SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - All For the Fed

Stocks had a hard go of it today, but managed to hold the level on their latest bubble up to near highs.

Economic news was limping in this morning with existing home sales missing estimates.

Stock market volume fell 14% off its ten day moving average. Volumes are lackluster.

GDP second go for the 3Q estimate tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Here is the Lord's Prayer Advertisement Banned By British Cinemas

"Leading UK cinemas are refusing to screen a Church of England commercial reciting the Lord's Prayer. But what are the rules on religious advertising, asks Justin Parkinson.

It features the Archbishop of Canterbury, a grieving man, bodybuilders, a festival-goer, emergency workers, a cattle farmer, a choir, refugees, a commuter, schoolchildren and the audience at a baptism. They say the words of the Lord's Prayer.

Official advertising rules are aimed at preventing misleading, or causing harm or offence. Advertisers must take care not to incite hatred or promote discrimination on religious grounds

Three of the UK's biggest cinema chains - Odeon, Cineworld and Vue - have banned the advert from being shown on the same bill as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, due to open just before Christmas.

DCM, the agency handling these matters for the cinemas, argues it could offend those of "differing faiths and no faith".

The Church of England says this is "plain silly" and could have a "chilling effect" on free speech...

The Advertising Standards Authority, which ensures the CAP's rules are followed, has so far received no complaints about the Lord's Prayer advert and the dispute remains solely between the Church of England and the cinemas."

BBC, Lord's Prayer Advert


"Christmas celebration this year is going to be a charade because the whole world is at war. We are close to Christmas. There will be lights, there will be parties, bright trees, even Nativity scenes – all decked out – while the world continues to wage war.

It’s all a charade. The world has not understood the way of peace. The whole world is at war. A war can be justified, so to speak, with many, many reasons, but when all the world as it is today, at war, piecemeal though that war may be—a little here, a little there—there is no justification.

What shall remain in the wake of this war, in the midst of which we are living now? What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers.”

Francis I


The New Atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason. The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment.

Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil, not for evil's sake but to make a better world.

Reigns of terror are thus the bastard child of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies.

The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction.”

Chris Hedges

Part of me says this is of no consequence, but it is a sign of the times, of a world that has forgotten its weakness and seeks to become perfectly powerful on its own terms.

God has a way of standing before the nations in judgement.

And for that, I tremble for the world, and ourselves.

The way to answer this is not to take action against the cinemas, or those who would ban prayer or any mention of God on their media or in their presence.

The way to answer this is to make this Christmas a special season of prayer for peace in the world, to join hands spontaneously, and recite the Lord's Prayer. Not to provoke anger, but to witness for the good news. They may have their god of the markets, or their god of themselves. But we will not be silenced.

And much more importantly, without which all this is just vanity, we must take those words to heart, and not let them become a charade. To do this we must make them a living part of our daily routine and interactions with others, so that our lives themselves become living prayers, and we do not fall into a pious hypocrisy.

Answer harshness with kindness, anger with peacefulness, and indifference with caring.

'Your love for one another will show to the world that you are my disciples.'

Of course we do not do this well. Like the Lord's own apostle Peter we are tempted to anger and violence, tempted to deny our relationship, often confused and uncertain. And he had seen with his own eyes, and heard directly with his own ears, our Lord as He walked on the earth.

And so we gather ourselves up, acknowledge our faults, and go forward again, and again, in grace, ever-growing, ever becoming as He wills us to be if we do but accept his commandment to love one another as we love Him, and He us.

Narcissists and Psychopaths

"Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.

Psychopaths view any social exchange as a 'feeding opportunity,' a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.

Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before.

You'll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one's position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something.  There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population.

People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren't criminal. Not all psychopaths are in prison - some are in the boardroom. I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange.

Psychopaths show a stunning lack of concern for the devastating effects their actions have on others. Often they are completely forthright about the matter, calmly stating that they have no sense of guilt, are not sorry for the pain and destruction they have caused, and that there is no reason for them to be concerned.”

Robert D. Hare

And this is why we need rules and regulations, and why theories about naturally free markets are a cruel trick perpetrated by the predatory class upon the gullible.  And like campaigns to deregulate, they will seek to use and manipulate those regulators and any new regulations for their own advantage.

Rules alone will not be sufficient.  The more complicated the rules, the more easily they are bent to the schemes of the swindlers and their lawyers.  They knock down the simple and efficient rules and set a labyrinth of complexities and exceptions for themselves to use.

And this may also be a handy guide for interpreting and understanding the next financial crisis or presidential election, whichever comes first.

Shanghai Gold Deliveries and Deliveries on the Comex - The 'Rest of the World' According To Bloomberg

Gresham's law is an economic principle that states 'when a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation.'

Notice the 'sea change' that occurred with Shanghai gold flows starting in 2013.

And notice how the Western financial media views this phenomenon.

China Savers Buying Gold As 'Rest of the World' Exits

The 'Rest of the World' apparently does not include India, Russia, Turkey, much of the Mideast, and the European central banks who have been busy trying to repatriate their gold from New York and London.

I have included a chart showing 'Silk Road' gold consumption below.

In addition to all the wealthy individuals in the US and UK who are buying it for their own private vaults.

Who are the idiots who own most of the gold in the central bank crowd anyway?  The numbers are a bit hard to come by because for some reason the bankers are notoriously secretive in response to questions.

The 'official gold reserves' of all central banks in the world is also included below.  And the biggest goldbugs are the US, Germany, Italy, France, the IMF, Russia, China, Switzerland, Japan and the Netherlands.

True, a few central banks have disgorged some of their gold. The UK sold quite a bit of their sovereign reserves at the bottom, the lowest price for gold in dollars. Brown's Bottom it was called, presumably to rescue some 'trading houses' who were caught short.

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it."

Sir Eddie George, Bank of England, September 1999

One might wonder what has some of the NY and London banking crowd so worked up?  What have they gotten themselves into now?  Their spokesmodels have been quite active in the media lately.

I am sure the truth of this will come out some day.  Most likely over some long weekend.

This is how Nixon unilaterally took the US off the international gold standard, and declared a new fiat regime for 'the rest of the world' under the rule of the US dollar reserve, thereby rewriting the Bretton Woods agreement by executive decree.

Is it true that only a few 'goldbugs' really care about this and no one else?

Most of the central banks know the truth of things.  They are just keeping quiet about it for now, for whatever reason.  I suspect that they are receiving pressure related to the antics of one or more of the Banks.

"Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another."

Salvatore Rossi, Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013

Do these fellows take us for complete fools?  Really?

Shanghai Gold Exchange Withdrawals of 49 Tonnes in the Latest Week

There were about 49 tonnes, or 1,575,000 troy ounces, of gold delivered from Shanghai in the latest week.

No matter what the pundits say about 'gold bugs' and all that sort of nonsensical disparagement, the central banks of the world have been net buyers of gold since about 2007, and the major countries of The Silk Road are buying gold bullion by the tonne each and every week.

Are they all unenlightened idiots? Goldbugs?

Bloomberg seems to imply that they are.  China Savers Turn To Gold As 'Rest of World' Exits

Are the central bankers of the world fools and dupes?

Or are we being misled by the global Banks?    Hard to believe, right?

Gold bullion is moving from West to East.

It is Gresham's Law in action.  

And they are dissembling, most likely to save a couple of the Banks once again and support a policy error that is both wrong-headed and unsustainable.