The VIX spiked higher today, and gold and silver rallied with the Swiss franc as the market felt a chill of Winter run up their backs.

Conventional wisdom points to the sudden rise of Donald Trump in the polls, pulling even with Hillary, at least in the popular vote. 

To sharpen it down to a fine point, today was all about the fear of the unknown, for those who are so comfortable and accustomed to be winning.

The ‘establishment’ does not care one bit for this added uncertainty.

But we also have the central banks mucking about, and plenty of global tensions to go around that are normally pushed aside by the market mavens.

But every once in a while they pause in their exceptional giddiness, and begin to wonder, and to think about the real future may hold for them.

Let’s see if gold and silver can add to the gains, or at least get past the FOMC and the NFP numbers on Friday unscathed.

“Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring. This is what baffles the power of Satan. He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it. 

Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God. Crafty and experienced as he is, he appears like a child or a fool, like one made sport of, whose daily bread is but failure and mockery, before the deep and secret wisdom of the Divine Counsels. 

He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark. He knew not of Gabriel’s coming, and the miraculous conception of the Virgin, or what was meant by that Holy Thing which was to be born, being called the Son of God. He tried to kill him, and he made martyrs of the innocent children; he tempted the Lord of all with hunger and with ambitious prospects; he sifted the Apostles, and got none but one who already bore his own name, and had been already given over as a devil. 

He brought into the world the very salvation which he feared and hated. He accomplished the Atonement of that world, whose misery he was plotting. Wonderfully silent, yet resistless course of God’s providence! ‘Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour;’ and if even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand, while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith?” 

John Henry Newman, PS 17