The fourth specimen the paper alludes to in its closing paragraph without developing may be the most structurally important. A 10-year US Treasury and the dollar it is denominated in satisfy the diagnostic criteria precisely. Both are liabilities of the same sovereign denominated in the same unit, deriving credibility from the same taxing authority. They are similar. They are non-identical, because one is a promise to return dollars in the future and the other is a dollar in the present.
The Inverse Sympathetic Principle predicts mutual cancellation, and the mechanism through which the cancellation expresses itself has a name everyone recognises but that the financial literature has never framed in these terms: inflation. When the sovereign issues additional claims against its own currency, the claims and the currency progressively annihilate each other's purchasing power. the observation is empirically undeniable over any meaningful time horizon and the issuing parties confirm it through their own forward guidance, which routinely acknowledges that expanded issuance will reduce the real value of existing claims. as with SLV the cancellation is confirmed not merely by observation but by stipulation. the principle may have found its most comprehensive specimen in the one case it identified but chose not to develop.
I would offer a - call it parallel- take, requiring no magic. The difference is between that which requires a counter-party and that which does not. Hardly an original idea on my part, but one I borrowed from Alasdair MacLeod. At the very least it doesn't require quantum physics. Whether that's a blessing I'll leave to you good people to decide.
The counterparty framing is the sober version of the same point, yes. MacLeod gets you there in one sentence and without the embarrassment of citing Frazer.
In my defence, the article was never really an anthropological treatise. It was an excuse to read SLV's prospectus aloud in the cadence of a 1890s academic paper and see if anyone noticed. The principle is a prop. The stipulation is the punchline.
Yours does the actual work. Mine just amuses itself on the way to the same conclusion.
Almost too difficult a concept for me. I prefer my own analogy to a candle. It represents our existence on the planet. We need raw materials, energy, fresh water, fertile top soil (if no fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and mechanical tractors) to grow food, etc. That’s one end of the candle.
The other end of our candle is the artificial construct humanity has created to facilitate exploitation of these resources: money. After leaving the hunter-gatherer existence, specialization occurred, then trade emerged. This new system could no longer be accommodated by barter. Money, as a medium of exchange and a store of value is required. But money is the double-edged sword. If saved, it enables the launching of new industries and services, which, as long as the natural resources are available, can benefit humanity. This has been called “capitalism”. Based on stodgy saving, it can still allow creation of new industry, but at a measured rate.
The dark side of money is when it overpowers and commandeers saving through the creation of debt and all its derivatives which eventually become a parasitic load. The producers vs the parasites. ( like bankers, politicians, hedge fund managers, etc who do no essential work and instead essentially skim off the debt-based system while creating no new wealth or offering any useful productive skills or services.
This financialization is the other end of our candle. A turbocharging of claims on future energy, materials and production they enable.
You can burn the first end of the candle and make it last longer. But you can not burn the financialization end unless you can use the flame from the natural resource end of the candle to light this financialization end. But once you start to burn from the financialization end, you are burning this proverbial candle at both ends. When you have burned both ends, there is nothing.
If there are no goods or services left due to the lack of raw materials and energy, then “money” no longer becomes useful. Stocks through the DTCC, gold, silver, stablecoins, BTC, fiat paper currencies etc., it will not matter. We will devolve back to a barter system based on goods and services that can be sustained by the earth’s steady state ability to replenish itself, whether by recycling already mined minerals ( to the extent that we have the energy to do that), restocking the oceans with fish, or the soil with nutrients.
Humans tend to deplete that stock, knowingly, for believing abundance puts its stock into nature, when it doesn’t.
Abundance is a truth, but only when it remains unknown by humans. And true abundance is something humans perceive when all they have is love.
Lennon would probably agree.
Once seen…poof…it’s gone. And humans will chase that abundance until the Earth kills them off. Rather than simply stopping to feel it, while nature restocks, all at the expense of No1.
My introduction to sympathetic magic came by way of Numbers 21:8-9 (Moses and the Bronze Serpent). The idea that this can be inverted has twisted my brain. Kudos to you!
The order of representation is an order of symbolic representation, a component of the order of modern rationality. This can be captured, for instance, in the 16th-century conflict over the principle of substantiality between Catholics and Protestants: for Catholics, during the reception of Holy Communion, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ takes place (magical thinking), whereas for Protestants, bread and wine are merely symbolic representations of the body and blood (symbolic thinking). And if—following Max Weber—capitalism was created by Protestants, then all the more so is our capitalist-financial order a symbolic order. In this sense, SLV and other paper ETFs are the embodiment of this order (and by extension: that would refer to our entire modern financial Ponzi scheme). An overlay, not an inversion.
Great writing and analysis, all to say, that in the end, physical silver for the win. Current and future industrial and space world applications needed to survive, silver for the win. Current and future $$ protection strong but still considered fringe, silver for the win. Current silver mining companies 7:1-10:1 G/S ratio, real in the ground dirt moving ****, today, 58.8:1, silver for the win. Key: pure silver hard to find, current geo-"logical" assays by people who look at rocks, estimated future production "plateaus" starting as early 2027 in key silver producing regions; plateaus will be hard not to see to those who look under rocks. There is more to say about the unloved silver rock but that says enough. Love the silver rock, long time?
The principle takes no position on portfolio construction. It merely catalogues which pairings will cancel under observation.
That said, if one is forced to stand somewhere within a system predicted to annihilate itself, standing on the side that is matter rather than the side that is a paragraph in a prospectus does seem, on balance, the less ontologically precarious posture.
But this is incidental to the framework. Strictly incidental.
The framework is descriptive, not prescriptive. Takeaways would require me to abandon the anthropologist's neutrality and admit I have views.
Fine. Under duress:
If a system contains two things that look alike but aren't, the system is busy cancelling one of them. Figure out which side of the cancellation you're standing on. The prospectus usually tells you, if you read past the marketing.
That's as far as the principle goes without breaking character.
The fourth specimen the paper alludes to in its closing paragraph without developing may be the most structurally important. A 10-year US Treasury and the dollar it is denominated in satisfy the diagnostic criteria precisely. Both are liabilities of the same sovereign denominated in the same unit, deriving credibility from the same taxing authority. They are similar. They are non-identical, because one is a promise to return dollars in the future and the other is a dollar in the present.
The Inverse Sympathetic Principle predicts mutual cancellation, and the mechanism through which the cancellation expresses itself has a name everyone recognises but that the financial literature has never framed in these terms: inflation. When the sovereign issues additional claims against its own currency, the claims and the currency progressively annihilate each other's purchasing power. the observation is empirically undeniable over any meaningful time horizon and the issuing parties confirm it through their own forward guidance, which routinely acknowledges that expanded issuance will reduce the real value of existing claims. as with SLV the cancellation is confirmed not merely by observation but by stipulation. the principle may have found its most comprehensive specimen in the one case it identified but chose not to develop.
Nicely done!
Thank you and congratulations again on a fantastic piece.
Positron-electron. Or opposing quantum spin attributes of entangled particles might be a better metaphor.
I would offer a - call it parallel- take, requiring no magic. The difference is between that which requires a counter-party and that which does not. Hardly an original idea on my part, but one I borrowed from Alasdair MacLeod. At the very least it doesn't require quantum physics. Whether that's a blessing I'll leave to you good people to decide.
The counterparty framing is the sober version of the same point, yes. MacLeod gets you there in one sentence and without the embarrassment of citing Frazer.
In my defence, the article was never really an anthropological treatise. It was an excuse to read SLV's prospectus aloud in the cadence of a 1890s academic paper and see if anyone noticed. The principle is a prop. The stipulation is the punchline.
Yours does the actual work. Mine just amuses itself on the way to the same conclusion.
And amusing it was. The difference between us is you create content. I just kibitz. 🙃
Actually, the credits go to cobben for the great thread that gave birth to this brain fart 😂
Well, at least your brain farts don't stink; unlike many of mine. 🙄
Almost too difficult a concept for me. I prefer my own analogy to a candle. It represents our existence on the planet. We need raw materials, energy, fresh water, fertile top soil (if no fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and mechanical tractors) to grow food, etc. That’s one end of the candle.
The other end of our candle is the artificial construct humanity has created to facilitate exploitation of these resources: money. After leaving the hunter-gatherer existence, specialization occurred, then trade emerged. This new system could no longer be accommodated by barter. Money, as a medium of exchange and a store of value is required. But money is the double-edged sword. If saved, it enables the launching of new industries and services, which, as long as the natural resources are available, can benefit humanity. This has been called “capitalism”. Based on stodgy saving, it can still allow creation of new industry, but at a measured rate.
The dark side of money is when it overpowers and commandeers saving through the creation of debt and all its derivatives which eventually become a parasitic load. The producers vs the parasites. ( like bankers, politicians, hedge fund managers, etc who do no essential work and instead essentially skim off the debt-based system while creating no new wealth or offering any useful productive skills or services.
This financialization is the other end of our candle. A turbocharging of claims on future energy, materials and production they enable.
You can burn the first end of the candle and make it last longer. But you can not burn the financialization end unless you can use the flame from the natural resource end of the candle to light this financialization end. But once you start to burn from the financialization end, you are burning this proverbial candle at both ends. When you have burned both ends, there is nothing.
If there are no goods or services left due to the lack of raw materials and energy, then “money” no longer becomes useful. Stocks through the DTCC, gold, silver, stablecoins, BTC, fiat paper currencies etc., it will not matter. We will devolve back to a barter system based on goods and services that can be sustained by the earth’s steady state ability to replenish itself, whether by recycling already mined minerals ( to the extent that we have the energy to do that), restocking the oceans with fish, or the soil with nutrients.
Nature re-stocks, but only if we leave it alone.
Humans tend to deplete that stock, knowingly, for believing abundance puts its stock into nature, when it doesn’t.
Abundance is a truth, but only when it remains unknown by humans. And true abundance is something humans perceive when all they have is love.
Lennon would probably agree.
Once seen…poof…it’s gone. And humans will chase that abundance until the Earth kills them off. Rather than simply stopping to feel it, while nature restocks, all at the expense of No1.
Invest with an eye to reality, not a "Reality" ETF. ;-/
The music will stop, and you need the chair when it stops.
My first law:
Everything that's true is paradoxical.
If we can't perceive the paradox then either it isn't true or we don't understand it.
MC Escher's work comes to mind.
https://cdn.rt.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2015/11/18074039/Escher_Day_and_Night_1938.jpg
https://api.nga.gov/iiif/e6eb5003-aa1d-4425-b604-aef1c71d0346/full/!800,800/0/default.jpg
True, so true.
My introduction to sympathetic magic came by way of Numbers 21:8-9 (Moses and the Bronze Serpent). The idea that this can be inverted has twisted my brain. Kudos to you!
Thanks for the credit, I’ll get back to you when I’ve had time to read your article.
Not today
You do realize of course that my original comment was meant as a joke -
Like an obfuscation - corruption of “Science”.
Or something like that.
Happy you got something useful from it.
Read the article with our thread in mind 😉 - not much commenters seems to have really understood it is seems 🤣
The order of representation is an order of symbolic representation, a component of the order of modern rationality. This can be captured, for instance, in the 16th-century conflict over the principle of substantiality between Catholics and Protestants: for Catholics, during the reception of Holy Communion, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ takes place (magical thinking), whereas for Protestants, bread and wine are merely symbolic representations of the body and blood (symbolic thinking). And if—following Max Weber—capitalism was created by Protestants, then all the more so is our capitalist-financial order a symbolic order. In this sense, SLV and other paper ETFs are the embodiment of this order (and by extension: that would refer to our entire modern financial Ponzi scheme). An overlay, not an inversion.
Great writing and analysis, all to say, that in the end, physical silver for the win. Current and future industrial and space world applications needed to survive, silver for the win. Current and future $$ protection strong but still considered fringe, silver for the win. Current silver mining companies 7:1-10:1 G/S ratio, real in the ground dirt moving ****, today, 58.8:1, silver for the win. Key: pure silver hard to find, current geo-"logical" assays by people who look at rocks, estimated future production "plateaus" starting as early 2027 in key silver producing regions; plateaus will be hard not to see to those who look under rocks. There is more to say about the unloved silver rock but that says enough. Love the silver rock, long time?
The rock is dead. Long live the rock!
So, is the main takeaway that it's best to own the real thing?
The principle takes no position on portfolio construction. It merely catalogues which pairings will cancel under observation.
That said, if one is forced to stand somewhere within a system predicted to annihilate itself, standing on the side that is matter rather than the side that is a paragraph in a prospectus does seem, on balance, the less ontologically precarious posture.
But this is incidental to the framework. Strictly incidental.
Yes, interesting article but I would appreciate some takeaways.
The framework is descriptive, not prescriptive. Takeaways would require me to abandon the anthropologist's neutrality and admit I have views.
Fine. Under duress:
If a system contains two things that look alike but aren't, the system is busy cancelling one of them. Figure out which side of the cancellation you're standing on. The prospectus usually tells you, if you read past the marketing.
That's as far as the principle goes without breaking character.