Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Big Squeeze

 

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.   They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"And such was the attitude of their minds that a shocking crime was dared by a few, with the blessing of more, and the passive acquiescence of all."

Tacitus, Histories: Book I, XXVIII, The Murder of Galba

"Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk. Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets. The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention. The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed.

The next five years are not about winning, but surviving."

Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World, 5 August 2019

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”

Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

"This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation." 

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion

"The people who designed the plans are either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

Joseph Stiglitz, On the Obama Administration Bank Bailout Plans, April 17, 2009

"So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing [US sponsored Ukraine regime change] and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU."

Victoria Nuland, US senior diplomat, Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call, BBC, 7 February 2014

"After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice.  I had a choice.  I could be an insider or I could be an outsider.  Outsiders can say whatever they want.  But people on the inside don’t listen to them.  Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas.  People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say.  But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don’t criticize other insiders."

Elizabeth Warren

"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter, television interview, September 27, 2015

"They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."

Job 21:13


It was a wobbly day, with a slight risk on bias. 

Stocks ended higher on the day.

Gold and silver were lower.

The VIX fell.

The Dollar rose.

The FOMC rate decision tomorrow is a pivotal moment for the markets.

Such is our failure to reform the financial system after a devastating series of financial debacles and serial bubbles.    And so we in the West seem trapped in an endless cycle of political betrayal, greed, war, hate, demagoguery, and fear.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Creatures of the Plutocracy

 

"Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; and when he yields to the forces of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on and on to the next and to the next, at a furiously accelerating rate."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas

"When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. It limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination."

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

"In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.  I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.  I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.  I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."

George Orwell, Looking Back On the Spanish War and Other Essays

"The democracy gap in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the least worst every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the least worst gets worse.  We’re told that we’re a polarized society, right?  That’s the way the ruling classes have manipulated people for more than two thousand years: divide and rule."

Ralph Nader

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


 Contemporary American finance, underpinned by the dollar, is a confidence game, a masterful combination of both fraud and force.  As the fraud grows increasingly heavy-handed and its veneer of normality grown thin, force must inevitably increase, until all pretense of democracy and freedom and virtue are stripped away.

It is not a national policy or force, but rather the tool of a relatively narrow elite, which has been taking the best of the national wealth for their own for years.

Stocks rallied hard, for no particular reason, led by the overnight futures market.  

It was risk on.

They hold most of those gains, giving up ground into the close. 

The Fed will be announcing their latest rate decision this Wednesday.

Gold gained a bit, silver not so much.

The VIX fell.

There will be a Comex precious metal futures option expiration on Monday the 25th.

Biden has not done right by Julian Assange, among other moral outrages.  How could he, being a charter member of the corporate Democrats led by the Clintons, with all that this implies.    

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Delusions of the Exceptional

"For the worldly reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, ‘Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from death.  For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been...

We'll oppress the poor, even if they are righteous.  We'll show no respect for widows or old people.  We'll call ourselves in the right if we are strong enough to get what we want.  No one ever succeeded by being weak. 

Righteous people are nothing but a nuisance, so let's try to get rid of them. We can't tolerate people like that; what they are contradicts our entire way of thinking.

They are not like other people; they have strange ways.  They think that our morals and ideas are so corrupt that everything we do should be avoided.  They say that they have God for their Father, and believe that when all is said and done, only the righteous will be happy.  But we'll see if that's true.   

So let's inflict them with suffering.  We'll be cruel and torment them; then we'll see how calm and reasonable they are.  We'll find out just how much they can withstand.   We'll condemn them to a shameful death.  After all, they say that God will protect them.'

That is how worldly people think, but they are wrong.  They are blinded by their own wickedness.  They have never known God's ways, never worked for the rewards of a holy and blameless life."

Wisdom 2:1-2,10-21

"The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are cowardly and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.”

Karl Marx, Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, September 12, 1847

"The church, quite naturally, is mobilizing everything and everyone against me.  The Führer has always shielded my consistent stance [occult neo-paganism] over the years, to the extent he could do so, given his position.  Now, with a laugh, he repeatedly emphasized that he has been a pagan all along, and the time has come when the Christian poisoning is approaching its end.  These remarks have remained secret, but recently a Berlin society woman has been proudly gossiping about them."

Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr, Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg, p. 36, 2015

“Religion used to be the opium of the people.  To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.  But now, we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism

 

Stocks dropped as the grudging realization that the Fed is most likely to only cut rates a few times this year, and later than expected, finally managed to sink in.

But don't think that they won't rally stocks again at some later date, based on the same old lies.

They just pretend to be sincere.  Its the fashionable thing amongst frauds and liars these days.

People who imagine they are exceptional become exceptionally good liars with time.  They benefit from the practice of lying to themselves, constructing well rehearsed justification stories for whatever illusion they wish to support and promote.

They sometimes just want to say it, to reinforce their own exceptionalism, subjecting those around them to very ardent lectures that most bear up with patiently, preferring to say good day, and good by. 

Why do people do this?   Especially if they are true believers in some thing?  This goes for both the left and the right, who at their extremes start sounding just like each other.  So bitter adversaries, and even victims and their oppressors, can start taking on each other's forms.

Maybe they are just talking to themselves, putting forth didactic lectures from the echo chamber of their obsessive intransigence.  

Gold and silver rallied and then backed off a bit.

We are heading into an FOMC meeting next week, and  a Comex metals expiration on the 26th.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.