That reducing the wealth of people in an area makes them more subservient and dependent on the wealthy? In this case, the state... Sanctions ironically simply cement the power of the powerful.
You make people more independent by making them wealthy.
Thank you, very interesting answer....I guess I'm going to need to work more to understand the 'backing' of money. I guess I, as I guess many of John Q. Public, just think of money as intrinsically 'worth' something, not that something backs it for value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It lets you get things you really want. It has no other real purpose. Paper money is often backed by the promise of some other commodity because it's literally just paper. Otherwise it's monopoly money. People must have confidence that they'll be able to exchange it for something of real value.
But, one thing...if all that cash came back to the US, could the govt. just not take it all out of circulation...store/destroy it....and keep the value closer to 'normal' to prevent inflation? They could, but they'd have to drastically reduce spending and increase taxation. Run a huge surplus basically.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the US government is trillions in debt because they spend more money than they earn in tax. This debt actually pushes more money into the economy because cash is created when a loan is taken out. The government are in the process of increasing inflation right now, not decreasing it.
You know that different antenna shapes broadcast to different areas? The standard monopole/whip shaped antenna on most access points produces a sort of flat, pancake shaped signal. Directly above it is probably a relatively slow signal area.
Also, the signals bounce off of metal sheets just like a mirror.
The issue with steampowered turbines is that the steam that comes out of the turbine is not very hot (under 45C). That makes it very hard to use the heat/energy that is bound in the steam. Clearly if you're going to make use of the "waste" exhaust heat, the output heat exchange would have to be redesigned. However it could improve the overall efficiency of the system from low forties to high eighties. i.e. 42% to 88%.
What are you going to do with _additional_ heat during +40C heatwave? You know, that's when nuclear plants have problems with insufficient cooling. Power adsorption chillers and pump cold water to customers.
Besides, you can't effectively transmit hot water for more than several kilometers. So this severely limits possibilities. 1: Denmark has 21,000 km of district heating pipes. 2: Who cares, you're pumping it into the river at the moment.
Because that worked so well when mortgage lenders chose their preferred borrowers. Mortgage lenders create money from nothing. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by handing out money like it's sweets.
It's already being done for NOX, SO2, CO2 and other pollutants rather successfully. All the politicians have to to is sample the environment regularly and set maximum acceptable limits.
It's not instead of. It's in addition to. "Pave Arizona with solar cells" vs "Build new nuclear plants" is a false dichotomy. All of these things are better than oil, especially given the foreign dependencies that entails. The best option then is for government to stop trying to "pick winners" and subsidise them to success. That's a socialist command and control way of thinking and leads to decades of heading in the wrong direction.
Simply allow the power generators to choose their preferred technologies. The most economically viable solutions will be popular, the unviable ones will fade away. If nuclear is viable it'll get rolled out. if not, it won't.
There are many reactors which have problems operating right now because of local/regional water supply issues. Either water levels are too low or temperatures are too high... And it will only get worse in many states. So stop dumping the heat into the river/ocean. Sell it to people.
Gold has almost no real value. You can do very little with it other than make jewelry. Yet, like fiat currency, people have become collectively convinced that it is valuable. Not to put too fine a point on it. There's 5,000 years of history which disagrees with you. It has value literally because people trust it to have value. That IS the nature of money.
Real value is power--the ability to control other people (aka labor) I get paid money for my time... Money gives someone else the ability to make use of my time and skills.
Inflation does not tax the poor: They have no cash savings. Inflation (by definition) increases the relative value of assets over cash. Those who have cash or who's pay levels don't keep up with inflation find themselves sliding lower in the economic ladder. Those with assets benefit. Those with the most assets benefit the most.
Basically it makes the richest richer and the poorest poorer. It stretches the economy.
Inflation forces everyone else to invest in something If you define "desperately getting out of cash" as investing... It strongly encourages frivolous investment. Buy anything as long as it's not cash.
I'm not disagreeing about the system. It's a ponzi scheme of biblical proportions, but the documentary makes out that it was all managed by a cadre of conspirators over several centuries. I just don't see it. Simple greed, looking over the water at the Bank of England seems more plausible.
I would assume that the only way this money supply could change would be if the government either created money and put it into circulation or destroyed money and took it out of circulation. No, because it's the private banks (citibank, bank of america, lone star bank etc etc) are the ones creating the money, NOT the government or the federal reserve.
Until 15th August 1971, the US dollar was backed by gold. The US was fighting the Vietnam war and spent all the gold paying for the war. Nixon broke the link between the dollar and gold because they couldn't pay the bills in gold any more, they didn't have any.
The dollar was then simply being printed, unbacked by anything. This increases the supply of dollars and the value falls massively. Huge inflation.
1972-3 Nixon or someone went to the Saudis and "persuaded" them somehow to remain only US dollars in return for oil. No idea what they promised, but it was big. From that point, the US dollar is pretty much backed by OPEC oil. It was denominated in dollars before, but the dollar had been backed by gold, so basically the oil price was based on gold. Not so after 1971.
So. All oil all over the world has to be bought in US dollars... The demand for US dollars (not gold) rockets, all the central banks across the world have to keep reserves on hand so the countries can buy oil. Billions of them. Trillions in total.
Do you see what this does? It does 2 things.
1: America gets paid first for any oil which other countries want to buy. They have to get the requisite number of dollars. And they get paid simply for running a printing press.
2: It allows the USA to print and spend as many dollars as they want to. The demand from outside the country means that inflation can't take off. The entire world is subsidising the US economy.
Now... 35 years later, there are trillions of US dollars out there sitting in central banks waiting to be spent on mostly oil. If oil were to be available in Euros, the dollars would be useless. They would come back to the USA.
Ask yourself what a million dollars would be worth if everyone had a million. ok, imagine what a trillion dollars or so would do coming back into the country. The value of the dollar would fall and as the value of the currency falls, the price of everything else increases.
Not quite. You have to add to what you have above.
The Fractional Reserve Banking system.
that is, the banks take deposits and are then allowed to loan out 90% (97% in the UK)of the value of those deposits and charge interest on them. This has the effect of inflating the money supply because all the money loaned out, ends up in another bank as a deposit, which can then be loaned out again. This is where 95% of the money comes from.
Anyway, the interest rates define how many loans get made by manipulating the supply and demand for loans.
The total money supply is that provided by the fed to the government plus what all the banks loan out to us. The Fed collects the figures from the member banks but stopped publishing them last year. It was the M3 money supply figure.
The entire disadvantage you just listed as stemming from a gold standard is: "Things requiring gold would be unjustifiably expensive." The single biggest argument against a gold standard is this:
Our Kings, leaders, politicians have already proven they can't stick to it.
They simply can't resist debasing the currency. The N thousand year history of gold and silver standards is one of debasement. Basically. The gold standard, isn't. They have to have that extra pet project, the extra promise to voters, or the war. And people won't pay the tax so they slip the tax in under the guise of inflation.
It's more obvious what they're doing, but it happens nonetheless.
In order for currency not to be continually debased or devalued it has to be removed from bank and political control... And I'd like to see you (or anyone) try that. Even if you were successful, the politicians and the bankers would always be looking at ways of getting their mitts on the system so that they can print to their hearts desire.
I'm coming to the conclusion that the best option would be to use a (non debt based) system which has big red "inflate" and "deflate" buttons attached to a press and a shredder which allows the politicians to manipulate the currency.
is conclusions about exponential growth being unsustainable and citing a need to control natural resources and population growth sounded like socialist FUD to me. Well. Exponential growth isn't sustainable in the real world, there are limits to potable water, limits to oil, limits to land area etc and debt is an exponential function, it requires exponential growth to service it. Which is why the economy collapses every so often.
Having said that, the end of the video was rather "socialist paradise". What I find interesting and ironic is that while the left and right wings are coming to similar conclusions about the existing monetary system and basically want similar characteristics from anything which replaces it. The more left leaning people still want the government to manage the replacement while the right leaning people prefer the market to decide on whatever replaces it.
Perhaps left/right is wrong, liberal/authoritarian might be better.
I would like to hear the opinion of an actual economist give their opinion on our money system to get an alternate point of view before making any conclusions of my own http://www.mises.org/money.asp
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Right because Linux hasn't been 64bit and running on SMP systems for years...
... Well, you'll have to wait the traditional 3 year Microsoft lag behind the state of the art.
Oh wait. You meant Windows. Sorry, I do apologize
Don't they all use atomic clocks?
Well if they check the timing on their equipment world wide, can't they tell the direction it came from?
XP sucks. It simply sucks less than Vista.
They obviously thought they'd give it a few extra months of effort to perfect the new features introduced by the service pack.
http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/09/28/vista-rants/
That reducing the wealth of people in an area makes them more subservient and dependent on the wealthy? In this case, the state... Sanctions ironically simply cement the power of the powerful.
You make people more independent by making them wealthy.
Lawyers?
Lawyers are deciding what's obvious and what's not in a technical discipline?
I don't know if you've noticed, but the US government is trillions in debt because they spend more money than they earn in tax. This debt actually pushes more money into the economy because cash is created when a loan is taken out. The government are in the process of increasing inflation right now, not decreasing it.
You know that different antenna shapes broadcast to different areas? The standard monopole/whip shaped antenna on most access points produces a sort of flat, pancake shaped signal. Directly above it is probably a relatively slow signal area.
Also, the signals bounce off of metal sheets just like a mirror.
2: Who cares, you're pumping it into the river at the moment.
HTH.
It's already being done for NOX, SO2, CO2 and other pollutants rather successfully. All the politicians have to to is sample the environment regularly and set maximum acceptable limits.
Simply allow the power generators to choose their preferred technologies. The most economically viable solutions will be popular, the unviable ones will fade away. If nuclear is viable it'll get rolled out. if not, it won't.
What will the poor dears do? They have cigars to buy! Mercedes to pay for! Wars to organise.
Look up the Austrian or Chicago Schools of economics. Less hand waving, more hard monetarism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_(economics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School
Oh and I don't believe there's a conspiracy. It's just greed. The effects are the same anyway.
Basically it makes the richest richer and the poorest poorer. It stretches the economy. Inflation forces everyone else to invest in something If you define "desperately getting out of cash" as investing... It strongly encourages frivolous investment. Buy anything as long as it's not cash.
I'm not disagreeing about the system. It's a ponzi scheme of biblical proportions, but the documentary makes out that it was all managed by a cadre of conspirators over several centuries. I just don't see it. Simple greed, looking over the water at the Bank of England seems more plausible.
They did it several times in the 20s and 30s because the fractional reserve system meant they were printing dollars anyway.
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_05/lundeen123105.html
Still happened. Admittedly inflation since 1971 has gone mad, but then, you just keep out of cash.
Until 15th August 1971, the US dollar was backed by gold. The US was fighting the Vietnam war and spent all the gold paying for the war. Nixon broke the link between the dollar and gold because they couldn't pay the bills in gold any more, they didn't have any.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock
The dollar was then simply being printed, unbacked by anything. This increases the supply of dollars and the value falls massively. Huge inflation.
1972-3 Nixon or someone went to the Saudis and "persuaded" them somehow to remain only US dollars in return for oil. No idea what they promised, but it was big. From that point, the US dollar is pretty much backed by OPEC oil. It was denominated in dollars before, but the dollar had been backed by gold, so basically the oil price was based on gold. Not so after 1971.
So. All oil all over the world has to be bought in US dollars... The demand for US dollars (not gold) rockets, all the central banks across the world have to keep reserves on hand so the countries can buy oil. Billions of them. Trillions in total.
Do you see what this does? It does 2 things.
1: America gets paid first for any oil which other countries want to buy. They have to get the requisite number of dollars. And they get paid simply for running a printing press.
2: It allows the USA to print and spend as many dollars as they want to. The demand from outside the country means that inflation can't take off. The entire world is subsidising the US economy.
Now... 35 years later, there are trillions of US dollars out there sitting in central banks waiting to be spent on mostly oil. If oil were to be available in Euros, the dollars would be useless. They would come back to the USA.
Ask yourself what a million dollars would be worth if everyone had a million. ok, imagine what a trillion dollars or so would do coming back into the country. The value of the dollar would fall and as the value of the currency falls, the price of everything else increases.
As to the size of the effect... who knows.
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/nov03/middleEast.asp
Not quite. You have to add to what you have above.
The Fractional Reserve Banking system.
that is, the banks take deposits and are then allowed to loan out 90% (97% in the UK)of the value of those deposits and charge interest on them. This has the effect of inflating the money supply because all the money loaned out, ends up in another bank as a deposit, which can then be loaned out again. This is where 95% of the money comes from.
Anyway, the interest rates define how many loans get made by manipulating the supply and demand for loans.
The total money supply is that provided by the fed to the government plus what all the banks loan out to us. The Fed collects the figures from the member banks but stopped publishing them last year. It was the M3 money supply figure.
Our Kings, leaders, politicians have already proven they can't stick to it.
They simply can't resist debasing the currency. The N thousand year history of gold and silver standards is one of debasement. Basically. The gold standard, isn't. They have to have that extra pet project, the extra promise to voters, or the war. And people won't pay the tax so they slip the tax in under the guise of inflation.
It's more obvious what they're doing, but it happens nonetheless.
In order for currency not to be continually debased or devalued it has to be removed from bank and political control... And I'd like to see you (or anyone) try that. Even if you were successful, the politicians and the bankers would always be looking at ways of getting their mitts on the system so that they can print to their hearts desire.
I'm coming to the conclusion that the best option would be to use a (non debt based) system which has big red "inflate" and "deflate" buttons attached to a press and a shredder which allows the politicians to manipulate the currency.
Having said that, the end of the video was rather "socialist paradise". What I find interesting and ironic is that while the left and right wings are coming to similar conclusions about the existing monetary system and basically want similar characteristics from anything which replaces it. The more left leaning people still want the government to manage the replacement while the right leaning people prefer the market to decide on whatever replaces it.
Perhaps left/right is wrong, liberal/authoritarian might be better. I would like to hear the opinion of an actual economist give their opinion on our money system to get an alternate point of view before making any conclusions of my own http://www.mises.org/money.asp