US Stock Market Whistles Past the Graveyard

It was a summer fit for the start of the Epocalypse followed by a fall where every event leans into Halloween. Summer began with a total solar eclipse that cast a long shadow across the nation from sea to shining sea, and fall began with hurricanes, mass bloodshed and fire. And through it all, the stock market barely blinked.
I watched a total solar eclipse for the first time. I had seen a 98% eclipse once before, but the difference made by the final 2% that I saw this time was literally all the difference between night and day. I discovered by experience why the ancients saw this spectacle as an omen portending the demise of a king or end of a dynasty. Evening triumphed over the earth in the middle of morning, but it was an eery, otherworldly, preternatural kind of evening, for the far horizon glowed almost white in a circle all around my world as if it was sunset everywhere. The sky grew darker toward the center where the stars were pooled in midnight blue. The birds stopped singing, and the crickets in the fields around me began to hum. Then the sun, which had been slowly dimming, transfigured in an instant into a pitch-black hole in the sky with long streamers of silver fire coming out of it – a change so sudden and a hole so large that it startled me. It was both horrific and beautiful, and I could see where it would have easily looked to the ancients like a portal to Hades.

This post was published at GoldSeek on Tuesday, 10 October 2017.