what really brought Greece down is corruption and uncontrolled spending and also corruption and a bit of corruption.
What really brought Greece down was the Euro. Currency standards have always been horrible in bad times.
Currency standards allow foreign and non-foreign entities to control and strangle your economy, which is a really horrible thing.
Yes, Greece is corrupt. But if they hadn't been caught in the Euro, that corruption would have had a far lower impact on the economy as a whole. Instead of a full out depression, their currency would have inflated a bit, and non-basic stuff imported stuff would have gotten more expensive, while most everyone continued on working as normal.
The value of taxes diminishes with the waste and poor performance of government.
Depends. Taxes have nothing to do with government spending if you live in a modern sovereign fiat country. Taxing by a fiat sovereign has two purposes. Keeping inflation down, and discourage negative externalities. One of the most negative ones being huge wealth imbalances.
This of course only applies to the sovereign and not someone else who has permission to tax in the sovereign's territory. And it of course also don't apply to countries who lack economic sovereignty.
HFT isn't liquidity though. You simply can't provide liquidity by buying and selling quickly. Market liquidity only comes from those who buy quickly and sell less quickly.
From the linked page, logged in users peak at ~5-6 million per day, while the most played games lists seems to indicate that the concurrent actually playing users probably peaks at around 1 million
Sure. We should just follow one of the many demonstrably successful socialist models.
You used to after WW2. But the rich didn't like it, and hence leveraged the mishandling of the energy supply crisis in the 70s to change the rules.
Of course, you could argue that you only accidentally implemented socialist policies. But that was basically what a good minimum wage, high margin taxes, anti unemployment policies and large savings among the middle class (due to war bonds being well distributed government debt) lead to.
It was basically income redistribution that resulted in the citizens indirectly owning a lot of the production capacity. Socialism the US way, keeping the private market, but ensuring that everyone had a decent stake in the market.
Parent post is easily the most ignorant thing I have read all week.
Your post is about the most ignorant I have read all week. The parent post was pretty much spot on. And anyone with the slightest bit of historical knowledge knows that.
Fiat money is used because of Gresham's Law. That's the one that says bad money drives out good.
Gresham's Law is bullshit from start to end. It is based on the false premise that currencies should have intrinsic value, when in reality, the exact opposite is true. Any currency with intrinsic value is bad as it not only ties up resources, but also allows external attacks on economies.
As such, smart countries have always moved towards using currencies with as little intrinsic value as possible. Of course, the idiot Gresham didn't get that, and instead came up with his insanely stupid law.
In addition to the points others have made, the big issue is interactivity. If I am confused by an explanation, I can't stop the Khan Academy video and ask it "Wait, what about...?"
You can't do that in the current environment either though. At least not unless you think you are "special" and deserve to waste the time of all the other students that understand things well the first time around.
Questions are bet asked to teachers in private, and that is best accomplished by giving the teacher more time to answer questions instead of holding lessons.
Actually, they are doing something much worse than that. They are participating in huge amounts of unauthorized wealth creation outside of the official market.
I think the official name for that nowadays is treason.
hat is your point, you think that for example somebody buying gold OR aluminum (Goldman) is doing something stupid, you think they are NOT protecting themselves against inflation?
Yes, they are doing something stupid. To protect yourself against inflation, you invest in something productive. The only reason to invest in gold is if you need to be able to run. (and in that case, make sure that you have the gold in your own hands, and not simply papers that indicate that you own gold in some other location)
you _cannot_ "borrow frrom the future" this is the stupidist statement have ever heard, who the fuck has a time machine? One person's borrowing is another person's savings - that is an identity, when the US government goes into debt, the private sector balance sheet improves (it is called deleveraging), if the private sector whiches to reduce its debt the money has to go somewhere, where it goes is US treasuries, which is US gov't debt - finally most of the US debt is not owned by foriegn counties, it is owned by US citizens.
Thanks for the great post. most people have a horribly twisted view of macro economy, because they think being a currency owner works similarly to being a currency user. In reality it is often very much the opposite.
A currency user earn money so that he later can spend it. A currency owner spends money so that he later can tax it back.
The spending of a currency user is limited by the amount of money he has. The spending of a currency owner is limited by the unused productive resources of the economy.
It is perfectly possible for any country with a sovereign floating currency to have full employment at a decent wage. The real question is why most countries don't. And the answer to that question is that bankers and corporations (and their bought politicians) don't want full employment at decent wages, because when people easily can get jobs at a decent wage, they can't be coerced and exploited as easily.
With a sovereign floating fiat currency there is no need to pay the money back. The value of the currency will automatically adjust over time to the demands of the currency owner on the economy.
In fact, there is really no need to borrow at all. The currency owner can simply print money to take the stuff it needs, and then it taxes the economy to keep up demand for the currency it prints, as well as to keep down inflation.
As long as the taking is aimed mainly at unused resources in the economy (Read: Hiring unemployed labor), the effects on the private sector are small, and the positive side effects are great. This generally works well as long as the currency owner doesn't take on foreign debt or collapses the production of a country.
Note that the currency owner always have to spend before taxing as it is the entity that creates the money that it then taxes back. This is how currencies have always worked since the beginning of history. Occasionally some fool ruler tries to bind the currency to something of perceived value (such as gold), but that generally only lasts for a shorter period of time before the economy becomes unstable and the currency owner decides to just go back to some fiat based coin system.
with four wolves and a sheep, to know the outcome of a vote on what's for dinner.
The wolves and sheep analogy is complete bullshit, because there are more sheep than wolves. Reality goes more like this.
You have 1 wolf and 4 sheep and they vote on who to make decisions. The wolf sneakingly convince the sheep that they shouldn't vote on another sheep, because that sheep would then steal some grass from the remaining sheep.
So the wolf wins. And he decides to have a sheep for dinner. When the sheep protests, he says, "Think on the positive side, there will be more grass for the remaining three of you. (until I get hungry again)".
Meanwhile Germany makes stuff that people want to buy.
Here states like Greece, Italy and Spain have been acting all nice and buying stuff so German people can get work. And then the Germans turn around and says, fuck you, we aren't going to buy anything in return. Instead we are going to try to rent seek you until you collapse.
The exact same thing happened in the US, except you can replace Germany with the Top 1%.
You can't blame those who lent and spent, as the production obviously managed to keep up in those years (and if there had been competition for that production, those with stronger surpluses would have had it easier to acquire their shares). And you can't blame those who lent and spent for stopping either. No, the only ones you can blame are those who saved and saved, and yet still aren't spending now when no one else can. They are the ones who violated the implicit contract of economy and broke the money circulation.
The US can always pay its debts because it is economically sovereign. It prints its own currency, its debts are denominated in its own currency and its currency floats against other currencies. Now, can the US politicians actually be trusted to honor the debts. That isn't as clear. And that is why S&P gives JPY an AAA rating while USD doesn't get one. A pure political (not debt) crisis based on fundamentalists in the government.
The Euro-zone, now that is a different matter. There is some real sovereign debt crisis. Those countries signed away their economic sovereignty, and now they are literally paying for it with blood and tears.
I wonder how long off until we see wheelbarrows full of euros and dollars being used to feed woodstoves rather than as currency
If you are expecting hyperinflation in either currency, then you have no clue about macro economics. There is not a single indicator that either currency will hyperinflate.
I can see the Euro zone collapse, and it is a fairly likely scenario. But there won't be an EUR hyperinflation if that happens. Instead the EUR will just get less and less relevant. As for the USD. I am not 100% sure what will happen if debt limit fundamentalists gets their way. But it will definitely not be hyperinflation. Probably more of the opposite, deflation.The growing sovereign debt crises
1: Government builds the infrastructure. Problem: Not profitable enough.
2: Make the government pay private companies to build infrastructure. Problem: Not profitable enough.
3: Steal..err...privatize the infrastructure. Problem: You still have to pay those damn progressive taxes, and what happens when you have to build new infrastructure?
4: Guarantee profits on new infrastructure and not via taxes. Instead just force the citizens to buy it so that it works like a regressive tax.
I am curious abobut where the C growth is coming from. Embedded stuff? Native libraries for the increasing volume other higher level languages?;)
Considering the massively flawed and naive methodology that TIOBE uses, the answer is fairly simply. "C programming" hasn't increased. "Objective C programming" has.
..small example is in LA (New Orleans in particular), with all the huge tax breaks they give to the movie and entertainment industry.
Businesses are just taking advantage of the even playing field to earn more money. Locally there may a decrease in unemployment, but in aggregate there is more likely a small increase as even more money accumulates in the hands of the few.
If you want to decrease aggregate unemployment you either have to either redistribute money away from big savers (taxes that targets big savings such as capital taxes and progressive margin taxes) or print more money (a.k.a. have the federal government increase spending and/or give tax breaks to those that will spend it). It is the macro economic reality of things and nothing can change that.
Implying that bankers are the direct cause of a devaluing dollar shows just how little you know. Bankers love to keep general inflation down as inflation cuts into their ability to profit from loan activity.
A properly run economy (as in one neither run by loan creating bankers nor homeopathic Austrian economists) should focus on maximizing actual real production. If that means inflating the currency 10% per year, so be it. Workers won't mind, because their salaries will tend to rise faster than inflation in a productive economy. The government won't mind, because they want said production. The pension savers won't mind, because they will have their money in government bonds as stocks, both of which are tied to actual production.
The only ones who mind are financial people that won't be able to squeeze an economy that has sufficient currency to function.
Enter your credit card number and get redirected to your bank's site where you have to verify the purchase using your own bank's security solution. This functionality already exists on an international level as I have had it happen while buying something from Japan, while living in Sweden.
Slashdot Mirror
what really brought Greece down is corruption and uncontrolled spending and also corruption and a bit of corruption.
What really brought Greece down was the Euro. Currency standards have always been horrible in bad times.
Currency standards allow foreign and non-foreign entities to control and strangle your economy, which is a really horrible thing.
Yes, Greece is corrupt. But if they hadn't been caught in the Euro, that corruption would have had a far lower impact on the economy as a whole. Instead of a full out depression, their currency would have inflated a bit, and non-basic stuff imported stuff would have gotten more expensive, while most everyone continued on working as normal.
The value of taxes diminishes with the waste and poor performance of government.
Depends. Taxes have nothing to do with government spending if you live in a modern sovereign fiat country. Taxing by a fiat sovereign has two purposes. Keeping inflation down, and discourage negative externalities. One of the most negative ones being huge wealth imbalances.
This of course only applies to the sovereign and not someone else who has permission to tax in the sovereign's territory. And it of course also don't apply to countries who lack economic sovereignty.
HFT isn't liquidity though. You simply can't provide liquidity by buying and selling quickly. Market liquidity only comes from those who buy quickly and sell less quickly.
Very true. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
From the linked page, logged in users peak at ~5-6 million per day, while the most played games lists seems to indicate that the concurrent actually playing users probably peaks at around 1 million
Tax rates are not low. Corporate tax is generally 35%. Subtracting 15% capital gains rate from the remainder of that, the effective rate is 58%.
58? 1-0.65*0.85=0.4475
And that is a really low rate for taxing rent seeking as you want 70-90% taxes on that to prevent money from earning money.
Sure. We should just follow one of the many demonstrably successful socialist models.
You used to after WW2. But the rich didn't like it, and hence leveraged the mishandling of the energy supply crisis in the 70s to change the rules.
Of course, you could argue that you only accidentally implemented socialist policies. But that was basically what a good minimum wage, high margin taxes, anti unemployment policies and large savings among the middle class (due to war bonds being well distributed government debt) lead to.
It was basically income redistribution that resulted in the citizens indirectly owning a lot of the production capacity. Socialism the US way, keeping the private market, but ensuring that everyone had a decent stake in the market.
predictable inflation is good but predictable deflation is bad? Why exactly?
Because lending $1000 today and getting $999 back tomorrow is a universally bad deal regardless of how much deflation the economy has.
Parent post is easily the most ignorant thing I have read all week.
Your post is about the most ignorant I have read all week. The parent post was pretty much spot on. And anyone with the slightest bit of historical knowledge knows that.
Fiat money is used because of Gresham's Law. That's the one that says bad money drives out good.
Gresham's Law is bullshit from start to end. It is based on the false premise that currencies should have intrinsic value, when in reality, the exact opposite is true. Any currency with intrinsic value is bad as it not only ties up resources, but also allows external attacks on economies.
As such, smart countries have always moved towards using currencies with as little intrinsic value as possible. Of course, the idiot Gresham didn't get that, and instead came up with his insanely stupid law.
In addition to the points others have made, the big issue is interactivity. If I am confused by an explanation, I can't stop the Khan Academy video and ask it "Wait, what about...?"
You can't do that in the current environment either though. At least not unless you think you are "special" and deserve to waste the time of all the other students that understand things well the first time around.
Questions are bet asked to teachers in private, and that is best accomplished by giving the teacher more time to answer questions instead of holding lessons.
Actually, they are doing something much worse than that. They are participating in huge amounts of unauthorized wealth creation outside of the official market.
I think the official name for that nowadays is treason.
hat is your point, you think that for example somebody buying gold OR aluminum (Goldman) is doing something stupid, you think they are NOT protecting themselves against inflation?
http://www.joshuakennon.com/stocks-vs-bonds-vs-gold-returns-for-the-past-200-years/
Yes, they are doing something stupid. To protect yourself against inflation, you invest in something productive. The only reason to invest in gold is if you need to be able to run. (and in that case, make sure that you have the gold in your own hands, and not simply papers that indicate that you own gold in some other location)
Look give Romney his tax cut, he in turn will hire extra workers (Miguel the gardener, Juanita the cleaner).
No he won't.
Romney already has enough money that if he actually wanted to hir Miguel and Juanita, he would already have done so.
?
Robber baron is just another way of calling those at the the top of the food chain in a right-libertarian society.
you _cannot_ "borrow frrom the future" this is the stupidist statement have ever heard, who the fuck has a time machine? One person's borrowing is another person's savings - that is an identity, when the US government goes into debt, the private sector balance sheet improves (it is called deleveraging), if the private sector whiches to reduce its debt the money has to go somewhere, where it goes is US treasuries, which is US gov't debt - finally most of the US debt is not owned by foriegn counties, it is owned by US citizens.
Thanks for the great post. most people have a horribly twisted view of macro economy, because they think being a currency owner works similarly to being a currency user. In reality it is often very much the opposite.
A currency user earn money so that he later can spend it. A currency owner spends money so that he later can tax it back.
The spending of a currency user is limited by the amount of money he has. The spending of a currency owner is limited by the unused productive resources of the economy.
It is perfectly possible for any country with a sovereign floating currency to have full employment at a decent wage. The real question is why most countries don't. And the answer to that question is that bankers and corporations (and their bought politicians) don't want full employment at decent wages, because when people easily can get jobs at a decent wage, they can't be coerced and exploited as easily.
With a sovereign floating fiat currency there is no need to pay the money back. The value of the currency will automatically adjust over time to the demands of the currency owner on the economy.
In fact, there is really no need to borrow at all. The currency owner can simply print money to take the stuff it needs, and then it taxes the economy to keep up demand for the currency it prints, as well as to keep down inflation.
As long as the taking is aimed mainly at unused resources in the economy (Read: Hiring unemployed labor), the effects on the private sector are small, and the positive side effects are great. This generally works well as long as the currency owner doesn't take on foreign debt or collapses the production of a country.
Note that the currency owner always have to spend before taxing as it is the entity that creates the money that it then taxes back. This is how currencies have always worked since the beginning of history. Occasionally some fool ruler tries to bind the currency to something of perceived value (such as gold), but that generally only lasts for a shorter period of time before the economy becomes unstable and the currency owner decides to just go back to some fiat based coin system.
Ah yes, the US court system where truth doesn't matter.
Of course, that is pretty much like the rest of the US. The whole country is one big cesspool of liars.
with four wolves and a sheep, to know the outcome of a vote on what's for dinner.
The wolves and sheep analogy is complete bullshit, because there are more sheep than wolves. Reality goes more like this.
You have 1 wolf and 4 sheep and they vote on who to make decisions. The wolf sneakingly convince the sheep that they shouldn't vote on another sheep, because that sheep would then steal some grass from the remaining sheep.
So the wolf wins. And he decides to have a sheep for dinner. When the sheep protests, he says, "Think on the positive side, there will be more grass for the remaining three of you. (until I get hungry again)".
Meanwhile Germany makes stuff that people want to buy.
Here states like Greece, Italy and Spain have been acting all nice and buying stuff so German people can get work. And then the Germans turn around and says, fuck you, we aren't going to buy anything in return. Instead we are going to try to rent seek you until you collapse.
The exact same thing happened in the US, except you can replace Germany with the Top 1%.
You can't blame those who lent and spent, as the production obviously managed to keep up in those years (and if there had been competition for that production, those with stronger surpluses would have had it easier to acquire their shares). And you can't blame those who lent and spent for stopping either. No, the only ones you can blame are those who saved and saved, and yet still aren't spending now when no one else can. They are the ones who violated the implicit contract of economy and broke the money circulation.
The growing sovereign debt crises
The US can always pay its debts because it is economically sovereign. It prints its own currency, its debts are denominated in its own currency and its currency floats against other currencies. Now, can the US politicians actually be trusted to honor the debts. That isn't as clear. And that is why S&P gives JPY an AAA rating while USD doesn't get one. A pure political (not debt) crisis based on fundamentalists in the government.
The Euro-zone, now that is a different matter. There is some real sovereign debt crisis. Those countries signed away their economic sovereignty, and now they are literally paying for it with blood and tears.
I wonder how long off until we see wheelbarrows full of euros and dollars being used to feed woodstoves rather than as currency
If you are expecting hyperinflation in either currency, then you have no clue about macro economics. There is not a single indicator that either currency will hyperinflate.
I can see the Euro zone collapse, and it is a fairly likely scenario. But there won't be an EUR hyperinflation if that happens. Instead the EUR will just get less and less relevant. As for the USD. I am not 100% sure what will happen if debt limit fundamentalists gets their way. But it will definitely not be hyperinflation. Probably more of the opposite, deflation.The growing sovereign debt crises
I guess it was just a matter of time.
1: Government builds the infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.
2: Make the government pay private companies to build infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.
3: Steal..err...privatize the infrastructure.
Problem: You still have to pay those damn progressive taxes, and what happens when you have to build new infrastructure?
4: Guarantee profits on new infrastructure and not via taxes. Instead just force the citizens to buy it so that it works like a regressive tax.
I am curious abobut where the C growth is coming from. Embedded stuff? Native libraries for the increasing volume other higher level languages? ;)
Considering the massively flawed and naive methodology that TIOBE uses, the answer is fairly simply. "C programming" hasn't increased. "Objective C programming" has.
This doesn't apply to Java's and C#'s generics, since they can't take advantage of the type information in the same way.
C# generics allows for full performance optimization as the CLR virtual machine code supports generic types.
How do you figure?
Because the overall employment rate in the current economic state is pretty much exclusively dependent on demand, not supply.
http://monetaryrealism.com/businesses-hire-when-they-are-swamped-with-demand/
..small example is in LA (New Orleans in particular), with all the huge tax breaks they give to the movie and entertainment industry.
Businesses are just taking advantage of the even playing field to earn more money. Locally there may a decrease in unemployment, but in aggregate there is more likely a small increase as even more money accumulates in the hands of the few.
If you want to decrease aggregate unemployment you either have to either redistribute money away from big savers (taxes that targets big savings such as capital taxes and progressive margin taxes) or print more money (a.k.a. have the federal government increase spending and/or give tax breaks to those that will spend it). It is the macro economic reality of things and nothing can change that.
Implying that bankers are the direct cause of a devaluing dollar shows just how little you know. Bankers love to keep general inflation down as inflation cuts into their ability to profit from loan activity.
A properly run economy (as in one neither run by loan creating bankers nor homeopathic Austrian economists) should focus on maximizing actual real production. If that means inflating the currency 10% per year, so be it. Workers won't mind, because their salaries will tend to rise faster than inflation in a productive economy. The government won't mind, because they want said production. The pension savers won't mind, because they will have their money in government bonds as stocks, both of which are tied to actual production.
The only ones who mind are financial people that won't be able to squeeze an economy that has sufficient currency to function.
Want to buy something on line?
Enter your credit card number and get redirected to your bank's site where you have to verify the purchase using your own bank's security solution. This functionality already exists on an international level as I have had it happen while buying something from Japan, while living in Sweden.