By Catherine Austin Fitts
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot.
Life in the financial markets increasingly feels like Beckett’s masterpiece; as all eyes watch for news of the pending US budget deal and ponder when, and if – the Federal Reserve will begin to taper its monthly bond purchases. Clearly the enormity of the U.S. federal borrowing, taxation, spending and money supply creation requires that its economic impact be considered. At the same time, real wealth requires focus and hard work in good times and in bad.
To continue reading Catherine’s commentary on current events subscribe to The Solari Report here. Subscriber’s can log in to finish reading here.
Hence it serves all of us to consider Washington to be the equivalent of weather. Sometimes, it is good. Sometimes it is bad. But we must soldier on and succeed irregardless of whether the sun is shining, or tornadoes wipe out this years harvest. Increasingly, this requires an enormous act of faith as the centralizers continue to look for every possible way to harvest the value we create – and to do so without paying for it.
Perhaps nothing best demonstrates this point than the pronouncements from corporations with the worst record of respecting privacy on the planet – Google and Facebook – braying about new laws to protect the world from the NSA. It turns out that market fundamentals matter and the lack of integrity in the Internet cloud is having a serious impact on the short and long term market share of Silicon Valley companies.
The most important message of 2013 was one that many in Washington and corporate America may not yet understand. Guns won. All the money on the planet dictated that the Obama Administration strip the American people of their ability to exercise the rights of self defense. It was clearly an election promise without which the Democrats would never have won – the nod from Mr. Global being the key to victory. While I continue to ponder whether it was the real estate interests who pushed hardest, or those who wanted to make the sky’s safe for Amazon’s drones, the reality is that they were stopped dead in the Congress. That is right – the Congress. Think about how much backlash there must be for the Congress to actually represent the will of the people.
So we soldier on, creating wealth, looking for ways to protect it from the bad weather. Better to do so than wait for the financial Godot.
