Stocks And Precious Metals Charts – As Old As Babylon

“The world says: ‘You have needs— satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder”.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”.

Edward Abbey  

Most people are willful idiots, who forgive themselves everything, and others nothing.I am an unwillful idiot. I am not sure that this is better, or even a marked improvement.But at least I try to have compassion for others because of this small kernel of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is in very short supply these days.

The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in ‘better-than-expected’ with a headline number of 201,000.

Most ignored the significant revisions lower from the last report in this one. Rolling jobs over from one month to the next is a time honored gimmick in putting a little nicer shade of lipstick on the pig.

The ‘household report’, as opposed to the well named establishment report, is the one in which actual people are interviewed in what one hopes is a statistically significant manner. And in informational terms it was not very good, at all.

The big tickle was that this ‘great’ jobs report was going to allow the Fed to raise interest rates later this month at the next FOMC meeting.

Here is a news flash. The Fed is going to raise rates at this next meeting unless the Yellowstone caldera blows its top.

And the US is not exceptional, except for a swollen and misplaced very high self-regard that is common amongst late stage empires.This has nothing to do with interest rates, but it cannot be said enough, nevertheless.

So the dollar rallied and gold was hit. What a surprise. And gold recovered a bit and actually finished marginally unchanged with a .32% decline or thereabouts.