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Veniversum 4 years ago.
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It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
Yes, good for me for not keeping money in banks when the FDIC has $35 billion to backstop between $6 and $10 trillion in deposits depending on whose numbers one is using. A fart from JP Morgan would send $35 billion in to the aether. I keep cash on hand for operational expenses; everything else is in precious metals, so any debasement of the paper currency is ancillary.
I also think you’re lying about getting 3% interest in a chequeing account when the Federal Funds rate is 0,25%.
You’d be surprised what some banks offer if you actually bothered to look around, especially your local credit unions.
You do not see many points, so I seriously doubt that my explaining matters further would be of any benefit to either party.
In passing, my dual citizenship is not in an Anglophone country, and it will be faring better than the United States I would bet.
Well considering you mentioned the UK I figured that’s where you had dual citizenship, but regardless…you explaining matters further won’t be of any benefit because all you are doing is trying to argue that an inflation hedge is the best investment you can make lol. Good luck with that, but I prefer to actually get a return on my investments.
Cipher Writes: One would think that technological advance would result in a decrease in the work week. How then did we get from 20 hours at most to the outrageous hours worked by the middle class?
Actually, we work less now, than we did 150 years ago. In the mid 1800’s, it was a 60-70 hr week in manufacturing. It’s been reasonably stable the past couple decades. http://ourworldindata.org/data/economic-development-work-standard-of-living/working-hours/ This is largely due to technology, which initially at least, reduced the workweek significantly. Before the 1800’s, sunrise to sunset, was typical.
Technological advance has made us much more PRODUCTIVE on a per hour basis — by multiples. In the US, though, in recent decades, this hasn’t been any great benefit to workers — stagnant wages even though productivity typically rose ~2% per year. After the last recession, the employee: population ratio took a nosedive dropping 4% or so, and hasn’t really worked its way back up. http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
Some of the extra productivity has gone to corporate profits — a strong argument for spending salary/wages investing in companies. Some has gone to government and transfer payments.
Don’t forget how unions helped create the middle class as well, frank.
Of course now I do have some issues with the fact that the only unions with any power now are for government workers.
Well, in many cases, unions have made American industries less competitive — take our auto industry — due to high wages.
I also disagree with the contracts. They typically make it impossible to can employees. Try to fire a public school teacher for incompetence, absenteeism, etc — for anything other than being a druggie or having sex with the students, it’s just about impossible. Of course, public school teachers are all protected by union rules.
In the private sector, it’s almost as bad, with grievances and processes whereby you pay someone more simply due to ‘seniority’ rather than competence or productivity. That is one f’d up system.
I don’t agree with the way labor disputes were handled in the Gilded Age with Pinkertons, and unions did help improve safety in the early days.
I’m not in love with Management of many companies, either — especially when they are paid large compensation packages which aren’t based on growth or profits.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
And Greeks never reverted to using gold as a currency when this was going on either. If a guy walked into a sandwich shop with a bar of gold and tried to pay by shaving a few flakes off he’d get laughed at.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
And Greeks never reverted to using gold as a currency when this was going on either. If a guy walked into a sandwich shop with a bar of gold and tried to pay by shaving a few flakes off he’d get laughed at.
I highly disagree. Given the fact that they were extremely limited on how much money they could actually withdraw, to prevent a run on the banks, I think any Greek would have LOVED to take that Bar of gold one country over and trade it for some other currency. You’re not the only one who can speculate theoreticals. I’m pretty sure they were p~~~ed off that they couldn’t get all of their money out of the bank, and that they had to stand in such long lines for long hours for very little money; because the law wouldn’t allow them access to their own money.. their own possessions.
Demand from Greek customers for Sovereign gold coins was double the five-month average in June, the U.K. Royal Mint said in an e-mailed statement.
A gold sovereign is about the size of a nickel and contains about $275 worth of gold. 1/10oz gold coins are smaller than a dime and can easily be lost, so I would wager people are using paper, silver, or bartering for smaller transactions.
In Greece, withdrawals are limited to €60 / day either via ATM or in person thanks to the situation with the banks.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
And Greeks never reverted to using gold as a currency when this was going on either. If a guy walked into a sandwich shop with a bar of gold and tried to pay by shaving a few flakes off he’d get laughed at.
I highly disagree. Given the fact that they were extremely limited on how much money they could actually withdraw, to prevent a run on the banks, I think any Greek would have LOVED to take that Bar of gold one country over and trade it for some other currency. You’re not the only one who can speculate theoreticals. I’m pretty sure they were p~~~ed off that they couldn’t get all of their money out of the bank, and that they had to stand in such long lines for long hours for very little money; because the law wouldn’t allow them access to their own money.. their own possessions.
Survivor writes: Nevertheless, unions helped create the middle class.
I would probably agree with that to a limited extent. They shifted money from profits to labor. But I’d say industrialization and the assembly line created the middle class. Productivity shot up tremendously, hours worked went down, and people could afford more goods since productivity spiked.
Later (the last 30 or 40 years), manufacturing declined, and the economy shifted more towards services. Automation of simple assembly line jobs, and foreign competition, were some of the many factors in stagnant wages. With high union wages in many sectors, it made entire industries less competitive (e.g. US made steel), further accelerating the decline in the manufacturing sector.
Younger workers don’t like how poorly funded union pension plans are, and the high dues. And that younger workers are fired first — seniority vs merit. Right-to-work states have higher economic growth rates and lower unemployment rates. Obviously, there are a lot of factors, but an interesting discussion.
As for Greece, they currently use Euros; so no need to ‘convert’ to anything; the Euro is stable (but who knows what the EU fiat currency will be worth next year)? The run on the banks was because of doubt about getting electronic deposits OUT in Euros. If they defaulted, the deposits might be lost or only given back in some new currency worth less than the Euros in the account were worth, since the banks would not have enough Euros to return money to depositors, due to fractional reserve banking practices. It’s a bit different situation than most in that the Greek government doesn’t issue its own fiat currency, but relies upon the ECB.
No worries, the Greek Government would just make Euros illegal to possess, and offer a limited-time-only (say, 1 week) period in which you could convert. And of course, the ‘neo-drachmas’ would depreciate against the Euro immediately, anihilatting personal savings. Owning gold would most likely also be made illegal. No worries, somebody’s gotta pay that debt, why not private citizens do their duty, haha! All of this has happened before with other currencies.
After all, who’s gonna trust a fiat currency from a government with a demonstrated track record of not being able to pay its bills?
The US may be the new Greece in 10 or 20 years, or maybe fewer.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
Correct. It’s a dangerous game of roulette with fractional reserve banking and a high national debt as a percentage of GDP. Eventually, investors lose confidence in your government’s ability to pay back its debt and people start calling it in (selling treasury bonds). You can sell more bonds, but have to offer ever-higher interest rates to find any suckers, err, ‘investors’. You can print money, but that causes hyperinflation.
This meshes right back in with fiat currency. I believe currency should be based on real, physical assets. Sure, it can still be manipulated, but it’s harder to do so.
If central governments didn’t enable banks to lend more than their deposits, sure, you might have lower short-term growth rates, but ultimately a more stable system. The answer is to pay down national debt, and slowly reduce the amount of money the Fed loans to banks
I couldn’t possibly agree more, Frank. I hope for posterity that the people (not the ruling class), come to a solution.. because the only the ruling class knows how to do is war. “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything has to look like a nail.”
I highly disagree. Given the fact that they were extremely limited on how much money they could actually withdraw, to prevent a run on the banks, I think any Greek would have LOVED to take that Bar of gold one country over and trade it for some other currency. You’re not the only one who can speculate theoreticals. I’m pretty sure they were p~~~ed off that they couldn’t get all of their money out of the bank, and that they had to stand in such long lines for long hours for very little money; because the law wouldn’t allow them access to their own money.. their own possessions.
I’m pretty sure they were mad too…but you just said they’d go convert their gold into currency if they could…that just proves what I’ve been saying lol. Greeks have gold…people weren’t cutting up necklaces and flaking pieces off rings to get by, were they? NOPE! In the Greek crisis I’d rather have just had a few thousand worth of euros laying around than a few thousand worth of gold…at least I wouldn’t have had to travel out of the country just to convert it into something useful.
Finally, when things get nasty, one flees with gold, not share certificates, and definitely not statements from an electronic brokerage.
When things get *that* nasty, your gold won’t be worth s~~~. At least I’ll be able to wipe my ass with $100 bills.
Back to the point on the Original Affluent Society… I’m familiar with this, having studied it in my college cultural anthropology classes. While there is not a lot of material by way of critique available to refer to (the Wikipedia page on this is woefully one-sided, for example) one must ask a few questions before swallowing this idea whole and using it as the basis for some idealized post-collapse society. I’ll offer a few here:
1) What happened to the OAS? In other words, how did humankind go from lounging around in safety, security and abundance to no longer doing so? Was it population pressure? The need to prepare for and survive the threats of warfare or predation or natural disaster? Was it that people wanted more from life than simple affluence?
2) How many affluent hunter-gatherers can the Earth sustain and who has to die first for the remainder to enjoy this degree of affluence?
3) Is it enough, in the grand scheme of things, to just lounge around and let a grape fall into your mouth now and then, metaphorically speaking, or are we biologically determined for greater things? In other words, if you “domesticated” humans to the point where we could go back to the OAS and then NOT LEAVE IT again due to whatever causes propelled us from that cradle in the first place, would we still be human?
I wrote a paper on the concept of sustainability once that I called “Sustainability = Doom”. In it, I proposed that human nature drives us to be never satisfied with what we have and to suggest that we could and should reach a point of infinite sustainability would be to crush out of existence that which makes us human.
I proposed three possible trajectories for humanity’s future:
1) The Rocket Ride – the one we’re on now where we consume and excrete as rapidly as possible for no particular purpose like a kid throwing a party while his parents are away on vacation. We can all see where that is going,
2) The Kiddie Coaster – what I see as the path of sustainability that zero footprinters, eco-minimalists and some economic Freegans (those who wish to do as little as possible themselves while enjoying the vast abundance and benefits produced by everyone else) would have us follow… no growth, no bumps and essentially going nowhere.
3) The Wonkavator – the middle path where we consume the resources we desire to consume but do so in the service of a greater purpose… namely to go steadily up and out and get the f~~~ off this rock.
In my paper I likened the Earth to an egg… the egg is not important, what’s important is the bird inside. A bird needs the safety and sustenance of the egg for a time, but can no more live sustainably inside of it than an oak tree can live in an acorn. At some point, the egg must be consumed and cracked open so that the bird can emerge and take flight.
You and I are not the bird… the bird is “mind” and if mind, in some form or another, is to escape the ultimate and inevitable destruction of this Earth, we’d better get our asses in gear. Blowing through our stores for a good time isn’t going to do it, and cutting our consumption back to the point that we will never escape (to spite someone who has more power than us or so we can save the egg!?) isn’t either.
If these two are our only choices, well then hell, I’d rather ride the rocket than the kiddie coaster. At least we’ll go out with a bang and have a great story to tell while we’re doing it.
In the end, having all of us and everything we’ve ever done die here will be the greatest crime humanity has ever perpetrated on itself… but after that, which is a lesser crime… to cede 30 to 50% or more of your productivity to someone else while you bust your ass to produce the most exciting and dynamic life for yourself you possibly can or to cut your air supply and blood flow to a trickle and lay on your mat while you wait for death?
Because let’s be honest, humans are “want machines” and if you somehow manage to convince yourself that you no longer want (or are so p~~~ed that someone else is getting a piece of your action that you’re willing to cease acting at all) then I say you’re no longer human and no longer deserve your place among humanity and that you may as well go ahead and reduce your productivity to zero.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
And when the stock market crashes you just wait it out and ride the recovery right back up lol. If if stock prices take a hit you aren’t going to lose all your wealth unless the underlying companies all go bankrupt. Considering how many large companies are international these days…a down turn in one country isn’t going to put them under. Our currency tanking isn’t going to cause a company that is also doing business all across Europe and Asia to go belly up. Call me an optimist if you want but I’m more than happy to bet that the global economy isn’t going to suddenly stop, all businesses are going to go under, and we are going to have 100% global unemployment. Its going to take a zombie apocalypse to pull that off, and I’m hedging that bet with guns.
Call me an optimist if you want but I’m more than happy to bet that the global economy isn’t going to suddenly stop, all businesses are going to go under, and we are going to have 100% global unemployment
It almost sounds like there are some people here who WANT this to happen. I wonder what they think they’ll be doing when SHTF… picking berries off bushes and living the good life in a mud hut somewhere?
Whenever I encounter a hardcore “individualist/survivalist” alarming over the impending collapse of the global economy and modern civilization, I just imagine a guy who got pantsed in gym class and can’t f~~~ing wait for those douchebags to get their comeuppance.
Believe me brother, when that day comes, we’ll ALL be up against the wall and no amount of natural economy theory or commodity baskets will save us.
Whether you work the bare minimum and maximize your free time, or work your hardest to accumulate resources to enjoy yourself, what matters is YOU decide the best use of your time and labor and YOU get to enjoy the rewards. However much your work or don’t work, make sure you only work for YOURSELF.
It’s all fun and games until there is a stock market crash and a run on the banks. Just ask Greece about the Grexit. If you can’t get your money, you don’t have any.
And when the stock market crashes you just wait it out and ride the recovery right back up lol. If if stock prices take a hit you aren’t going to lose all your wealth unless the underlying companies all go bankrupt. Considering how many large companies are international these days…a down turn in one country isn’t going to put them under. Our currency tanking isn’t going to cause a company that is also doing business all across Europe and Asia to go belly up. Call me an optimist if you want but I’m more than happy to bet that the global economy isn’t going to suddenly stop, all businesses are going to go under, and we are going to have 100% global unemployment. Its going to take a zombie apocalypse to pull that off, and I’m hedging that bet with guns.
Are you *sure* Beer? This is the first time ever that the entire world has simultaneously been on fiat currency. The reserve currency is the dollar. How do you know that the ruling class isn’t intentionally collapsing civilization so that they can build it anew? Civilization version 2.0. You sure are confident. I hope for your sake that you’re not in a densely populated area when it goes down.
It almost sounds like there are some people here who WANT this to happen. I wonder what they think they’ll be doing when SHTF… picking berries off bushes and living the good life in a mud hut somewhere?
Whenever I encounter a hardcore “individualist/survivalist” alarming over the impending collapse of the global economy and modern civilization, I just imagine a guy who got pantsed in gym class and can’t f~~~ing wait for those douchebags to get their comeuppance.
Believe me brother, when that day comes, we’ll ALL be up against the wall and no amount of natural economy theory or commodity baskets will save us.
On the contrary, if a person like myself wanted this, then the best thing for me to do would be to shut up about the ruling class and the evil that they do. The entire point of bringing it to light is to attempt to prevent history from repeating it’s self by encouraging people not to cooperate. As for individualist/survivalists getting “pantsed in gym class”, you must not know any. You must be a city boy. You see, rural people have to fight. The police are a LONG way off. They get away with it. They also work. You can’t live in the country and not work. There’s too much work to be done. These guys exercise for fun. They go hunting/fishing/canoeing/wrestling/boxing/paint ball, etc. They spend their free time playing with weapons. They go bow hunting. They chop their own fire wood. They tend to their gardens. They train their dogs. On sundays, they trade at large bazaars early in the morning where there are fresh fruits and vegetables, guns, knives, camping equipment, etc. They fix their own vehicles. These guys do not get “pantsed”.
It almost sounds like there are some people here who WANT this to happen. I wonder what they think they’ll be doing when SHTF… picking berries off bushes and living the good life in a mud hut somewhere?
Whenever I encounter a hardcore “individualist/survivalist” alarming over the impending collapse of the global economy and modern civilization, I just imagine a guy who got pantsed in gym class and can’t f~~~ing wait for those douchebags to get their comeuppance.
Believe me brother, when that day comes, we’ll ALL be up against the wall and no amount of natural economy theory or commodity baskets will save us.
Don’t forget, they’ll be fondling their nuggets…gold nuggets that is, while they are sitting in a mud hut eating berries living off the fat of the land lol.
If the s~~~ ever hits the fan so hard we have a total global economic collapse and everyone just stops going to work, I’m going to be far more concerned about the mass starvation and bloodshed in the streets that will be going on than thinking I’m somehow immune because I have gold lol.
Point of view of an Anarchist LAWYER:
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