The Battle Over Your Money

[Harry Bosch]

None of your misunderstanding about money or currency explains your claim about how bank and fed "fraudsters" have screwed the middle class since the US went off the gold standard.

The 2008 bankster bailouts would have been impossible under the Bretton Woods gold standard.

Banks and hedgefund managers kept their jobs and bonuses. The middle class lost much of their wealth

Well, that's not true. Thousands of bankers lost there job. I think around 400 banks went banko. But not positive.

 

[laughing dog]

None of your misunderstanding about money or currency explains your claim about how bank and fed "fraudsters" have screwed the middle class since the US went off the gold standard.

The 2008 bankster bailouts would have been impossible under the Bretton Woods gold standard.

Why would you think that?

 

[jonatha]

But I do know it was designed to facilitate a transaction between 2 parties without a 3rd party clearing process

You are wrong.

The clearing process is 3rd party but it is not centralized, at least by design.

Anyone can join the mining pool and so potentially act as a clearer.

But there is no mechanism to prevent anyone from dedicating enough resources to the mining pool to control more than half of it.

 

[bilby]

I think you are confusing correlation with causation. After WWII, the US was the only industrialized country left untouched by the war. We benefited from the rebuilding of Europe and the growth of Asia. Which had nothing whatsoever to do with "real money" (whatever that is).

There is a HUGE difference between currency and money. Currency is just worthless fiat paper governments can assign for convenience to settle barter transactions between individuals. But money, OTOH is also a store of value in addition to serving as a medium of exchange.

Currency is only valuable if the people have faith that it will buy things. But money never loses value. Because it has utility besides being used for barter.

So neither gold nor bitcoin are money - both are currency by your definition.

A commodity that has few uses, of which we have vast stockpiles of the refined product massively beyond any quantity that we could reasonably use for those purposes, is effectively valueless. What good is 75,000 tonnes of gold (that's the amount currently sitting in storage being used for nothing except as currency)? We might find a use for perhaps a percent or so of it for optical coatings; Maybe we could use a few percent for cheap jewellery (and it should be cheap with such a glut of the stuff).

Gold has value only for the same reason paper money does - because people believe in it. Bitcoin the same only even more so.

If you want a store of value, buy tinned food and soft toilet paper.

 

[Horatio Parker]

A video about land and its place in our unequal political environment.

The classic economists such as Adam Smith were opposed to nonproductive rentier income. Later, in the 19th century, an effort was made to conflate land and capital. And from that time, economics tends to ignore land's special status. Or so they argue...well worth a watch.

 

[SimpleDon]

https://youtu.be/N7m2KGB0rd8

As the days of physical money are nearing an end there is at present a battle emerging between bitcoin and a US based digital currency. According to this guy, the public acceptance of bitcoin will make it impossible for the US government to ever control your money in the future. I agree with all he has to say and I also believe that given a choice, rational people will favor bitcoin.

But what he does not answer (to my satisfaction) is how everyone will be able to trade in bitcoins when taxes will be due in whatever the government requires. For example, what will happen if the government requires income tax to be payable in US digital but makes it prohibitively expensive to convert bitcoin into that currency? The banksters and politicians will then still have everyone by the balls.

The pain, the pain, to quote your Youtuber, "the dollar is a fiat currency. That means it is a fake currency. It isn't backed by anything." This from a man extolling Bitcoin, so-called money generated by computers guessing progressively longer cryptographic keys to unlock new Bitcoins. This is presumably what he thinks is a currency backed by something real.

The dollar is worth something because you can buy things with it. If you want to see what a dollar is worth, walk up and down the aisles of a Walmart and look at the pricing of all of the different items for sale. This is what your dollars are worth. Perhaps more importantly this what money has always been worth, through out history, even before money was invented.

Bitcoin is another in a long line of absurd Libertarian fantasies. Not content with the anarchist fantasy, "we don't need any fucking government (except to do the things that we think are important which no one else can do)!," the Randian cult of the individual fantasy "collective action has never accomplished anything worthwhile because it suppresses individual initiative," the fantasy of the self-regulating free market, "greed is good, non-aggressive greed is all we need" the fantasy of the gold standard, "money that is really worth something," they embraced bitcoin, "deflation isn't a problem, it is a desirable feature of our bitcoin money."

There is an ultimate end to the amount of bitcoins that can be "mined" by the computers by design. If bitcoin was our currency when that point is reached the money supply would be fixed. The only possible result is that deflation will occur, bitcoins will become more valuable, the price will go up. Then the monetary value of all of the real goods valued in bitcoin will go down. This is pretty much the worse thing that can happen to the economy. Until conservatives found a new way to put the economy into a depression, the deregulation delusion that caused the Great Financial Crisis and Recession of 2007, either deflation caused the depressions or was what was responsible for the slow recovery from the financial sector misadventures caused depressions.

Bitcoin is not a currency so much as it is just another derivative for speculators. Under the cult of deregulation, we no longer constrain the means to Wall Street's worse ideas, so we get more of them, such as derivatives like tranced mortgage backed securities that are suppose to reduce the risks of buying subprime mortgages but that actually introduce added risk to buying conventional mortgages.

You can make up a derivative about anything where the outcome is one of two possibilities or greater and in doubt. It is no different than betting on a horse race but with the added sheen of being an "investment" along with a capital gains tax break and usually a huge amount of leverage, loans hidden in the makeup of the derivative to boost the pay off amount of the derivative at the cost of limiting the number of people who get the full amount.

The person who made this video did so with a misunderstanding of what money is and the nature of exchanges in the economy that we have. These are serious flaws in their education to make such a video, but they aren't uncommon, unfortunately. These are the people who tell us that our national debt is going to bankrupt the country or that it is a debt that we are leaving to our grandchildren and it will bankrupt them.

So why do you favor bitcoin over digital dollars, what we effectively have now?

 

[Canard DuJour]

Every single fiat currency we've ever had comes to an end. Every one.

Er, no.

Every extant currency is a fiat currency. Every commodity currency we've ever had has come to an end. It remains to be seen whether all the extant fiat currencies - i.e. all the extant currencies - will come to an end. Even if they do, all indications are that they'll be succeeded by other fiat currencies. It's like saying every vertebrate species has come to an end.

Then there's the usual misattribution of a quote to Henry Ford - actually a paraphrase by one Charles Binderup of a passage in which Ford criticised Wall St financiers.

He went on to regurgitate the usual litany (already debunked by others) before I lost interest. I'm guessing he eventually offers to relieve people of their "worthless, fake dollars" for bitcoin ..and perhaps that his dad offered a similar favour with gold.

 

[Derec]

Gold has value only for the same reason paper money does - because people believe in it. Bitcoin the same only even more so.

Gold has several properties that make it a good store of value. It is rather rare, has low reactivity (does not corrode), and it is 70% more dense than lead, meaning that a given mass of gold will take up very little space.


I am not arguing for the gold standard. I am just saying that there are intrinsic reasons why gold and other precious metals were money for most of human history. Before the advent of banking, where you could carry a written certificate that could be redeemed in a far-away city, gold was the only practical way to transport significant amounts of wealth long distances.

If you want a store of value, buy tinned food and soft toilet paper.

These things may have intrinsic value, and are more immediately useful, especially in a crisis, but they are poor stores of value.
Tinned food has a long shelf life but it will spoil within a decade. If you stocked up on tinned food after 9/11 in anticipation of another calamity, your canned food portfolio would be worthless today. Toiled paper is easy to spoil as it will readily react with oxygen (i.e. burn) and it will become a soggy mess if exposed to water.
And both have very low value to mass and value to volume ratios (the latter is especially low for bulky toilet paper) which means you need to reserve a lot of vault space.

 

[J842P]

https://youtu.be/N7m2KGB0rd8

As the days of physical money are nearing an end there is at present a battle emerging between bitcoin and a US based digital currency. According to this guy, the public acceptance of bitcoin will make it impossible for the US government to ever control your money in the future. I agree with all he has to say and I also believe that given a choice, rational people will favor bitcoin.

But what he does not answer (to my satisfaction) is how everyone will be able to trade in bitcoins when taxes will be due in whatever the government requires. For example, what will happen if the government requires income tax to be payable in US digital but makes it prohibitively expensive to convert bitcoin into that currency? The banksters and politicians will then still have everyone by the balls.

I've met the typical bitcoin bro. They don't strike me as better than your typical banker, except maybe a Napoleon complex thrown in to boot.

 

[Axulus]

It would be idotic to turn back to the gold standard. Among other reasons, astroid mining may not be that far away. We could one day be flooded with gold. That would destroy an economy on the gold standard, and for no good reason.

 

[RVonse]

None of your misunderstanding about money or currency explains your claim about how bank and fed "fraudsters" have screwed the middle class since the US went off the gold standard.

The 2008 bankster bailouts would have been impossible under the Bretton Woods gold standard.

Why would you think that?

With the dollar is tied to a gold standard it can't just be printed at will by the fed. Without the monetary easing tool there would have been no way to pay for the bankster bailouts.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Why would you think that?

With the dollar is tied to a gold standard it can't just be printed at will by the fed. Without the monetary easing tool there would have been no way to pay for the bankster bailouts.

The "bankster bailout" was cheap equity that was injected to increase bank liquidity, incenting them to lend more. It only went to the stronger bankers (for the most part). If they hadn't received the bailout, it just would have taken them longer to lend than what it did.

 

[laughing dog]

Why would you think that?

With the dollar is tied to a gold standard it can't just be printed at will by the fed.

The Fed never printed the dollar at will. The US Treasury is in charge of the official US currency and coin. When the US was on the gold standard, the Federal Reserve manipulated the reserves of the banking system to manage the supply of money. Even under commodity money (usually gold or silver), any economy with a banking system with fractional reserves, most money is created and supplied by the private sector (checkable deposits).

Without the monetary easing tool there would have been no way to pay for the bankster bailouts.

That is incorrect. The Fed could have engaged in the very same actions. It probably would have meant the US would have ended up devaluing the dollar, but the notion that a gold standard by itself, would have stopped any of these actions is simply untrue.

 

[RVonse]

It probably would have meant the US would have ended up devaluing the dollar,

Exactly. And they wouldn't have let that happen because that alone would have greatly benefited the middle class by greatly reducing the trade deficit and bringing back high value jobs. Allowing the dollar to be tied to the free market would have even benefited everyone else (rich people too) as there would be no more asset bubbles and real price discovery would be possible again.

By not allowing the dollar to be tied to anything real the fed can financially engineer the economy. And that sounds real good if you think that men are smarter than the free market. But it sounds real bad if you happen to believe (as I do) that a communist style centrally managed economy does not work as well as the free market.

Furthermore there is this. No one knows who owns the fed (a private entity) and congress is not allowed to even audit what they are doing. Why does a supposed free society allow our global economy to be centrally managed by a secret cabal of people we do not even elect? A financially engineered economy sounds good to most of us until we stop to realize that there is nothing about it that is democratic.

 

[bilby]

It probably would have meant the US would have ended up devaluing the dollar,

Exactly. And they wouldn't have let that happen because that alone would have greatly benefited the middle class by greatly reducing the trade deficit and bringing back high value jobs. Allowing the dollar to be tied to the free market would have even benefited everyone else (rich people too) as there would be no more asset bubbles and real price discovery would be possible again.

By not allowing the dollar to be tied to anything real the fed can financially engineer the economy. And that sounds real good if you think that men are smarter than the free market. But it sounds real bad if you happen to believe (as I do) that a communist style centrally managed economy does not work as well as the free market.

Furthermore there is this. No one knows who owns the fed (a private entity) and congress is not allowed to even audit what they are doing. Why does a supposed free society allow our global economy to be centrally managed by a secret cabal of people we do not even elect? A financially engineered economy sounds good to most of us until we stop to realize that there is nothing about it that is democratic.

The US Federal Reserve is wholly owned by the United States of America. It is managed on behalf of that nation state by a five member board, who are all listed, with photographs, at https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed.htm.

How much more about 'who owns the fed' could you possibly know, or want to know?

Seriously, you should spend some time browsing that website - it answers a lot of your questions, and provides a lot of information of which you are clearly in dire need, if you wish to discuss this topic without sounding either ignorant, crazy, or both.

Money is nothing like you appear to imagine it to be. The US Federal Reserve is also nothing like you appear to imagine it to be.

Without knowledge of the basics, your opinions range from worthless to risable.

 

[RVonse]

It probably would have meant the US would have ended up devaluing the dollar,

Exactly. And they wouldn't have let that happen because that alone would have greatly benefited the middle class by greatly reducing the trade deficit and bringing back high value jobs. Allowing the dollar to be tied to the free market would have even benefited everyone else (rich people too) as there would be no more asset bubbles and real price discovery would be possible again.

By not allowing the dollar to be tied to anything real the fed can financially engineer the economy. And that sounds real good if you think that men are smarter than the free market. But it sounds real bad if you happen to believe (as I do) that a communist style centrally managed economy does not work as well as the free market.

Furthermore there is this. No one knows who owns the fed (a private entity) and congress is not allowed to even audit what they are doing. Why does a supposed free society allow our global economy to be centrally managed by a secret cabal of people we do not even elect? A financially engineered economy sounds good to most of us until we stop to realize that there is nothing about it that is democratic.

The US Federal Reserve is wholly owned by the United States of America. It is managed on behalf of that nation state by a five member board, who are all listed, with photographs, at https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed.htm.

How much more about 'who owns the fed' could you possibly know, or want to know?

Seriously, you should spend some time browsing that website - it answers a lot of your questions, and provides a lot of information of which you are clearly in dire need, if you wish to discuss this topic without sounding either ignorant, crazy, or both.

Money is nothing like you appear to imagine it to be. The US Federal Reserve is also nothing like you appear to imagine it to be.

Without knowledge of the basics, your opinions range from worthless to risable.

Can you site where it says who owns the fed? Who actually gets paid for what they do? What did they make last year? I dont care about the managers, just the directors and owners.

You will quickly find no real answers to those questions.

 

[bilby]

The US Federal Reserve is wholly owned by the United States of America. It is managed on behalf of that nation state by a five member board, who are all listed, with photographs, at https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed.htm.

How much more about 'who owns the fed' could you possibly know, or want to know?

Seriously, you should spend some time browsing that website - it answers a lot of your questions, and provides a lot of information of which you are clearly in dire need, if you wish to discuss this topic without sounding either ignorant, crazy, or both.

Money is nothing like you appear to imagine it to be. The US Federal Reserve is also nothing like you appear to imagine it to be.

Without knowledge of the basics, your opinions range from worthless to risable.

Can you site where it says who owns the fed? Who actually gets paid for what they do? What did they make last year? I dont care about the managers, just the directors and owners.

The link in my post is to the exact page that lists the directors.

The 'owner' is a nation state. Nation states own loads of stuff; Not everything (nor even most things) is privately owned.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

By not allowing the dollar to be tied to anything real the fed can financially engineer the economy. And that sounds real good if you think that men are smarter than the free market. But it sounds real bad if you happen to believe (as I do) that a communist style centrally managed economy does not work as well as the free market.

Check out the 19th Century United States economy and come back when you have learned about a "free market" economy and dollars pegged to gold.

Furthermore there is this. No one knows who owns the fed (a private entity) and congress is not allowed to even audit what they are doing. Why does a supposed free society allow our global economy to be centrally managed by a secret cabal of people we do not even elect? A financially engineered economy sounds good to most of us until we stop to realize that there is nothing about it that is democratic.

Some things are better out of the hands of Joe Schmoe. I know people hate hearing this, but almost all people should have zero say in how the Fed regulates the economy. That includes me. It is complicated and requires experience.

Kind of like we learned with the Presidency and letting an idiot become one.

The Fed gets regulated by the people appointed by the guy elected President by the people and approved by the Senate, also elected by the people.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

According to 16th wave conservolibertarians, gold dabloons are going to make a comeback. But the more recent 17th wave conservolibertarians think bitcoin is where it's at. I think they should just fight each other so they can get their narrative straight.

 

[laughing dog]

It probably would have meant the US would have ended up devaluing the dollar,

Exactly. And they wouldn't have let that happen because that alone would have greatly benefited the middle class by greatly reducing the trade deficit and bringing back high value jobs.

Why on earth would you think that? Abandoning the gold standard in 1972 made the dollar's value fall - which is what a devaluation does.

Allowing the dollar to be tied to the free market would have even benefited everyone else (rich people too) as there would be no more asset bubbles and real price discovery would be possible again.

Where do these fantastical ideas come from? There is nothing preventing asset bubbles with a free floating currency.

By not allowing the dollar to be tied to anything real the fed can financially engineer the economy. And that sounds real good if you think that men are smarter than the free market. But it sounds real bad if you happen to believe (as I do) that a communist style centrally managed economy does not work as well as the free market.

There is nothing magical about the free market (which consists of people). And the idea that a central bank intervening in financial is equivalent to a centrally managed economy is ridiculous.

Furthermore there is this. No one knows who owns the fed (a private entity) and congress is not allowed to even audit what they are doing. Why does a supposed free society allow our global economy to be centrally managed by a secret cabal of people we do not even elect? A financially engineered economy sounds good to most of us until we stop to realize that there is nothing about it that is democratic.

The Fed is routinely audited. The Fed is an agency of the US government, so it is not technically owned by anyone. The Fed was created by Congress and Congress can pass laws to alter how the Fed operates. There is no secret cabal within the Fed. People are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

There has been a debate over whether our central bank should be directly controlled by elected officials or not. This has been going on for decades. The argument against direct control is simple - would you trust Congress to keep the financial system relatively stable and well-working?