Gold: The Day-Late Savior

by Norman Ball

Gold dealers are notorious for laying out the lurid details of their impenetrably corrupt
market before moving in for the sales close:
"The price of gold is hopelessly manipulated by the largest, most corrupt
financial institutions on earth. Would you like our monthly gold purchase plan?"
We had a similar crash-and-burn sales pitch in the seventies: Yes, the Pinto explodes. Here, Ill
get you the keys so you can give it a test-drive around the block. Remember, if you lose your
foot in a trap, it's a sure sign you walked into a trap. The fact there was a large sign above the
trap saying TRAP, well that's not exactly going to sew your foot back on. Caveat emptor.
Admittedly, gold is a weird fish. True cognoscenti are as rare as, well, gold. Despite Dr. Antal
Fekete's numerous star turns on The Daily Bell (The mistake most gold bugs make is that
they identify the value of gold with its price.1.) the latter publication still reports gold 'rising
and falling' against those officious bits of colored paper. (Sorry, paper has demonstrable
mass. What I really meant to say was computer keystrokes.) Statisticians take great pains
differentiating dependent from independent variables. Causality matters. Gold is the
numeraire. The difference between 0/x and x/0 exceeds all definition. If you think golds
coming or going, youre still not getting gold.
Presently, the most notable thing about gold is that roughly the same number of USD's are
required to buy it today as was required a couple of months ago. (Well, give or take a few

keystroke clicks. Geez. Sticklers for minutiae.) Deflation and a galloping dollar are
unreflected in the exchange, which is to say gold is making a powerful, silent statement via
this stalled trade.
By contrast, take my wife and nearly everything else: Even when fiats as a group can barely
get arrested, it still takes a whole lot less of them to buy practically every other commodity.
The first-order feature of commodities (sans gold) is their use-value. How frightening then
is this Systemic Use Collapse? The great extinction event of global economic activity is
pressing down upon us making golds definitional immobility look profoundly more
immobile than usual, in dollar terms. Signs of a safe harbor at last?
Remember, gold doesn't exhibit behavior. It's more like the implacable obelisk in Kubrick's
'2001'. Featureless, useless, yet profoundly there. The obelisk was a unit of account for mans
evolving consciousness. As Bob Dylan remarked of Allen Ginsberg: "What I mean by 'holy' is
crossing the boundaries of time and usefulness...Allen Ginsberg, he's just holy."
Gold is holy because it's gloriously useless and immutable. It offers no handles and would
never trouble itself to rise and fall against anything. Careful though: holy only in the collapsed
realm of the earthbound. Souls are of inestimably more precious mettle. But thats another
strange thing about gold: invariably, it leads you to contemplate higher realms. No mere
commodity, its like an earthbound analog for the Son of Man - Son of God; the ultimate divine
paradox. Please remove all avarice from the Temple so the Messiah can get through.
On the day the house really really burns down (that day being Armageddon when people will
have more pressing concerns than portfolio weightings), the fire insurance will come to
mean a lot because there'll be nothing else left. Provided you're not counting Jesus. What's
net worth worth on Judgment Day? Goldbugs keep praying for the house to burn down
because, you know, the insurance costs an arm and a leg and theyre feeling kind of silly after
buying Peter Schiffs shtick hook, line and sinker. Gold is a binary. It mints paupers and kings.
Back to house fires. Tracking daily price action on gold is like reporting there was a spark
near the house, someone's burning leaves around the corner or a wisp of smoke could be
seen from the bedroom window, etc. Sorry, but those observation just arent binary enough.
Imagine a daily spot price on fire insurance. Firefighters spend whole careers in anticlimax
mode before bang a three-alarm inferno gets called in. The silly hour-to-hour reportage is
grievously incommensurate to the epic, singular moment gold will ultimately herald.
Paracelsus was right. Living gold (as opposed to hoarding the physical which is the sin of
coveting) is pure consciousnessthe fully realized soul. The System, by contrast, is a souldestroyer. In fact, you'll know the Antichrist by his aversion to gold. Like a vampire
encountering garlic, he'll convulse in its presence. Thats another reason to have some gilt

nailed above the threshold. The Mark of the Beast will be a celebration of ephemerality: an
e-identity or a bitcoin. In a recent blog post, Jim Rickards paints a picture of the year 2024:
"All of the gold in the world was confiscated in 2020 and placed in a nuclear bomb-proof vault
dug into the Swiss Alps...the purpose of the Swiss vault was not to have gold backing for
currencies, but rather to remove gold from the financial system entirely so it could never be
used as money again. Thus, gold trading ceased because its production, use and possession were
banned. By these means, the G-20 and the World Central Bank control the only forms of money."
Sounds plausible enough as an End Times scenario.
First though, its going to be hell on earth for Americans. The decades-long contortions of the
Triffin Dilemma will make the walk-back from reserve status to national currency a long trek
through the Valley of Death. America is the only nation on earth that lacks an answerable
currency. Odd indeed that the worlds only superpower is barely a paper tiger as even paper
has been deemed too real for Pax Americanas deadly work. And please, no whistles for that
military-petro-industrial monstrosity with the hijacked Franklin portrait. Im talking about
a currency right-sized and fashioned for the Peoples business, one that exists in enough of a
closed system that it demonstrates responsiveness to the metrics of its own supply.
Decades ago, the globalists borrowed the USD, ran in through a bomb factory and visited
terror on the world. For the trade, American peepledom got some false prosperity that
allowed them to swap houses back and forth in a parody of gainful labor. Every family had a
real estate agent. Soon, even that shell-game got foreclosed.
Meanwhile Pax Americana exerted the soft power of economic violence on the world stage
in our names. Now the world is pregnant with dollars and returning to pre-industrialism via
a killer short squeeze. The dollar merchants desperately need WW3 to feed the gathering
void. Just when the planet is groaning for lack of a sustainment model, the IMFs Special
Drawing Rights (SDRs) promise to install a more eclipsing Ponzi. Thats no solution. USDs
will be left to limp back homeall x trillion of them. Think of this unprecedented
repatriation as a trillion-man army returning to a jobless home-front.
Currency de-patriation (or if you prefer, internationalization) is a fools game. For
Americans, it was like loaning your mower to the guy who cuts The Meadowlands. The
machine you eventually get back drools like an old geezer gumming the lawn. It takes days
just to cut your suburban postage stamp. That approaching sound you hear are the Four
Horsemen of Hyperinflation: Pain, Suffering, Misery and More Pain or is it a million thirdworld ghosts hell-bent on karmic retribution? Hard to tell in this deflationary prelude, but
the real swoon is coming. Meanwhile from beyond the grave, Keynes mutters, I tried to sell
you on the bancor. But no, you had to have everything for nothing.

Just after shooting the old lady in the Flannery O'Connor's short story 'A Good Man is Hard
to Find' the serial killing Misfit pronounces: "She would of been a good woman if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Thats gold, sort of.
The day after the Big Fire, great celebration will break out among the gold crowd, strange
birds that they are. Their houses reduced to smoldering ash, nonetheless they will have
enjoyed the windfall of a lifetime, all at the same time. You cant eat gold. But you might build
a fort in the woods with it. Gold is like the old Gypsy curse: may your dreams come true. A
twisting contrarian until the End, it will have its best day when theres nothing left to buy but
your soul.
1. Dr. Antal Fekete, Thank Heaven for Gold Manipulators, April 18, 2014, The Daily
Bell)

NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA,
George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American
businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch,
The Western Muslim, Asia Times and elsewhere. His new book "Between River
and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments" is available here.
Two essay collections, How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? and
The Frantic Force are spoken of here and here, respectively. A collection of
poetry Serpentrope is due out early 2014 from White Violet Press. He can be
reached at returntoone@hotmail.com. Visit his blog Full-Spectrum Domino for
the latest news