The U.S. Government sells debt on a revolving door basis, yet most people aren’t aware of the mechanism by which this is done. Luckily, ZeroHedge covers the debt auction results, which allows us to articulate one of the structural problems in the Federal Reserve system. As reported last week:

“Thank you for your service.” It’s a sentence I have spoken many times to veterans and people in military uniform. The ideals in which the United States military is ostensibly rooted—honor, duty, bravery, transcendence of self—are ideals to which all men ought to aspire.

A man stands at a farmers market stall. His wife is talking to the farmer. He picks up a chicken. Paper-wrapped, no barcode, a handwritten tag on the twine. He holds it close to read the label and sets it back down fast. The price is an insult. What are these people thinking?

A minute later, another man reaches for the same bird, reads the same label, and smiles. What a deal.

If we were to identify the most sacrosanct dogma of Western modernity—the one that no one questions—it would undoubtedly be representative democracy. We automatically assume that it is the best form of government that humanity has ever invented—a sort of “end of history” method of governance and the ultimate political achievement.

In 1948, Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell System Technical Journal, a paper that established information theory as a formal discipline. Shannon’s central contribution was to show that information can be measured, that communication channels have finite capacity, and that—when noise is introduced into a channel—the receiver’s ability to reconstruct the original message degrades in precise, calculable ways.

While April’s reading was slightly improved from the preliminary reading, it remained the lowest in data back to 1978.

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note — the key benchmark for U.S. government borrowing — rose more than 3 basis points to 4.325%.