22 April 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pillaging for Profits

 

"The financial asset bubbles since the turn of the 21st century have been enabled by four basic instruments of monetary policy error:  Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell.  Whether we will have a third major collapse and crash to follow this latest asset bubble, as a consequence of misguided monetary policy, economic priorities, and bank regulation is not the issue.  The question is, shall we have a system that holds together long enough to have a fourth?"

Jesse, Malice Domestic and Endless Foreign Wars, 31 July 2018

'Malice domestic' from time to time will come to you in the shape of those who would raise false issues, pervert facts, preach the gospel of hate, and minimize the importance of public action to secure human rights or spiritual ideals.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at the San Diego Exposition, October 2, 1935

"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud. It’s just the opposite. The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis. 

The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014

“It's impossible that there could be the plague, because everyone knows that it has vanished from the West. We should not act as though half the town were threatened with death, because then it would be. Yes, everyone knew that, except the dead."

Albert Camus, The Plague

"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite, however, is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

"It is what a person does is what defiles them. For from within, from the heart, come fraudulent schemes, immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wicked acts, deceit, outrageous behavior, selfishness, slander, arrogant pride, and profane disrespect. All these things come from within, and they are what corrupts them."

Mark 7:20-23

 

Stocks rallied today, in what may reasonably be termed a 'relief rally' from a short term oversold condition.

Gold and silver were sold, as there will be a option expiration for the precious metal futures contracts this coming Thursday the 25th.

VIX fell.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

We deserve better than this.  But we will not obtain it easily. 

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Have a pleasant evening.



21 April 2024

"I am the Good Shepherd"

 

‘I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep.  So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.  Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.  The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that are not of this fold.  I must bring them also.  They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.'

John 10:11-16

“Woe to the shepherds, who have been feeding only themselves.  You eat the fat, you take the wool, and you slaughter the fattest animal, but you do not feed the flock.  You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bandaged the injured or brought back the strays or looked for the lost; rather, you have ruled them with harshness and tyranny."

Ezekiel 34:1-4

"With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.   Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures."

Abraham Lincoln, Baltimore Maryland, April 18, 1864d

"See what love
the Father has bestowed on us,
enabling us to be called the children of God,
and that is what we are.
If the world does not recognize us,
that is because it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God’s children now.
What we shall be has not yet been revealed.
However, we do know that when he appears
we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he really is."

1 John 3:1-2

"What is a proper disposition towards life? It is to accept God as a loving father, who is full of tenderness and forgiveness for us, despite our willful blunders and hardened hearts. He yearns for us, as a father and mother yearn for the return of their most beloved child.   It is to accept that we are not lost, we are not abandoned. We are wandering like a wayward child, full of our own headstrong delusions. And our father waits expectantly, calling out for us through the darkness. He sends the spirit out to find us, a light to find our way home to him out of the gloom of the night."

Jesse, Acceptance and Forgiveness, 2 January 2018

"They sing to the sound of the tambourine and the harp and rejoice at their playing of the flute.  They spend their days in prosperity and go down quietly into the abyss.  They say to God, 'Leave us alone!   We do not want to learn your ways.  Who is the Almighty that we should serve him?   And what would we gain by praying to him?  Is not the prosperity of the wicked the result of their own efforts, since they have never sought God’s help?'"

Job 21:12-16

And he said, ‘These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”’

Revelation 7:13-17

“The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is all about."

Fulton J. Sheen


19 April 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - They Annihilate Truth, and Prophesy Illusions

 

"Go now, write it on a tablet for them,
      inscribe it on a scroll,
so that in the days to come
      it may be a witness to them, for ever and ever.
For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,
      unwilling to listen to the instructions 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

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals.  The whole culture is geared to this.  The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation that the fully schizophrenic person feels.  In fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society.   

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda.  It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Garry Kasparov


Stocks once again shook off geopolitical and economic risks, and rallied into the green. 

But as we have seen several times this week, those who bought the dip found themselves holding positions as stocks gradually sank deeper into the red as the day wore on.

Gold and silver finished higher, after having given back all of their 'flight to safety' gains from the night before.

VIX is elevated.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Illusions can become a powerful addiction.

They allow a people increasingly consumed by madness to blind themselves, as they slide quietly into the abyss.

His children have been freed of the illusions of the world, and instructed to stand in the light, to be a light to his people, as the darkness spreads over the land.

And the world will hate them for it.  For the madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant weekend.