Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - One More Silver Dollar

"Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."

C. S. Lewis

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wooly Bully

“Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.”

George R.R. Martin


“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy— then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

Hunter S. Thompson


"This idea that you can't be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don't stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It's possible to do this job with honor and dignity."

Matt Taibbi

It was a less risk prone day in the markets, with the trading light because of the Bank and Bond holiday in honor of Christopher Columbus.

Bully seems to be engaging in some retrospection just ahead of earnings.

I have put a special, shorter version of the gold chart up first in the charts below. Look at the recent trading bottoms we have formed in the price of gold in the past year. I have circled them for your viewing pleasure. Do you see anything that might appear to represent some commonality?  What a coincidence!

Ideology, as expressed in glib phrases, is one of the great impediments to independent thinking and, thereby, often valuable knowledge. You know, things like, 'markets are by their nature efficient because of their size and diversity of participants'  or 'the denizens of Wall Street are rational and honest businessmen that have been corrupted by government.'

Some remnants of a hurricane blew through our area this afternoon, bringing us some much needed rain.

Have a pleasant evening.

Uno, dos, one two tres quatro...

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Not With a Bang But a Whimper - Dedicated to the One I Love

"When swept out of its normal channel, life scatters into innumerable streams.  It is difficult to foresee which it will take in its treacherous and winding course.  Where today it flows in shallows, like a rivulet over sandbanks, so shallow that the shoals are visible, tomorrow it may flow richly and fully."

Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don


“For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.   His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.   He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly.   He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit


"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

As you have probably heard the Non-Farm Payrolls report was a mixed bag. There was a seasonally adjusted net loss of jobs, which was certainly unexpected.

But miraculously, the unemployment rate dropped, and the wages increased much more than expected.

Now how about that for a counter-intuitive set of data.

The markets were not sure what to make of it. They have of late been asked to digest quite a bit of what Harry Truman called bushwa. 

We produce so much bushwa now that we are exporting the stuff, in the form of financial assets and obligations.  We have even selected its high priests and exceptionally gifted practitioners as our organizers and leaders.

We are the hollow men, the hope only of empty men, hearts and heads filled with straw.

For Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg


"If the two great semantic beacons of our time are the terms 'transition' and 'crisis,' then a third term is perhaps necessary to capture the special quality of this transition and this crisis.  That term—the third semantic beacon—is 'alienation.'   It expresses a unique facet of the crisis of our times: the widespread belief that there has been a revolutionary change in the psychological condition of man, reflected in the individual’s feeling of isolation, homelessness, insecurity, restlessness, anxiety."

Nathan Glazer, The Alienation of Modern Man, 1947

I'm posting a little early today because I have things to do outside.

It was a 'risk on' day all the way, with the shorts being properly squeezed in stocks.

And with a risk on day, and ahead of non-farm payrolls, gold took a hit, while silver remained largely unchanged.

We will be enjoying a harvest moon tonight.  &nbsp

It is an uncommon gift, even in our modern alienation from nature.  For we have for the most part lost our relationships with all that does not bend easily to our will, and provide an opportunity for a quick profit.

Perhaps alienation, a notion so last century as to seem almost quaint now, is not the right term to use for our elite and the post-modern world.  We are not aware enough to feel alienated; we are insensate, and our existence is a series of meaningless, impersonal transactions, ruled by Mammon.

Or perhaps we can skip thinking and feeling anything,  and sell each other 'moon glasses.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - After Many a Summer...

"Here, at the quiet limit of the world."

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tithonus


"A rose will bloom, it then will fade.
So does a youth.
So does the fairest maid."

Nino Rota, What Is a Youth

There is a story to be told here, of twisted markets, and legitimate pursuits taxed by insidious corruptions, and their patrons.

But it is nothing new.  It is a story all too familiar, as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.  Perhaps, then, another time.

It was a beautiful autumn day.   The warmth is slowly fading from the fields, captured in the harvests, and taken away.  Darkness is falling earlier, and the nights are growing colder.

And as fields fade, so too do empires— and the vanities and illusions of  proud and willful men.

Not then so rare as we had thought.   But still, after many a summer, dies the swan.

Have a pleasant evening.