Doing Well in Defence Stocks: The Dividends of Death
Weekend Edition October 10-12, 2014
Doing Well in Defence Stocks
The Dividends of Death
by BINOY KAMPMARK
War does what it needs to. It kills. It disrupts. It ruins and maims. And it earns a good dividend for shareholders who think their continued wealthy existence depends on the profit of the war industry. While the official definition of a state of war is becoming ever more opaque before legal watering downs such as “armed conflict”, the money being earned is getting clearer than ever. If you are in the death business and its various offshoots, you are doing spectacularly well with the noisy trading and the even noisier consequences.
Such behaviour goes to show that a fall in military spending does not necessarily equate to a fall in the business of arming. 2012 was the first year since 1998 that global military spending actually fell, but that did not stop the 100 largest arms producers and contractors recording $395 billion in sales. The dip was explained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as a lull occasioned by the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Those figures have certainly changed with the broadening of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based BMO Private Bank, was getting so tumescent at the latest figures, his talk started streaming with suggestive, meaty metaphors. “As we rap up our military muscle in the Mideast, there’s a sense that demand for military equipment and weaponry will likely rise.”[1]
Ablin’s response is the fetishist’s hope that his product is bound to go further than it can. Forget the human element, and embrace the machine-like logic of destruction. “To the extent that we can shift away from relying on troops and rely more heavily on equipment – that could present and opportunity.” Humans, after all, just get in the way.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/the-dividends-of-death/
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