Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

 

"...to the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen


“Now all the Athenians as well as the foreigners residing there used their time for nothing else but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said: 'You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.  For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’  What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything.

Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.  He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.  For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.  God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.'  When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, 'We should like to hear you on this some other time.'”

Acts 17:22-32


Empires rise, and rage for their time upon the stage of history, and fall, to be forgotten. 

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

Stocks did their usual intraday churn and burn, finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver were feeling a bit wobbly, but not overmuch.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX has now fallen, considerably.

Wash cycle is almost done.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped.  Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." 

Robert Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Speech, Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Father of Lies and His Children of the World

 

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God.  The world is crowded with him.  He walks everywhere incognito.  And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate.  The real labor is to remember, to attend— in fact to come awake.  Still more, to remain awake.”

C. S. Lewis

"Franz Neumann’s book Behemoth, details how the Nazi regime came about, how you could have this really advanced, highly educated, industrial society suddenly be ruled by this imperialist, vicious regime – how is this possible?   And when looking at the ways that the economic elites collaborated, the end result is you have the German establishment supporting Nazism basically as a way to crush any leftists that might want a social revolution or serious reforms to German capitalism.”

Aaron Good, American Exception, July 2022

"It is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification.  The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, and justice nothing."

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture for Literature, 1970

"American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy. By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."

Haile Selassie, Addis Ababa, 1963

"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: The Politics of Us

"Why do you not understand what I am saying?  It is because you cannot bear to hear my words.   You are from your father, the devil, and you willfully carry out your father’s desires.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand with the truth, for there is no truth in him.  When he lies, he speaks in accord with his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

John 8:43-44

The markets avert their eyes from injustice, brutality, and slaughter, with a self-righteous contempt for those who are weak.   

Power will ultimately achieve its true purpose— it's own destruction in an ignoble end.

Stocks tried to rally, but eventually fell back to close nearly unchanged.

VIX fell again, as it was damn the geopolitics and risk away.

Gold and silver fell back a bit.

The Dollar rose.

The sheer injustice and brutality of the portrayal and disposition of the campus protesters reminds me very much of what it was like to be opposed to the war and support civil rights in the 1960s.  

Its surprising how many of the professional leadership class are on the payroll, happy just to go along to get along, or cowed into silence.

"I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent of the crimes. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler.  And at that moment I actually sensed that it would have been possible to find things out."

Traudl Junge, Hitler's Secretary

Try explaining this to the boss, and not the poseur, when the time comes.

Winning....

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Privileged Few: Their Myths and Illusions

 

"'Gnosis’ was an enormous temptation in the early Christian Church. What made it so insidious was the fact that the Gnostics very often did not want to leave the Church. Instead, they claimed to be offering a superior and more authentic exposition of Holy Scripture, though, of course, this was only for the ‘superior souls’.  It inevitably encouraged not only an excited craving for higher initiation, but also an almost unbounded arrogance in those who had moved from mere ‘faith’ to real, enlightened ‘knowledge’.

Myth seeks the ascent of man to spirit; the Word of God seeks descent into flesh and blood. Myth wants power; revelation reveals the true power of God in the most extreme powerlessness. Myth wants knowledge; the Word of God asks for constant faith and, only within that faith, a growing, reverent understanding. The revelation of God’s Word is gentle patience amidst the intractable tensions of life. Error never shows itself in its naked reality, in order not to be discovered. On the contrary, it dresses elegantly, so that the unwary may be led to believe that it is more truthful than truth itself.”

Irenaeus of Lyons, The Scandal of The Incarnation, 180 AD

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

Proverbs 11:2-3

“We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day. We who are anxious over many things look forward to your coming among us. We who are blessed in so many ways long for the complete joy of your kingdom. We whose hearts are heavy seek the joy of your presence. We are your people, walking in darkness, yet seeking the light.”

Henri Nouwen, Advent Prayer

“The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.”

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard

"Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshaling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it. This Apostasy, and all its tokens and instruments, are of the Evil One, and savour of death.

John Henry Newman, 1890

"Some crazy numbers in here.  Big US Universities are really hedge funds with a side hustle in education. The gulf in pay between the fund managers and the Provost tells you everything you need to know."

Dr. James O'Leary, University College London, 2024


I never really understood until now why the President of Columbia just closed the university to all of their students and faculty. 

They are getting in the way of the university's real business— the serving of money and power. 

Stocks were off to the races today, squeezing the shorts and piling up those gains, going out near the highs.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX fell, as is suitable for a 'risk on' day.

Gold and silver were in rally mode, after the recent sell off into Friday's Non-Farm Payrolls support.

Wow, what a coincidence.

No real data coming out until Wednesday, although earnings reports are still coming in.

The 'very serious people' of the financial and political sectors were gathering for the Michael Milken Global Institute meeting in Beverly Hills.

The mask is really coming off these days, isn't it.  

You may have the privilege of seeing history in the making, as we have not seen for many, many years.

"The humility of the righteous will guide them, but the deceitfulness of the proud will destroy them."   Proverbs 11:2-3

You can forecast things, and fairly well, but when they come true, you still can't quite believe it.

It is hard to overestimate the hypocrisy and lack of decency of the privileged few.

This reminds me a lot of the 1960's.  But I think the music then was better.

And the times, they are a-changin'.  Again.

Have a pleasant evening.