Money is WHAT?

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livingnote

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 12, 2007
Messages
1,048
Location
Berlin, Berlin
I was kinda shocked when I learned that money exists solely as debt. I always thought money was kinda "out there", but as it turns out, every dollar that gets printed by the fed or whatever central bank you have are to be paid back with interest on them, but the interest can never be paid because there are no dollars put into circulation without interest on them. As if that wasn't enough, all these banks are privately owned... This means that every company out there will eventually go broke, and the debt will never be paid back, no matter what kind of ideas we have to "save our economy".

Wtf?
 
http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml

there's some circuits in there that could be used as "auto" release in compressors.
 
The global warming hoax seems to be pretty much along the lines of that document, the biggest piece of social engineering of modern times.
 
You know...the idea of minus numbers was only invented to convey debt. We're unfortunate pawns in some ways.

I'm guessing you watched that Zeitgeist video on youtube about the American federal reserve right? It's scary.

Rob
 
> to be paid back with interest

I'm not sure what this means.

Imagine a no-money society.

All trade would be "things".

I want the Honda my brother is getting rid of. I offer to trade him a cow. But the car is worth more than the average cow, so I throw in a pig and two chickens. But if he's not instantly hungry, he has to fed and house them; the "interest" on a cow is maybe negative 25%/year. And it is illegal to hold cows or pigs in my town or his. And he may keep Kosher, not need a pig.

I could issue paper promising to take it back and deliver a cow. You don't know if a small dude like me will actually have a cow when you want one, or if my cow is healthy, so you would not take it. Paper from more established outfits is more trustworthy, but ALL human enterprises WILL eventually end.

Gold is lousy for plows or swords, and how many gold cups do you need? But gold has historically "had value" beyond its utility, and much higher value per pound than a cow. And you don't have to feed it. But my brother would not take raw "gold" from me: he knows I could give him a lump of lead with a flash of gold. Even if he took it, he could not give it to someone else at full value. Gold has to be assayed. Alternatively it can be formed in a standard product backed-up by a recognized authority. The King can stamp his face on lumps of gold and kill anyone who forges coins.

But even gold is awkward. Banks offered fancy paper which could be traded for metal. It rarely was, and they could often hold much less "reserve" than the paper in circulation. The mass of silver and gold moved in the China Tea Trade had major repercussions. Banks in London established a global system of paper standing for silver, which (combined with internal funny-business) lead to trouble in Mexico which may have seeded a collapse of US banking.

The US government went back in the business of holding metal reserves and issuing paper against actual metal. A $10 bill could be traded for a $10 silver coin. But as Bcarso says, this was quietly dropped many decades back.

Cows and metals have risks. A cow epidemic could make my live cow much more valuable than a Honda. Or a flood of Chinese (or Kansas) cows could make my cow almost worthless. Even when Silver was an "industrial" metal (for photo film) the Hunts manipulated the price of all short-term silver up and down. The value of gold is even more arbitrary. The US set a silly-low value on gold for many decades. When that was dropped, the price yo-yo-ed. Bad news, or a stretch of good news, yo-yos the price again.

Currency (distinct from money in general) is worthless paper plus a promise from someone. In 1920 the US Gov would take back a $20 Silver Certificate and give you a "$20" silver coin actually worth a bit less than $20. Today the promise seems to be "someone will take your $20 paper in trade for something of value". If nothing else, the IRS is obliged to take US Currency to pay taxes. The fact that governments usually must take their own money for taxes may be the most reassuring aspect of a rather thin promise. Even then, all governments play games, because the trouble won't come until the next administration.

All economic theory is wrong. Or rather: you can apply Ohm's and Kirchoff's laws to any economy, but the "circuit" is millions of NON-linear elements and you can't know the value of any one. In a stable economy you can make some observations and write some equations which "work".... until the unknown hidden factors come to the top in a Crisis. The last decade looked good by "standard" measures. But it was kept "good" by cheating, by encouraging excess promise of future cows.
 
It's not too late to start working on Ron Paul for 2012, but he'll need a better rap than last time if he seriously wants to be elected into a position to really change things. It might take a president and congress to change up that, and he's already in congress so never mind. We're good to go... fishing.

JR




 
 
I mean, I'm OK with something like paper that has a symbolic value to facilitate exchange, it's just that I don't like this third weird guy who owns all the paper and says "that's mine, and you have to give me more paper than I gave you, and because I am the only one who can make the paper, either you go broke and I get your cow or you get your extra paper from someone else and he goes broke"

It really makes me rethink the thing about greed turning commerce into a monster...commerce relies on a monetary system that forces us to be monsters, or go under.

So when are we gonna shake this stuff off?
 
livingnote said:
So when are we gonna shake this stuff off?

I'm not smart enough to predict the future but I am basically an optimist. This too will pass.

I try to be open minded and I like the talk coming out of Washington, I just don't like the walk I'm seeing... damn politicians.

The shift of support toward unions does not bode well for job creation. The shift toward protectionism (buy American clauses) is already getting reaction from our world partners. These folks need to consider how Smoot-Hawley back in the '30s was reportedly responsible for a 5% drop in our GDP, not to mention the damping effect on the worlds recovery, especially if other nations respond in kind. The stimulus bill is shaping up like a trojan horse full of all kinds of pork and not so subtle policy shifts.

I have been critical before of government trying to micromanage natural business cycles, Normal downturns give us an opportunity to clear out dead wood, and foster innovation. I concede the credit/banking lockup was unusual and worthy of intervention, but only to the extent we facilitate a market for the toxic securities and let them find their true value. Then we need to let bankrupt institutions fail. If we borrow money we don't have and give it to the weakest institutions to paper over the holes in their balance sheets, we are keeping the terminally ill alive and damaging the well institutions out there. When you offer incentives for bad behavior you get more bad behavior. No bank in their right mind will write off these toxic assets when there is still a chance the government will bail them out. The government is prolonging and deepening the problem by pretending they can resolve it painlessly. The truly bankrupt institutions need to fail.

If our congress is so bent on spending money they don't have, they should use it to buy some of the excess oil in tankers sailing around in circles at sea to put into our strategic reserve. Does anybody believe it will ever be this cheap again?? Moving the cost of oil off it's current speculation driven lows will help their (not my) green agenda that doesn't make sense with oil at these prices. Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see Chauvez and Achiminijad hurting at current prices, but Iraq could use more oil revenue to rebuild their infrastructure that was already in disrepair before the fighting. I would really like to see that fledgling democracy thrive. Purple thumbs are a good thing.

JR


 
livingnote said:
So when are we gonna shake this stuff off?

What stuff?  Ask any of the numerous entrepreneurs here if they look at themselves as monsters.  Are you a monster if you are trying to get a break on that new washer/dryer for your house?  When I fix broken studios and equipment I charge for it.  I am not a monster, and neither are my clients.  Well, most of them.  Walmart or Superfood are not monsters.  People are free to buy things from scores of local places.
If you are talking about pop consumer culture, then I agree.  That is a huge monster.  I see that most of it is driven by the FreeVee- look at how psyched people get over the Stooper Bowl and all the cool commercials they will run.  Look at all the reality shows, pimp my whatever, bling-blang-badaboom garbage that people consume.  Then look at the sponsors, the stars who brand the crap that people are led to feel they need.  Funny I have been re-visiting this in one of the Kiyosaki books, "Who Took My Money?".  He says look at the advertisers.  Conservative and liberal talk radioand TV both try to sell the same vacuums, slip-and-fall legal, get-out-of-debt, have better sex pills, etc.  And SEX.  Look at what a huge business that is from FreeVee to internet to snake oil pills to perfumes.

Another monster is the big government.  I think it was the Times that reported that the economies in areas of the UK are well over 60% government spending and directive.  The private sector is smaller that in former communist countries.  In the US, they find it more efficient to tax you, take a cut, and talk about giving it back to you as stimulus.  They find it important to take more responsibility from the private sector and take it upon their bloated inefficient selves, in the name of a level playing field, or sharing the wealth, or protecting the little guy.  This actually serves to take freedom away from the little guy.  Alas, an undereducated electorate returned 80% of the people to whom they gave a 9% approval rating.  And they were our only choices for our new leaders!  

Yes, the greenback is debt, and you still have the major controlling authority over your $, and a good thing is to make it work rather than spend it or stash it.  Move it.  Use it.  Leverage it.  Give it away to someone who has not.  These are acts of a smart person and not a monster.

Mike  

 
Well it's funny, because the people themselves are all fine fellows, but then you have companies that produce shoes and clothes and just about every large-scale consumer item in third-world countries, for 15 cents a pop, and selling them in the states for 40 bucks and more, sometimes the CEOs themselves don't even know what's going on. There's a pretty well-documented canadian movie about it called "the corporation".

Point I'm getting at is this: They behave like this because they need to keep up paying their interest and taxes, but there is no way for society as a total to shake off even a percent of the interest, it just keeps mounting. The only way to relax the situation is for the broke elements to become insolvent, in which case the bank writes them off and forecloses on their securities - their land, cars, etc.

Now the bank itself goes broke because these toxic papers were appraised way too high, and even foreclosure doesn't save them. After their bankruptcy, they get bought up by a bigger house, which now owns everything they foreclosed on - title deeds, stocks etc. - at a severe markdown - and thereby, in one fell swoop, owns all the land and company shares left in the busted bank's deposit. Real estate is nice to have, and stocks translate into power over corporations.

This has me a bit concerned because it means that by this system sooner or later most everything will belong to the central bank. There is no way around this. It is really interesting because even within the banks themselves, this point cannot be disproved. All they ever do is talk around the problem and diffuse by complication and perticularities, but no one has to date been able to directly nullify the assumption.

I loved reading Kiyosaki, but one thing I don't remember reading is that your asset column consists solely of someone else's debt. Meaning ultimately, some of us will be able to save our own heini until we meet our maker, but as a group we're screwed because man a's plus reaps 4%, and man b's minus (which is what man a's plus consists of in the first place) costs him 9%.

So where do we get the missing 5% if not by creating more debt? The only valve here is for the real economic values to wander into the deposits of the big banks via foreclosure and write-offs, and where does that get us?
 
tv said:
http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml

there's some circuits in there that could be used as "auto" release in compressors.

Wow that pretty sums up many (most) of all my suspicions/theories from observing what has been happening as of late.


Now does anyone care to cite info/rumors out there around the time (circa 2000) the Euro currency was being initiated, that the Gov of Iraq was going to start using the "Euro" and was going to drop the dollar???  In addition to all the talk of the ending days of the dollar's dominance in the world market?


Now recently we have a world recession that nobody can really explain for "what" is the main cause other than "economic sabotage"???? 


That some real cleaver chaps from the Finance/Banking sector of the US and possibly a few other countries did some "hocus pocus" and thus crashed the world market in order to "madeoff" like bandits as well as the "self preservation" of the US dollar currency which was just about half the value of what the Euro was going for about in the beginning Summer of 2008.


Has anyone else thought of this?  That the deliberate crashing of the world finance markets was in the attempt to preserve the relevance of the dollar in which is a separate issue from what the prior article that tv posted?


 
Another side question i'd like to ask in which im sure I'll get some good answers to...

Now...some people dont believe this to be the case but do you feel theres a difference between Corporatism/Laize-Faire Capitalism and the "Free Market"??

Its very subjective I know but many to whom call themselves "conservatives" feel there isnt a difference in which the "Free Market" can be described to what system (correct me if im wrong) of economics that we had in the US or in other places before the marketplace was 1. Ruled by "Multi-National" Corporations and 2.  Wasnt under as much gov regulation, regardless of what that reason may be. 

 
Well I do know that the real estate crisis was not the cause of the economic crisis. 10% at max.

What basically happened was that banks went offshore and - free from domestic regulatory laws - started lending each other trillions with zero backing. Now they took these IOU's to the stock markets and invested them, which was why the stock market skyrocketed the way it did. Now the banks weren't stupid, they started packaging the overblown papers into their customers' deposits (as in, you bring your money to the bank and tell them to multiply it, and they buy stuff like that for you). The whole thing was so complicated and intertwined that almost nobody noticed for years. Even big banks like the Union Bank of Switzerland were neck-deep in it, but suddenly got caught red-handed before they could repackage everything, and in turn got screwed themselves rather than their clients (at least in part). Serves them right after ruining Swissair so cold-heartedly.

I heard that thing too that Saddam was gonna go Euro so the banks puppeteered dubya into war (with their more worldly interests at stake of course)...one thing for sure is that there really seems to be some deliberate crashing going on...and "yes we can" work our asses off in the false assumption that increasing productivity is gonna get us back on track.

What was that thing btw in the one movie that if we take 5% out of pentagon budget and stick it in welfare, we would have free clinics nationwide and stuff?

Edit: just read your second post...well, government regulation or laissez-faire capitalism either way, all dollars you think are yours are private property of a private bank, and they want them back, plus interest, or they take your house and your prize dog woofy, or control entire sections of the governement.

So either way, the world ends up being run by banks which run corporations, and installing government regulations is just kindofa bus stop in between, like bouncing a squash ball off the floor instead of hitting it directly.

Interesting you mention that point btw, the way it happens is that the debt just gets shoveled from individual companies to the government itself over time, because the government is the only institution with direct access to your wallet this is quite handy. So of course they want to regulate everything they pay for.
 

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