By Louis James
Chief Metals & Mining Investment Strategist, Casey Research
Let’s start by calling a spade a spade: the so-called US government shutdown is anything but. As Doug Casey told me in a recent interview:
“It’s Orwellian doublespeak to call it a ‘shutdown,’ when all they do is furlough a few nonessential personnel and then hire many of them back again the next week — with pay for the time off.
“The so-called shutdown is nothing more than a paid holiday for many federal employees. It’s business as usual in Washington, DC. They close the Washington Monument and actually go out of their way to prevent people from even seeing Mt. Rushmore from the highway. It’s strange that there still seem to be plenty of park police around to arrest you if you disregard the signs they posted saying everything is closed.”
Even smart people who understand this may regard the impending “debt ceiling” deadline with some alarm. Congress itself seems to take the matter more seriously than the phony shutdown.