According to the Golden Rate page, while these lines are running, the updated value of gold in the United States is $2,512.56 per troy ounce (31.1034768 grams), so per gram costs USD80.79. Its price has been growing steadily since March, with small setbacks that do not detract from the graphics, which look like a steep mountain seen in profile, in which the metal is the climber who is so slowed down by a bout of apnea that he continues his patient path to the summit.
Although the gold standard is an early 20th century antiquity replaced by fiat currency and the 19th century gold rush was an epic with less gold than fever, gold as a fetish has not yet ended its mythical life. Which explains why there are now more than a hundred sovereign gold reserves, a ranking in which Argentina occupies 44th place (between Denmark and Finland), with 61.7 tons, roughly equivalent to 685.5 adult English mastiffs, 1,028.3 Yaninas Latorre and 555,300 pork sausages from the La Campestre butchery in Junín (Alberdi 189. Phone: 0236 442-1649. Sunday: closed), to whom these paragraphs send a bear hug.
First among the countries that accumulate gold, only the United States is cut off. Germany and the IMF follow. Uruguay appears in 105th place, with 300 kilos; and the mentions at the bottom of the table of Haiti, Burundi, Oman and Comoros, which have zero grams, constitute a statistical intimidation, unless their central banks have free space in the vaults while waiting for the Prosegur float.
Among these 61.7 tons of Argentine gold, some are no longer there. Traceability is opaque. According to investigators, desperate to obtain the information that the government refuses to provide, turning the Summary of the assets and liabilities of the Central Bank In an arcane affair that resembled a clandestine party, some 1 billion dollars “disappeared” in trucks that transported the metals to Ezeiza, from where they flew to undeclared destinations. The maneuver has the nocturnal halo of a gaping blow. And remember “poetically” what he said Osvaldo Lamborghini on how when Rimbaud goes to Africa we must understand that he comes because in the Argentine pampas and in Africa it is “all the same”.
The decision, like that of the faloperos under the irresistible temptation of repeating the offence, taken by the president Javier Milei (self-proclaimed wise man of one thing, market bullshit, which he cannot relate to anything else) and the minister Luis Caputoderails from what were suspected to be its natural shipping routes. Obtaining gold, for what? To pawn it. The genre of the event – and that may be the real underlying question– It does not seem to be economic but psychological. In any case, more psychological than economic.
Let’s say we are compulsive and problematic gamblers, and we are running out of firepower to continue living, since as gamblers, continuing to live can only happen if we continue to gamble. We have already burned our salary and our savings. The children’s pig has already been raped and restored with La Gotita, but there is not a coin left inside. Outside, we have debts and the creditors are already combing through the agenda of the letter S of the “Sicarios”.
What can be done? We are committed to a Monte de Piedad, what the Banco Ciudad was in the 19th century on the scale of immigrants and what the Bank of Basel is today on the scale of global financial speculation. Let’s go with a gold bracelet from grandmother, or the washing machine, or the Destiny edition of Borgesby Bioy Casares, we sign a mortgage, take the money and run to the casino to put our heads back in the guillotine of chance. Tomorrow, if luck smiles on us, we will return to Monte de Piedad with the ransom money and recover what was promised. And if the money is not there? Let’s not be pessimistic…
That Luis Caputo, of Caputo Casinos, opened all the drawers of the State in the face of the next debt deadlines and, seeing that the dollars were disappearing, kept an eye on the gold bricks of the Central Bank like a croto on a churrasco, is a completely logical solution to his psychic nature, deduced from his acts of government.
You have to be in the mind of the bettor. Juan Jose Saerwho was a serious player, wrote “On the Game of Man” (Working Papers IISeix Barral, 2013) with the aim of stopping acting, following in the footsteps of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who dropped out of school after writing The player.
Saer says that for the vices of gambling, drinking, drugs and sex to have the status of “violence,” the subject must “exercise them to the limit.” He began practicing his as a hobby following a suicide. He left the wake with a friend, they went to play at the Syrian Lebanese Club in Santa Fe and returned to the wake.
In his analysis of the excesses of the game, he says that “the self is at the center of the game because the game is linked, I don’t know in what way, to omnipotence.” And he adds this phone call to Caputo: “Nothing is more difficult for a player than to admit his ignorance”; Moreover, in defeat, everything is presented to him in an obvious way “a posteriori.”
“Further speculation, especially by the loser, consolidates the desire in the illusion of omnipotence.” This refers to the desire to play and the impossibility of not being able to do so. Why would the player not play if, to do so, he possesses “all” the powers?
What happens when the game rewards the player with momentary success? What follows is “the euphoria of triumph,” and all this “because chance, with disdain, had coincided with our blind slaps.” But this triumph, says Saer, “as I later observed in people who believe they have triumphed in life, has one of the most dangerous effects I know, that of giving the illusion of the intelligibility of the world and of one’s own dignity.” And he gives this example: “Read the statements of the latest fashion star: you will see at once that he confuses the adventures of a career with the hidden order of the universe.”
One can imagine Caputo’s intoxication when, in desperation, he discovered, like Perón!, that there was gold in the Central Bank and that his gambler’s soul had returned to the body to which it belonged. Gambling to live. The relief was so great that he was even able to recount in his half-tongue of a “verbal degenerate” (in the sense that he is a pure libertarian) his misdeeds as a boquetero: “This is a very positive step on the part of Central. Today, you have gold in the Central Bank, which is as if you had a property inside that you cannot use for anything. On the other hand, if you have that, you can get a return. And the reality is that the country must maximize the return on its assets. Having it locked up in Central without doing anything for the country is negative. It is better to keep it outside where you are paid something.
My God, how strangely he speaks. “Very positive move,” “a good inside” another good? I don’t understand why he didn’t say “a piece of furniture inside a building.” A closet, a piano, a chiming clock, a board with easels for counting money, I don’t know, something: it would have given his column of smoke a scent of literacy.
But if we do not let ourselves be distracted by the forms of this Caputazo, said in the sense of the greatest or most remarkable of the Caputos who dance this macabre state dance, we could deduce to what type of timba their activities correspond.
If we let ourselves be carried away by Saer, who considers himself an actor of desire “to the end”, of life or death and of the “setting up of the body” so that it disappears in the enjoyment of chance (the organs and consciousness, “outside of what happens”), Caputo is a gentle and distant Timbero, without any trace of loss. The fact is that if what he puts into play is the gold of the Central Bank, and as mysterious as his gesture may be, what is proven is that this gold is not his. Or else, it is only 1/50,000,000 of his. This is your risk rate as a player.
Saer says that after twenty years of descending into the hell of gambling, he does not consider this a manifestation of “bourgeois waste.” He says this because he does not gamble “what he has left,” even if sometimes he does so in pure poverty. That is why he was ashamed, “close to remorse,” to learn that the Chilean oligarchy had celebrated Pinochet’s coup at the Viña del Mar casino.
To divide the waters that separate players from players according to what they put into themselves, Saer says of this shame: “But I know how the bourgeois play: as another form of ostentation, without risking anything, without questioning either their values, or their existence, or the fragile reality that the game represents.”
JJB/MF
