"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.
The official expectation of war also enables men to solve the problems of the economic cycles without resort to political policies that are distasteful to many politicians and to large segments of the American public. The terms of their long-term solution, under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist elite to face. Some of them, accordingly, have come to believe that the world encounter has reached a point where there is no other solution but war, even when they sense that war can be a solution to nothing.
An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become 'the Business Way of Life'.
Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems."
C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960
"We suspect that shorting gold has come to seem like a riskless proposition as long as there is confidence in the Fed. Synthetic gold is the perfect substance for a carry trade: an easy borrow with very low carrying cost and little upside basis risk. Such a hypothesis, in our opinion, does much to explain the incongruity of a declining gold price while fundamentals for paper currency, and the U.S. dollar in particular, obviously deteriorate; while demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars."
Tocqueville Gold Newsletter 2Q 2015
In their desire to appease Wall Street and the Cheeto bandito, the Fed initiated Döllardämmerung this afternoon.
Gold and silver soared. Silver is on an amazing bull run.
Stocks rallied on hopes of the oil of excess liquidity to calm the troubled waters of a faltering economy and pipe dreams of beneficent AI for all.
VIX fell of course.
The US military seized a Venezuelan tanker in the open sea this afternoon. They are not even pretending that it is carrying drugs, or threatening the US in any way.
Perhaps this will distract the public, at least for a little while.
And the band played on.
Have a pleasant evening.
