Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Staggering Towards Another Minsky Moment - Hiding Out

 

"In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."

Hyman Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis

"Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.

Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his 'financial-instability hypothesis,' which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot. Today, with the subprime crisis seemingly on the verge of metamorphosing into a recession, references to it have become commonplace on financial web sites and in the reports of Wall Street analysts. Minsky’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting."

John Cassidy, The Minsky Moment, The New Yorker, 4 February 2008.

"The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revival, but finally giving up in the final collapse."

Charles Kindelberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises

"Bubbles most often resolve their imbalances irresponsibly and jarringly, with a correction that is sharp and destructive.  It is often triggered by some seemingly trivial event, especially if its predatory mispricing of risk has been allowed to fester for an extended period of time..  How can this be?

Credit cycles explain bubbles in modern finance, but the elite protect themselves and their banks from the effects. Hence, only the middle and working class loses. And this has been the case for many years now. Hence the growing unrest abroad, and the decisions by the electorate at home that seem to puzzle and provoke the very comfortable 'credentialed' class.

The reason for this is quite easy to understand. Those who benefit the most from the bubble both actively and passively help sustain it. They are reluctant to surrender any potion of their enormous advantage and personal gains, even if it might be better for them in the long term."

Jesse, Who Could Have Seen It Coming?, 17 January 2019
 

Stocks continued moving higher in a relief rally from a short term oversold condition.

Without a fresh fundamental reason to continue to rise higher, the correction in the market is probably coming quickly to an end.

Non-Farm Payrolls report for April on next Friday May 3rd will likely affect the markets.

Gold and silver were hit hard early on, as part of the Comex option expiration boogie woogie.

That also may be quickly passing.  Gold achieved a 38.2 Fibonacci retracement early today, and then bounced back to almost unchanged by the close.  

Silver actually posted a gain for the day.

A big chunk of gold took a walk out of the Hong Kong Comex warehouses.  More expected to follow. 

How did the governments of the US, UK, Germany and France become so indifferent to the good of the people who elect them?  

It's quite the fashion these days.

Follow the money.

Have a pleasant evening.

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 25^th.

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.

"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