Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Force and Fraud and Their Alternatives

 

"And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.  I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night."

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978

"At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, October 2011

“When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands—  like water.   And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again.  Some men aren't capable of this, but I would be loathe to think your father one of them.”

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, July 1960

"Of this Logos, the Word being eternal, men have proven to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.  For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the uneducated who first experience words and deeds.  And as for the rest, they are as unaware of what they do when they are awake, as they are when they are asleep."

Heraclitus, On Nature, ~500 BC

"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."

Thomas More, Utopia, 1516

"Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you, and criticize you, but you never go alone.  Walk with him this morning, and believe in Him, and do what is right, and he'll be with you even until the consummation of the ages.  And the world will look at you, and they won't understand you, but you'll go on anyhow.

I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, 5 November 1967


Stocks were wobbly today, and lacked the kind of support they have enjoyed the last few weeks that helped pump some new life into the tariff-plagued bubble.

VIX is wallowing around on the low side.  There was no panic in the tape today.

Gold and silver rocketed back higher today, as they are often wont to do after a Non-Farm Payrolls smackdown.

These guys have no shame and even less accountability.

I think the US is heading towards a disaster, and there is a pronounced lack of adult supervision.   

So it may get quite messy.

But it is what it is.   

China is back from its May holiday.  Their buying will be felt in the markets tomorrow, but I suspect some of their fellows came back a bit early to take some tasty positions in the metals.

This flight to quality may continue to gain momentum, as nations recoil from what they perceive as unpredictable madness.

My goal is to navigate the markets with some success, and that requires me to see things as they are, and not as I might wish them to be.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Great Calling to the Faithful and the Fallen - Lazarus, come forth!

 

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes.  And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves.  Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient – they think they know just what they ought to do, and that they do it all; and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct."

John Henry Newman, The Religion of the Pharisees, 1835

“Grace without price; grace without cost!  The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.  Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.  It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.  It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.   Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son.  When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.  For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on traditional concepts.  The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.

In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.   Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

"The ultimate test of discipleship is our willingness to abandon our egos and be carried by a power greater than ourselves."

Robert Barron, 17 May 2024

"But I know in my heart who I love, and that I want to be a part of that love forever, forsaking all else, all material stature and advantage which I now see as a falsehood and thin veneer over a slow demise.  I have chosen, and struggle on to that outcome, one day at a time.  And this is how it is and how it will be for all who have chosen the way.  Love is our destination, but while we are here on earth it can only be a journey, a way of life, as we struggle on, to a holy rest and peace at the last."

Jesse, Obedience Without Love: The Leaven of the Pharisees, 5 April 2017

"A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you.  By this all will know that you are mine — if you love one another.”

John 13:34 John 13:34
"Babylon’s days are numbered. Its time of destruction is coming."

Isaiah 13:22

"And Jesus said, 'Did I not say that if you have faith you will see the glory of God?'  And so they removed the stone.  Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, 'Father, I thank you for hearing me.  I know that you always hear me, but I say this for the sake of the people, so that they may believe that it was you who sent me.'

When he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth.'"

John 11:40=43

"Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth. Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes. It does not crush, but cultivates, repairs and protects."

Jorge Mario Bergoglio Francis I, Way of the Cross: Jesus Falls, 18 April 2025

We who are intimate with the world and comfortable in our bondage to it are not His.  We are a His adversaries.

We are called to love Jesus, to love Him and His creation with all our hearts.

The things that steal the love of our neighbor from our hearts make them hard, and dead to His grace. 

All the zeal for the Law and anger for the things that afflict our sensibilities inflamed by pride are not His, but the work of the Adversary.  It is the leaven of the Pharisees.

We are His when we do as He has asked us, out of love in all humility, because He has asked us, so that we may have life with Him.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Powerful Delusions of the Fallen

 

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice.”

Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Preface, 2003

"Despite knowing of God, they refused to honor him as God, or to give Him thanks.  And so they became proud in their thinking, and their foolish hearts became hardened."

Romans 1:21

"For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.  There is one who restrains it, until he is taken away.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the words of his mouth, and render him powerless with the wonders of his coming.  

The coming of the lawless one is from the power of Satan, with false signs and wonders, and in every wicked deception for those who are perishing, for those who did not accept the love of truth to be saved.  God will send them a powerful delusion so that they may believe the lie, so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have taken pleasure in lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”

Léon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute

"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 last and forever after, their own dark and miserable soul, as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in a little better than expected.  

It was an essentially meaningless number.

But it did provide an excuse for Donald and His Merry Banksters to run the bubble in equity markets back up again.

Donnie sees this as validation of his economic policies.

Wall Street sees it as just another leg of the highly profitable transfer of wealth by inflating financial assets.

Gold and silver were slammed, but the miners even moreso.

I suspect this phase of the precious metals price manipulation is nearing its end, as we often see with the Non-Farm Payrolls event.

VIX is now down to a high likelihood of a risk correction.

The reports from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and other places where the US and its enablers and clients are operating are rather grim.  

The media is highly complicit in turning a blind eye to this.

Money and power are all that matter to the elites in the West, drunk with the opiate of exceptionalism.

They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."
Job 21:13

They think they are neutral, taking no sides, just going along to get along.

The wealthy man was damned not because he abused the beggar Lazarus, but because he did not even condescend to notice him, and the suffering on his doorstep. 

 Moses and prophets could make him see the truth, not even a man who had risen from the dead. Their wisdom did not fit with his biases and ideology of selfishness and pride.

The careless rich man was a self-absorbed intimate of Mammon— and an adversary of the living God. 

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Limits of Imperial Power and Its Oligarchy

 

"The limit of the Fed's and Treasury's ability to create money is the value and acceptance of the dollar and the bond in open market transactions.

The Weimar government never 'ran out of money.'  Zimbabwe never 'ran out of money.'  And if interest is paid 'in your currency money' you can never fail to service your debt either.  What they did run out of were people willing to take their paper at its intended value, from those who are their sphere of control, their compulsion of legal tender.

It is not clear to me that the dollar has passed the point of no return. But it is obviously unstable, as a bulwark of a corrupted system.  And therefore it is making its holders understandably nervous."

Jesse, Money and The Limits of Empire, 13 February 2011

"A market collapse is nothing but risk-aversion meeting a market that's not priced to tolerate risk.  Buckle up."

John Hussman, April 30, 2025

"If we are indeed in a Minsky Moment, which we think we are, then monetary inflation by the Fed and government intervention without reform will most likely increase the probability of a protracted stagflationary repression in the United States, and possibly lead to civil unrest and an exogenous reform of the system.  An abandonment of the system as it is with a turn to fascism has been the historic choice of Wall Street.  The political lobbying against systemic reform by the Bankers and their sycophants will be intense and as persuasive to the many as most appeals to fear.  However, their reckless advice leads to a trip to the brink of the abyss."

Jesse, Which Way Out of the Minsky Moment, 23 March 2008

"The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal.   Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control.  Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis [Inverted Totalitarianism] will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong."

Chalmers Johnson, A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled, May 16, 2008

"We are imperial, and we are in decline. People are losing confidence in the Empire."

Lawrence Wilkerson, The Travails of Empire, October 8, 2014


The Empire seems to have gone barking mad.  

Is this just a clever game, a negotiating tactic?   

The famous Nixonian 'madman theory' gambit?

Perhaps.  But when coupled with a multipolar world of gathering resistance to the usual economic coercion, in which one of your fundamental supports, the fiat Dollar, is based on trust and confidence, it can prove to be strategically fatal.

We seem to be in a pivotal moment.

Stocks were rallying all day, extending the imperial decree that despite the tariff shocks incoming all is well.

You didn't catch it if you just watch the cash price, but US equity markets futures utterly collapsed into the close and went red.

A disappointment from the Amazon cloud after hours is possible.  There are many possibilities.

Apple is up to bat next, later this evening.

Gold and silver were hammered today, as is customary on the day before a Non-Farm Payrolls report.

To say I think that this was 'technical' trading would be an understatement.

China metals markets will be quiet for the May 1 holiday week.

The Dollar bumped up a little higher.

The VIX is now low enough to suggest that this rally is getting really long in the tooth.

And did I mention that I think this was a dictated rally to put someone's tariff decisions in a less disastrous light?

One can only wonder.

The truth will come out, eventually.  

Be careful where you look and listen, or you may miss it.

See you tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.