"We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: 'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.'"
Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, 1925
“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”
Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916
"I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them.
What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that, from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes, shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.
Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready."
Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, March 26, 2012
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
George Orwell
“Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations— all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war."
Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London 1930
As it is with conventional war, so too with economic wars, wars fought with banking systems, trade sanctions, and currency.
The Jobs number came in smoking hot this morning, and the Labor Participation Rate ticked higher.
But unemployment rate rose, so of course stocks focused on that and went into a risk on stampede higher.
Gold and silver were crushed.
What a surprise. Not.
And of course the VIX fell to a low we have not seen since 2021.
Market bubbles, false flags, cartel pricing, manufactured wars? It's all good for profits.
Maybe we'll see the flip side to this next week.
Rinse follows wash in the endless harvesting of a nation's wealth.
Have a pleasant weekend.
