Agent Provocateur

What an agent provocateur does is, go behind the scenes, and incite someone or some group of people to rash or illegal behaviour.

Of course though, today, we know that the word is also a branded lingerie product that stresses marketing through images.

We all live in a much more sophisticated world today than ever before.  But wealthy and well-funded and sophisticated though it may be however, even the branded ‘Agent Provocateur’ company cannot spread itself so wide as to sponsor frivolous events in, say, Outer Mongolia. Or Western Mongolia, let’s be more specific, where the Republic of Kalmykia is located. (Between Russia and China). This kind of thing is reserved only for sovereign states to be able to afford.



Amir Ban, a chess engine programmer, with a Kalmyk.
Propaganda with a sinister purpose

I’m engaged in a fairly large commercial negotiation right now, and I am in a virtually unrelenting state of fear and panic. On the one hand it is very exciting, but on the other hand unnerving because I simply can’t trust that things are as airtight shut in terms of confidentiality as I would prefer them to be.

And so to skirt around things, let’s talk about Chess. Chess is most certainly, a frivolous pastime. It has little or nothing to do with strategy, since all the rules are pre-set, and the game itself produces nothing material. One can neither benefit from it by applying ideas from it about strategy to the real world, and nor can one eat the products of the game’s endeavour for there aren’t any to speak of.

Decadence, of course, is nothing if not to do with the sophisticated frivolous.



The Dolmabahce Palace

But of course I jest. Strategy is learned from many pursuits. And those of us who fancy that we understand strategy deeply, usually take the long view, and draw an often rather distant perspective on our ultimate objectives before we step into spotlights at all.



I’m not too sure that the word I’m really looking for is not ‘labyrinthine,’ rather than ‘Byzantine,’ to describe how I personally approach the art of making money.  Perhaps it is a bit of both. And yet it is the style I personally recommend, for at least in the dark and shadowy labyrinths of Byzantium, one may scratch the guilding off the walls and profit even there from alone, if from nothing else. And this means, one ought to always walk where there is money, and not where there isn’t any. Sometimes what appears like power or money is really only the phantoms flitting across the shadows of the labyrinth.

 

Next post, propaganda that is not sinister.

Sailing To Byzantium

So what do we learn from history? What do we learn that is useful to us when making financial and investing decisions?

I personally think one thing is that it is impossible or very rare to be able to change people’s minds when they have set themselves to a belief or committed themselves to an idea.

A 'diplomat's seating arrangement' in
the Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul

When the empire of Rome fell and was replaced by what came to be known as the Byzantine Empire (330 AD onwards) centred in Constantinople, an oriental influence exerted itself on what had previously been a strongly Western European-influenced progress of ‘modern’ civilisation.

Turkey has now become – once again – as did the Byzantine Empire before it, a great economic centre-point of trade.

Turkey has immense geopolitical advantages, of course. It is difficult to see the economy of Turkey go backwards or sideways over the next several decades.

One will never be able to change the opinions of those who believe that ‘economic sanctions’ against Russia are clever.  And that New York is the greatest centre of money and trade the world has ever seen and will ever be thus.

A Byzantine form of civilization is not strictly speaking, oriental, and nor is it occidental. It is multi-faceted, and, as the Russian news service recently quoted, the lying voices against this economic and cultural precedent will now become polyphonic.



What the hell are they trying to do to her?!
(Katy Perry in a D&G Byzantine art dress)

Sophisticated people though, are well ahead of the whole game.

The Byzantine Truth

Part of the attraction of taking part in the activity of modern investing through stock exchanges, is the psychological motivation behind the idea of being able to go to your stock broker’s office, where all the fresh-faced kids out of college or university work, and have them make a cheque out to you when you ‘take profits.’

I always remember old man Geoff Cambridge from my original broker Saw Cambridge and Brannelly, very drunk, very old, still very dapper-looking though, turn to me inside the elevator and say: ‘taking profits young man? Excellent!”

Old Geoff Cambridge, the stock broker,
always reminded me of Wilford Brimley

I think it was just the standard patter he used on anyone after another late lunch.

The stock market Crash of ‘88 was something I personally foresaw and raised a bundle of cash prior to.  And I suppose I have basically never ever looked back since because of my actions at that time - but there is a stark difference in conditions today: there is little circulating cash about the place anywhere. Having the luxury of observing from a safe distance, after having cashed-up, I believe I more easily noticed the moments when circulation problems started to be created in the economy. I say ‘created’ because they were indeed created, rather than having been the result or consequences of economic factors. They were nearly all strictly the effects of specific political acts, which included decisions made in active and deliberate collusion with supposedly politically-independent central banks. BIS (the Bank for International Settlements) policy could have dealt with Hank Paulson’s so-called sub-prime mortgage and banking crisis, but was not only never allowed to, but inch by inch in the years beforehand, its power and structure and meaning was quite deliberately cut down.

Without going into all of that in this article though, let me just state what should be obvious but will likely want to be avoided by most - you cannot expect to trade or invest in exchange-handled stocks and bonds these days, and retain your money; you will lose it. And probably lose it all.

And so when I start to talk about making money - and thus being able to ‘take profits’ - from something to do with exploiting the natural Equation of Exchange leverage available in the circulation function of money in today’s economy, I will not be talking about going anywhere near a stock broking house or typical financial institution. All of these do not, in the first place, have cash that can be released into the domestic circulations…

So, you too might ‘foresee’ another Great Crash now - but then you will not able to access any cash to do anything about it and in any case you also need to be concerned that your counterparty really intends for you to be paid out at all. Criminality, heavy-duty cheating, broad theft, dissembling; that’s what you have on your hands with stock exchanges and their agents now. It’s not safe there. Sure there is a lot of paper capital told of in more ‘tall tales’ than Damon Runyon generated, and there are big sums written about all the time. You won’t see the cash though - there isn’t any. And more to the point, the digital credits are not allowed to go into economy-wide circulation in any case.

Which brings us back to the psychological impediments to a realisation about where the money actually is. You know where it is not, and thus you should resist the temptation to go to those places - but do you? Chat-rooms are still full of talk about stocks and shares and indexes. You might as well be spending time talking about some painting on the wall of the Louvre - the paint is not going to flow off the wall there either and turn into money in your hands even if you know which way the brush stroke was made. Up or down…

Stay away from the Wall.

A real 'Russian Cocktail'

Direct your mind to the foundations.

The foundation of a Russian Cocktail - a true ‘Russian Cocktail’ - is Maraschino liqueur and a brandied cherry. The Italians, soaked a Croatian cherry in brandy liquor to come up with the Maraschino cherry and the Maraschino liqueur is simply spirits made from the natural Croatian cherries including their pits and stems - which adds a slightly almond bitterness.

During the American Prohibition era, Maraschino cherries were banned because of the fact that they were soaked in alcohol.

Besides the Maraschino, a Russian Cocktail has pure grain Russian vodka in it as the main body of it. Crystal clear, ice cold, and with a red velvet heart of fire.

Now you need to understand, that American Maraschino Cherries - are fake. The FDA spells out that their definition of a Maraschino Cherry is this: “a maraschino cherry is regarded as the common or usual name of an article consisting of cherries which have been dyed red, impregnated with sugar and packed in a sugar sirup (sic) flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor.”

No it isn’t. Nobody ‘regards it’ this way except the FDA.

And you shouldn’t regard the truth generally either, as being able to be simply or merely asserted absent from an independent and objective test. The truth is crystal clear.

You can see the truth, I promise you, through the glass of a real Russian Cocktail. And if you were holding a Byzantine glass in your hand, in which there was a real Russian Cocktail, you would not only be seeing the truth, you would be actually literally holding it.

Enough said.

The Sting - Velocity

In The Sting, the 1973 movie starring Paul Newman, the main action hinges around an elaborate Depression era scam using ‘wire fraud.’

A Depression Era Henry Gondorff

Wire fraud is where telecommunications are interfered with so that the resulting output information - or the timing of it - is different or creates a disconnection to the original information input. This is essentially what HFT (high frequency trading) amounts to, for example, because the interposing of a cost line is not relevant to the actual (real) buying and selling of shares or financial positions. HFT is wire fraud. It makes use of the disadvantage that buyers and sellers are at when the buyer input data is deliberately falsified through spurious buy signals.

One of the most significant, and usually forgotten, elements to wire fraud is the deliberate misuse of time, or timing.

If news you get from reporting in a certain location is deliberately delayed, you are at a disadvantage to those who are doing the deliberate delaying.

Creating a false impression in the gap of uncertainty, allows for guilt by impression - and then default action springing from the consequence of the impression having gathered a certain emotional reality through mistaken belief.

When you look at today’s low interest rates and the absurd size of the static Money Supply, it is possible to gain an impression that something new is happening in economics. Commentators and even a large number of economists worldwide are grasping to ‘see’ some trigger for price collapse or other disturbance because of the seeming impossibility of a continuation of sheer magically created ‘money’ by the Fed without some negative consequence, either on the value of the US Dollar or prices and inflation.

People are forgetting about the ‘Time’ component in the Equation of Exchange. The Fed has tried to change the standard capital term of ten years on bonds by creating focus on something they call the long end, by which they attempt to skew people’s perceptions towards a belief that there is actually something called a thirty year bond and even a connection with property mortgages and so-called longer term money.

Under people’s noses however, there is the catastrophe in circulation velocity - or the number of economic transactions in the domestic flow model - in evidence. By preventing people from ‘seeing’ that a major consequence has already taken effect, ordinary people are at an extreme disadvantage. Everyone believes the Dow can never come down, and that QE infinity can persist without negative consequences. The consequences, however, are already here.

Irving Fisher’s Equation of Exchange has not been repealed, or repudiated by any fact.

People such as Christine Lagarde actually have the audacity to point to low or slow growth as a concern that politicians and bankers must address, whereas in fact it is the money velocity that central bankers themselves have caused to collapse through pushing the envelope on total nominal Money Supply.

The ‘trigger’ is - there is no trigger required! Not many people have worked out that ANY velocity increase, whether economy wide or singular, will pull on the other factors in the Equation (of Exchange) directly.

An umbrella in the BRICS rain - or,
'it's raining BRICS.'

The biggest weapon competing countries - China, Russia, India - have, is not a military weapon. It is the ability or capacity to invoke circulation velocity on the American and general ‘Western’ economy. People have talked hyper-deflation but this is no longer possible at this point now that the gross nominal Money Supply has gone to such extreme numbers whilst circulation velocity was terminally low.

And it is possible to affect velocity from outside of the Fed or Washington politics.

As I demonstrate how in follow-up articles, you will be able to massively profit from the dynamics of simple application of the Equation of Exchange.

Can It Be Averted Now?

Anna Netrebko is a russian opera singer who attracts an amazing amount of negative criticism. The criticism, comes from the usual band of experts who have this idea that opera - or the operatic voice - is about some kind of austerity and machine-like perfection, rather than music. Frankly, I have to tell you that I simply never could ‘get’ what all the fuss was about with a soprano like Sutherland; she was utterly without feeling as far as I am concerned. She was staccato, stilted, dogmatically conservative in her interpretations of roles - and of course absolutely beloved by droves of snobs around the world.

Same as today the self same band of snobs decry Netrebko at every opportunity.

Netrebko with VV

Netrebko, however, is everything Sutherland never ever was. Beautiful to those with music in their soul.

There are perhaps a small handful of musicians and theatrical dramaturges who will wholeheartedly agree with me on this: someone like Netrebko is similar to someone like say, Natalie Peris… Or, simply put, absolutely, totally and awesomely stunningly musical in every possible way.

Natalie Peris is a modern pop trance singer. Well, I suppose not pop exactly.

Peris comes from Croatia, Netrebko from Krasnodar of Kuban River Cossack ethnicity.

Peris - modern Trance music singer

Anna Netrebko just pulled out of a London production of Gounod’s Faust, saying that in the final analysis, she didn’t think the role (of Marguerite) was for her. And a very wise decision, too.

You know, culture - culture - is something that snobs will never comprehend. Snobs want to have a stirred vodka martini but don’t really care that the truly most complicated cocktail in the world is actually the otherwise supposedly crass or commonplace Bloody Mary - which is nonetheless another vodka-based drink.

Aficianado's say this is the most
complicated cocktail

Faust. Sold his soul to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles is either a being who distributes falsehoods and false stories, or is a ‘non lover of the light;’ someone who hides in the shadows.

The Faust story is a great one, but the opera is unmusical - very orchestral yes, but devoid of melody and aspires to be something on account of extremes of range and instrumental turbulence filled with the crash and clatter of theoretically dramatic sounds. A bit like Dore Gold or Mark Regev, frankly. Look at us, look at us! Woe is us. There will be no peace until Kirk is dead!! (The Klingon High Council).

"Show Me The Meaning..." Lyric line from the below: