War has always been sold as necessity. It is framed as defense, as liberation, as the tragic but unavoidable cost of history’s advance. But behind the slogans and ceremonies lies a quieter truth: war is also a ledger. It is not only about the ground taken, but about the flows of capital that move unseen beneath the noise of artillery and the grief of headlines.
The spilling of blood becomes the perfect disguise. While bodies fill the earth, balance sheets expand; while the news lingers on the rubble of cities, dividends are quietly declared. War launders money in plain sight, dressed in the uniform of patriotism. And the brilliance of this theatre is that it convinces us to look only at the stage, never at the books that pay for the performance.
We are told it is tragedy. And it is. But it is also transaction. It is not only destruction. It is design. To follow the money is to see disclosure before the first shot is fired, to notice that capital has already chosen its winners and its victims, long before history declares them.
The Defense Dividend
The most obvious trail begins with the defense contractors. Their stocks are not merely investments; they are advance signals, disclosure written in price. As I argued in The Philosophy of Markets, entire wars can be anticipated by watching where capital flows. The sharp rise in Lockheed Martin’s stock price before major escalations is not coincidence—it is revelation. The market speaks before politicians do. It whispers the truth before the headlines catch up.
War budgets become laundering pipelines. Fear is translated into legislation, and legislation into contracts. Contracts worth billions, awarded under the pretext of urgency, with oversight conveniently suspended because “lives are at stake.” What begins as a taxpayer’s sacrifice ends as a shareholder’s dividend. Public money is pulled into the system at one end, and private wealth emerges at the other—clean, justified, and celebrated as the spoils of national security.
It is here that the illusion reveals itself most starkly. These profits are not accidental, nor are they byproducts of tragedy. They are the very architecture of the system. The guns and missiles may leave the factories in Alabama or Bavaria, but what they really manufacture is cash flow. Blood on foreign soil becomes balance on domestic ledgers.
To call this profiteering is too weak. It is structured expectation. It is not that companies like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon benefit from war; it is that their entire valuation is premised upon it. Their rising stock price is not reaction—it is anticipation. And in this anticipation lies the clearest proof that war is not just fought, it is engineered.
Commodities and Manufactured Scarcity
If defense stocks are the most blatant disclosure of war’s choreography, commodities are the subtler instrument. Here the laundering is not written in missiles but in bread, in warmth, in light. Prices of necessities cannot rise too sharply without breaking the social contract. Push the people too far, too fast, and they riot. But fold the spike into the language of crisis—blame it on war, on sabotage, on the misfortune of history—and resistance dissolves.
This was the story of natural gas leading into 2022. As the Russia–Ukraine conflict unfolded, prices surged across Europe. Energy bills in the UK tripled for many households, the justification repeated like liturgy: it is the war, it is the war, it is the war. Yet when gas prices collapsed the following year, household bills did not follow them down. The shock became the plateau. Crisis became the baseline. And profit margins soared.
The numbers do not lie. British Gas reported profits of £72 million in 2022. In 2023, that figure leapt to £751 million—more than ten times higher in the space of a year. A war thousands of miles away had become the alibi for margins that no regulator dared to touch. Scarcity was the story. Excess was the reality.
The same pattern unfolds in electricity. The UK’s HVDC interconnectors allow companies to buy cheaper power abroad and sell it domestically at inflated local prices. Some reports have shown margins so extreme they exceeded the total cost of building the infrastructure itself. A project that should have been a public good became a private arbitrage machine. And again, the story was framed not as exploitation but as necessity.
This is the genius of laundering through tragedy: scarcity is never allowed to fade fully. Even when the underlying resource returns to abundance, the final price remains elevated. The war is invoked to explain the climb, but never the plateau. The bills do not fall with the bombs. What remains is margin.
Fear as Liquidity
Fear is the most versatile commodity of all. It is cheaper to manufacture than oil, easier to distribute than wheat, and more addictive than gas itself. In times of war it becomes the hidden currency, flowing through every channel of the economy.
Populations under siege accept what they would never otherwise tolerate. Oversight is suspended, scrutiny is silenced, and spending that would have sparked outrage is applauded as patriotism. Higher energy bills, higher food prices, higher taxes—each is endured so long as the specter of threat hangs in the air. Fear stretches the social contract until it no longer resembles consent but submission.
Markets, too, feed on this current. Investors rush into defense contractors, into oil and gas futures, into wheat and corn, not because they desire conflict but because fear directs them there. Fear creates liquidity. It floods capital into predictable channels, raising valuations and margins precisely where policymakers and profiteers had already positioned themselves.
This is not accidental. It is liquidity harvesting on a planetary scale. In The Philosophy of Markets, I wrote that most traders are not trading the market—they are the market. Their behavior is the fuel that institutions harvest. In war, entire populations become liquidity. Their fear is monetized, their despair becomes flow. It is not the guns or the gas that matter most, but the predictable reactions of those forced to endure them.
Here lies the cruel elegance: fear is both the justification and the engine. It explains the rise in prices, and it supplies the capital to keep those prices high. It silences resistance, and it fills ledgers. It is not just an emotion. It is a resource. And in the hands of those who understand markets, it is the most valuable resource of all.
Blood as Smokescreen
The spectacle of blood is the oldest smokescreen. Images of bombed-out cities, of grieving families, of soldiers marching into fire — these are the pictures that hold our gaze. They are tragedies, but they are also distractions. While attention is fixed on the visible wound, the quiet surgery of profiteering continues unnoticed. Dividends are declared in the shadow of funerals. Contracts are signed as headlines fixate on atrocities. The bloodshed is real, but it also serves as cover.
And war is not the only theatre. When economies begin to fracture under the very weight of the profiteering that sustains them, new distractions are summoned. Civil unrest is not soothed, it is inflamed. Immigration is not managed, it is scapegoated. Propaganda resurrects the oldest demons of race, color, and foreignness, directing anger toward the vulnerable rather than the powerful. Hatred becomes another curtain, concealing the extraction taking place backstage.
The choreography is deliberate. When energy bills rise because corporations refuse to surrender their war-time margins, the blame is shifted onto the foreigner, the refugee, the outsider. When wages stagnate and rents consume paychecks, the story is not about the system that engineered scarcity but about the neighbor who looks different, prays differently, speaks with an accent. While communities fracture over invented enemies, the true architects of collapse continue their work unchallenged.
This is laundering in its most sophisticated form. It is not only money that is cleaned—it is culpability. Responsibility for systemic failure is washed away in waves of outrage, redirected toward scapegoats who had no part in the design. The state manufactures division, the media amplifies it, and the market harvests the distraction to preserve the flow of profit.
So long as the spectacle is sustained, the books remain unread. We rage at one another while the real beneficiaries walk away untouched, their ledgers swelling in silence. Blood on the battlefield. Fear in the marketplace. Hatred in the streets. All smokescreens, all disguises, all part of the same laundering machine.
The Closed Circuit of Power
Every laundering machine must close its circuit. Money that enters through fear and crisis does not vanish; it cycles back into the very structures that keep it flowing. Profits become lobbying budgets, campaign donations, offshore reserves. The revolving door between government, corporations, and banks ensures that those who authorize the spending also benefit from its return. War is not merely an event—it is an institution, with shareholders, custodians, and guarantors.
The Ukraine conflict made this grotesquely clear. Even as President Zelensky stood before the cameras, appealing for billions in aid to defend his nation, reports surfaced of corruption within his inner circle—personal aides accused of funneling funds into offshore accounts, with some estimates exceeding €5 billion siphoned into private treasuries. The spectacle was surreal: public appeals for solidarity, private pipelines of enrichment. The world was told the war effort depended on continued generosity, while insiders treated that generosity as liquidity to be harvested.
This is not unique to Ukraine. It is the pattern of every prolonged conflict. Aid packages are justified as humanitarian necessity but often end as financial arbitrage. Contracts meant to rebuild hospitals and schools line the pockets of intermediaries. Military budgets overflow with “emergency allocations” that bypass normal oversight. And in every case, accountability is postponed because “the war is not yet over.”
Thus the circuit completes itself. Taxpayer money flows outward under banners of urgency. Corporate profits swell. Offshore accounts expand. Lobbyists recycle a fraction of those gains into the political class. And the cycle begins again, cleansed by the smokescreens of tragedy, fear, and hatred.
This is not incompetence. It is choreography. A system designed to preserve itself, laundering not just money but legitimacy. The more obvious the corruption, the louder the appeals to necessity. The more brazen the siphoning, the more urgent the calls for solidarity. The books are balanced not with numbers, but with narrative.
The Laundromat That Kept Spinning
In the end, what we are witnessing is not chaos but craft. War is sold as necessity, but functions as theatre. The bombs and speeches, the tanks and funerals—these are the stage. The real script is written in contracts, in profit margins, in offshore accounts. It is not only blood that flows in war, but money, and money always flows toward the same reservoirs of power.
The defense contractors reveal the pattern in advance, their stock charts disclosing the next act before a single shot is fired. The energy giants hold their prices aloft long after scarcity fades, justifying their margins with the memory of crisis. The utilities and arbitrageurs turn necessity itself into speculation, buying cheap, selling dear, and calling it stability. Politicians and aides funnel billions into hidden treasuries while calling for more aid, more sacrifice, more solidarity.
And through it all, the people are told the same story: that this is tragic but unavoidable, that suffering is the price of freedom, that sacrifice is the only path to survival. Meanwhile, the architects of this machinery preserve their power, not despite the crisis but because of it. Fear keeps the contracts flowing. Hatred keeps the public distracted. Blood keeps the books unread.
This is not simply profiteering. It is laundering—of money, of legitimacy, of culpability. And like any laundromat, it never really stops. One war cycles out, another spins in. The machine keeps whirring, the clothes keep turning, and the stains are always washed away before anyone can hold them to the light.
To see war not only as tragedy but as transaction is not cynicism. It is clarity. And clarity is the first step toward refusal.