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.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Mad and Blasphemous Rebellion Against Heaven

 

“Be silent no more.  Cry out with one hundred thousand voices.  I see that, because of this silence, the world is in ruins, the Spouse of Christ has grown pale; the color is taken from her face because her blood has been sucked out, that is the blood of Christ, which is given as a free gift and not by right. Out of darkness is born the light.  Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire."

Catherine of Sienna

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort?  They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.  A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.  Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.  No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system”

Dorothy Day

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.  By their fruits you will know them.  Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?  Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit."

Matthew 7:15-18

"What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?  Can his faith save him?   If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,' but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it?  In the same way faith, if it doesn’t have works, is dead by itself."

James 2:14-17

"Our Lord has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good.  Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

"Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.  Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.  Without love deeds, even the greatest, count as nothing.”

Thérèse Martin de Lisieux

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.   This is what baffles the power of Satan.   He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.

Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God.  He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark.   If even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith."

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol 4, No. 17

 

VIX fell.

The Dollar fell.

Gold and silver rallied higher to their breakout points.

Stocks managed to pull higher after some waffling around.

Stock option expiration and inflation data next week.

Have a pleasant evening.