16 May 2018

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Option Expiry On Friday


“Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors
and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away..”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, New Poems, City Lights


"Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried, the little children died in the streets."

W. H. Auden, Epitaph To a Tyrant


"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."

W. B. Yeats, Easter, 1916

Are we not exceptional?

Are you not entertained?



Another More Terrible Financial Crisis Is Coming— For the Benefit of a Few


"So we may not be that far away from the next bubble bursting, and I could imagine, if I think about policy, what we just talked about, with the end of a recovery cycle, we’ve pumped $4 trillion in this country, $30 trillion globally, into the economy with monetary policy.   So that’s tapped out.

We are now using fiscal policy to overheat a late-stage recovery in order to keep the Republicans in office.  We are doing nothing to bolster underlying growth with educational reform, infrastructure reform, et cetera."

Rana Foroohar, The Rich Have an Escape Plan


"I think it’s important in the power of finance and how pervasive this is throughout the economy, this has very little to do with Republicans and Democrats. In fact, some of the key opening doors for finance happened in the Clinton administration."

Paul Jay, Clinton's Committee To Save the World Unleashes Wall Street

Rana Foroohar is an associate editor and global business columnist for The Financial Times, and CNN’s global economic analysts. She’s the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.





15 May 2018

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Bullshit Reigns - Stock Option Expiry This Week


"If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own.  But you do not belong to the world,  as I have chosen you from it."

John 15:18

Suffering is a means by which God saves us, afflicting us so we do not lapse into vain self-sufficiency, a pride and a perverse individualism that gathers us blindly into ourselves, and separates us from His own.   To suffer is how we grow in humility, and conform ourselves to do what He commands, rather than as we may will.

Prayer is how we sustain ourselves in times of both suffering and joy, with humility in this life, as we resort not only to ourselves or to the world, but to all things with God.

And so we find comfort in His will, and the conversations that we keep with His many tender mercies.  The world can not see this, and in not seeing does not understand.  To the world we are fools.

His consolations and comforts are hidden, delivered to us in quiet moments, heart to heart. And so He gathers us together to Himself, and keeps us safe, and slowly takes us from this world and the dark powers therein, that search endlessly for souls to make their own, and to devour.

Stocks and the precious metals slumped today as yields on US Treasuries climbed.  The ten year Treasury yield finished at the highest level since 2011.

This in turn greatly strengthened the US Dollar.   Bloomberg characterized this as a 'risk off' reaction to something or other that was not clear.  North Korea or Jerusalem?   The VIX took a leg higher.

The retail sales number was rather weak, which would not support higher interest rates per se.   Although there was an upward revision last month, and Empire Manufacturing did come in a big stronger.  All in all a zzzzzz.

The SP 500 yield has fallen below the 3 month Treasury yield.  And this is just the market to buy stocks for clipping coupons, right? lol.

Perhaps the market has decided that the Fed will be raising rates no matter what the productive economy is doing, which is not all that bad of a bet.  Unless there is an economic cataclysm.  The Fed seems to be self-absorbed and self-referential to a remarkable degree, having painted themselves into a corner with few places left to hide.

I suspect that gold was in an over-reaction   Many punters have noticed gold's tendency to bottom off the NFP-FOMC combination, and probably placed too many weak bets ahead of the curve.  Well, that is one possibility at least.

Or maybe the masters of the universe were just having a day.  Anything is possible when bullshit reigns.

I just checked and there it is, a stock option expiry this week.   The calendar included below.  Mary is not normally that big of a month for stock options as I recall.
"On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? - three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? - had become precisely that— Masters of the Universe. There was no limit whatsoever! Bullshit reigns."

Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
Bullshit and faithlessness reign in our amoral wilderness.    And you-know-who is the King of the May.

Have a pleasant evening.













Real News: 'A System In Which Sociopaths Rise to the Top'


“It’s no accident that the size of the financial sector today as a percentage of GDP is at levels equaled only on the eve of the Great Depression. Like the decade leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, the Roaring Twenties were marked by not only financial boom and technological wonder, but also massive income inequality. Worker wages stagnated and those of the upper classes grew, bolstered in large part by stock prices. Another similarity was a rise in debt, both public and private, which was used to mask the declining spending power of the lower and middle classes and its dampening effect on GDP growth."

Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers

Paul Jay interviews Rana Foroohar on the global economy, debt, and financial crises.

Rana Foroohar is an associate editor and global business columnist for The Financial Times. She’s also CNN’s global economic analyst and she joins us in the studio.

Here is a link to the original interview and transcript, as well as five additional interview segments.

The Western establishment is caught in a credibility trap. And this intransigence to change and to even rationally discuss genuine reform is going to lead to severe economic and civil dislocations before it is resolved.  And they don't care, because they have been winning for so long that they no longer can even imagine what they might lose.
"The big thing that happens for 10 years [upwards of 20] is that you have asymmetric economic growth where 80 percent of the income distribution gets none of the rewards of the growth after the recession.  Of course you get populism after that. It’s natural. It’s just the way it works.  Bernie Sanders is a populist. Bernie Sanders’ populism is all about scapegoating. It’s rich people, it’s bankers, it’s Republicans [and the corporate Democrats]—it’s all these people who got your stuff. That’s the kind of populism that we frequently see as opposed to a kind of ethical populism, which basically says we have good values, let’s go share."

Arthur Brooks, President American Enterprise Institute, ‘Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’

I could not believe that Politico had the stones to label Brooks 'center right.'   If he is center right, then Abbie Hoffman is center left. 

Notice in the first sentence that Brooks admits that there is a terrible disparity that has been built into the system, although he does not say how. But he then goes on to excoriate and delegitimize anyone who dares to point that there is a systemic problem out, and suggest that it needs to be changed. As opposed to an 'ethical populism' in which the effectively disenfranchised approach the politically rapacious figureheads for the powerful and ask, 'may we please share?'

It really frosts the corporate tools that the public did not stick to the script and vote for 'reform' with Hillary. Or Jeb.

Where the powerful use the channels of a society to crush and distort ideas, they will soon enough turn to crushing people while casting a distorted image of them to across the public channels of communication which they monopolize.

And if there is dissent from the system as it is, this if fueled by terrorists, lunatics, and of course, the Russians and their accomplices who have been sowing dissatisfaction.

When disruptive change finally breaks out, no one could have seen it coming—  because they have tightly shut their eyes to it, and deafened their hearing with slogans and ideologically slanted catch phrases fed to them by think tanks and the mainstream media.