Re: real journalism

2
Yeh, so the reserve banking system is ridiculous nonsense and only leads society down the garden path to systemic risk. But really, what is currency? It comes from the latin word for circulation. In fact anything that humans want or need can be a form of currency. It's as simple as that. So should precious metals be currency or cereal grains be currency or should a government create a paper currency by fiat. In any case you can't eat metal and you can't eat paper (unless you're a termite).

What's the answer? Adam Smith didn't have the answer. Neither did Karl Marx. I don't have the answer either. I do know one thing. We're very near the end of the garden path with Donny Dump's tariffs.

Re: real journalism

3
Paper money is a "marker", an I.O.U. It's a contract. And now that our metal money is all pot metal (except the nickel) it's the same as paper--no inherent value.

Yet, ultimately, all value is nothing more or less than we say it is. A canoe is far less valuable in the Gobi Desert than it is in the Amazon. Relevance and human whim determine value. Yet measurement of value is totally whim. A Troy Ounce of gold currently is valued at roughly $1200. 30 years ago it bottomed at $280. Palladium, then, was $100-150. Now it's well over $800, but platinum, which used to ALWAYS be higher than gold, is now about $250 to $300 LESS per ounce.

Problems come when crooks like Trump, the Kushners, Manafort, and others like Maddoff "game" the system to gain the "markers" without actually having done anything to EARN them. They assume the money itself has the value, not the products and service behind it.

Even if you give a stupid speech and you're paid a couple of hundred grand for it, at least you DELIVERED the service you were contracted for.

Governments have cheated the money for millennia. The king would issue gold coins and call it a "Crown". He'd contract to pay for things in "Crowns"...and then would have his mint make them a little smaller, yet STILL say "It's a Crown, and a Crown is a Crown!" Ridges were put on coins to discourage "clipping"--literally taking a bit of gold or silver off each coin, making them, like the shrunken Crown, less valuable though retaining the same face value.

But Gold and Silver only have, yet again, the value we assign to them. It's not even scarcity that determines value. I remember when so-called "Morgan Dollars" in uncirculated condition shot up from $30 to $100. Very common coins. Meanwhile, EXTREMELY rare $.20 silver coins ("double dimes") cost far less. Then the demand for the Morgans collapsed and they went back to $30! Kind of like the Dutch Tulip catastrophe, when they became SO desirable people would pay for a bulb in its weight in gold!

Yeah, "Who knew Economics was so complicated?" DUHHHHHH!!!!
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: real journalism

4
YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat Aug 11, 2018 3:31 pm Paper money is a "marker", an I.O.U. It's a contract. And now that our metal money is all pot metal (except the nickel) it's the same as paper--no inherent value.
It's worse than that - fiat money brought into existence through fractional reserve banking is a unit of debt. So, it's not only not based on something valuable, and not based on something worthless, it's based on continually digging the country into a deeper hole.

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