Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Calm Before Their Exceptional Madness

 

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.  Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

"Demagogy enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

"The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated… The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered… The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965

“Unprecedented state secrecy gave the power elite vastly expanded realms in which to pursue desired political ends. Its dimensions and details obscured by state secrecy, exceptionism—the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law—allowed for the state to decisively influence politics at key moments in a top-down, authoritarian manner while practices of plausible deniability preserved a degree of democratic legitimacy.

In other words, the power elite’s rise precluded meaningful democracy since major decisions were not to be arrived at through open, informed public debate in which responsible officials and political parties were influenced by a healthy civil society which could allow the informed, prevailable will of the public to become manifest in policy.”

Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, 2022

"Our hearts are continually prone to wander from Him; prosperity and enjoyment all too easily satisfy us, dull our spiritual perception, and unfit us for full communion with Himself.  It is an unspeakable mercy that the Father comes with His chastisement, makes the world round us all dark and unattractive, leads us to feel more deeply our sinfulness, and for a time lose our joy in what was becoming so dangerous.  Though He has indeed no pleasure in afflicting us, He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home."

Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ, 1895

The markets were off a bit today, accommodating their recent impressive gains.

Gold and silver were similarly disposed.

Tomorrow is our stock option expiration.

Looking over the world's current crop of exceptional peacocks and pigeons can we not now, at long last, fully understand Hannah Arendt's observations about 'the banality of evil?' 

Let's see where their shenanigans may lead us.  

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Dark Personalities of False and Designing Men - Risk On!

 

“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind.   Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.  God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity.  But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 1963

"What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishmen, December 1866

"Three dark personalities, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, have been studied in businesses.  Although the first two share similar traits with psychopathy, such as superficial charm, lying and manipulation, the inability to accept responsibility for their actions, and the complete lack of empathy, guilt and humility, a large body of research has demonstrated that psychopathic individuals are more dishonest, treacherous and destructive than the others.  While all three dark personalities can be bad news for a company, corporate psychopathy is the most dangerous."

Cynthia Mathieu, The Devil Lurks In the Suit, December 2015

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities.   It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.   Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, March 1985

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.  We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.  It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."

Samuel Adams, under pseudonym Candidus, The Boston Gazette, 14 October 1771


The Consumer Price Index data came in soft to in-line this morning, which lit a fire under the bulls, who were eyeing the defensive short positions in the market with a gleam in their eye.

And so the momentum and meme buyers were piling in, trying to grab a piece of the upward momentum which turned out to be a powerful and fairly broad rally.

The Dollar was sold fairly hard, as safe havens were abandoned in order to add to risk profiles.

Gold and silver rallied fairly hard as well, in part in a reaction to the Dollar drop but also because of the pent up buying pressure being fed by physical offtakes, largely in Asia for gold, and industrial usage for silver.

Silver has now met its short term measuring objective of 30 on the chart.

As you might surmise VIX plummeted back down to its recent lows.

There will be a stock market option expiration on Friday.

Maybe not just yet, but a rinse may be lurking in the hearts of those who pull the strings on the markets.

The geopolitical situation grows increasingly fraught with unaccounted risks.

Biden's administration seems fragmented, tactically oriented for the short term to the great dettriment of strategic policy formation. Unless the strategy is to obtain more money and power, and the consequences be damned.

The Republicans are in utter ideological disarray, and morally bankrupt.

The madness serves none but itself.

But the markets are at some new highs, and the devil take the hindmost.   

And funny, but sometimes he does just that.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Hidden Sorrows of the Proudly Deceitful

 

"Once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.  As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

"The humility of the righteous will guide them, but the deceitfulness of the proud will destroy them."

Proverbs 11:3

"Great and sustained destruction requires great ambition.  It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute.  The ideology of genocide is all of those things.”

Philip Gourevitch, Tomorrow We Will Be Killed, 1998

"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new, by the beatific face of Pure Love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at the last and forever, one's own dark and miserable soul, as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

"Satan's monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.  He has wished to be himself, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom.  To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"What is good?   All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man.  What is bad?  All that proceeds from weakness.  What is happiness?   The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895

"As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be with the coming of the Son of man. In the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, even to that very day in which Noah entered into the ark. They did not suspect what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. So shall the coming of the Son of man also be.  Watch therefore, because you do not know at what hour your Lord will come."

Matthew 24:37-42
 

Stocks were in rally mode, and went out near the highs.

Gold and silver moved higher.

The Dollar lost some ground.

VIX fell back a bit.

The PPI inflation data came in hot this morning.

The markets ignored it, looking forward to the CPI inflation data tomorrow.

And, as always, there is a stock market option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Games People Play

 

"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society.  Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.  Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.  And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe."

Robert F. Kennedy

"The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.  The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the 'last thing standing' between us and the end of the world.  It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability."

Thomas Frank, Trump to the White House, and liberals put him there, The Guardian, 9 November 2016

"The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World Empire run by an elite self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading nations of the earth."

Dr. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966, p. 860

"The problem was not paper money per se, but the concentration of power and wealth which the abusive use of the paper monetary power had granted to a few powerful individuals and institutions.   No system is foolproof when a foolish people will allow the unscrupulous few to operate it in secrecy and without transparency, accountability and the rule of law.  And the primary reason we cannot acknowledge the facts of our own situation is that our political and financial class are caught in a credibility trap.   They cannot speak the truth without compromising their own personal greed and will to power."

Jesse, Peak Junk, Currency Wars, 11 August 2015

"We believe we are creating the beginning of a new world order coming out of the collapse of the US-Soviet antagonisms."

Brent Scowcroft, Bush's Talk of 'New World Order', The Washington Post, 26 May 1991

"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas.  The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.  Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.  Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.  Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

The markets caught a whiff of risk today, which elevated the VIX, and kept stocks subdued for much of the day.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold was under pressure, silver not so much.

There will be a stock market option expiration on Friday.

It is a bit surprising how quickly the masks of respectability are coming off, as the servants of power grow eager to demonstrate their loyalty. 

The White Rose, in the Land of the Willfully Blind

Biden and Trump have both been disastrous for the well-being of the American republic.

And yet they seem to be the anointed candidates of the prevailing political duopoly.

There is little fear of justice, and perhaps most tellingly, even less fear of the judgement of God.

These are the times of darkness, ascendant.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Captives of Madness and Illusions

 

"They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts.  They went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power.  You forget our hatred is a deadly poison."

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947

"The face still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely are dropping from the body.  These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions.  When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth.  They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils."

G. K. Chesterton, National Madness

"No doubt it is more comfortable to deliberately wear blinkers that prevent one from seeing the evil done in the discharge of their responsibility— to be unwilling to see that one is defending murder and robbery."

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Executed in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, 23 January 1945

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.  I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power."

Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

"What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,
      unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord.
They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’
      and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right!
Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:8-10

Another lull in the markets, as the VIX drifts lower and complacency seems to be settling in.

Stocks tried to pop a rally into the weekend, but it faded back to almost unchanged into the close.

Silver was off a bit, but gold rallied and held on to a good portion of it.

Option expiration for stocks next Friday.

Inflation data coming out which may move the markets.

War is simmering on multiple fronts overseas.

Have a pleasant weekend.