Weird how finance suddenly becomes "gambling" when a bunch of regular people join the table.
Always has been.
There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
371–380 of 409 posts
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do I create value when I loan another person some asset? What about when I act as a currency exchange, and offer at any moment in time to take either side of any trade along with a 0.3% fee? These are two things I do on Ethereum right now which have analogs in the traditional finance system. Seems to me it matters little whether the activity is done in a traditional space or in cryptoland: they either both create val…
Loans would be one of the classic value creating activities, because they allow others to use otherwise idle capital to produce something new. Currency exchange is fuzzier. If the exchange is happening to facilitate commerce, then sure, I would consider that value creation. If it's happening simply in order to support speculation in a different currency, then no, it's not value creating. And it's pretty clear from th…
> Loans would be one of the classic value creating activities, because they allow others to use otherwise idle capital to produce something new.
Only because capital is privatised. Perversely, only those institutions with enough capital can obtain the privilege of creating money from thin air.
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple/safe/reliable 10% was a fluke that should never exist. Profit and risk must be in balance. If it isn't it should attracts more and more people until the balance is reached. Making it hard for people to join to keep it unbalanced is what happened and its slowly going away now.
> Profit and risk must be in balance. Risk is one factor, but not the only one. The main factor in low-risk investment returns is time preference . In essence: People are willing to pay rent (interest) in exchange for access to money now rather than later. Those with savings can earn a profit by renting out their accumulated savings even in a risk-free scenario where return of principle is 100% guaranteed.
There is no such thing as risk-free renting out your accumulated money.
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#374Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…
> This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real.
As opposed to rent, property speculation, the stock market, etc?
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you call "corrosive" (appreciation of non-value-creating assets) is 1:1 applicable to Real Estate. Compared to the appreciation of worldwide real estate, the market value of crypto is only a drop in the ocean. And countless people got unbelievable rich due to rising prices and "crowding-out" in cities without creating any value for society at all (in the opposite, making life harder for everybody struggling to k…
Comparing cryptocurrency to real estate is laughable. With real estate you have either a place to live, reducing a real world expense (rent), or an income producing property. No matter how much you dress up cryptocurrencies as stocks, by using terms like market cap, you are not buying a share of an income producing asset. You're speculating on a digital collectible. You can speculate on real estate and stocks, but yo…
> If you buy an income producing property that's good because it is an income producing property.
Not sure I understand your reasoning there.
> You're speculating on a digital collectible.
And if you buy properties not for self-use you're speculating on a physical collectible. So?
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you call "corrosive" (appreciation of non-value-creating assets) is 1:1 applicable to Real Estate. Compared to the appreciation of worldwide real estate, the market value of crypto is only a drop in the ocean. And countless people got unbelievable rich due to rising prices and "crowding-out" in cities without creating any value for society at all (in the opposite, making life harder for everybody struggling to k…
> And nobody so far managed to explain convincingly, in which ways investments in (existing, residential, not for self-use) real estate creates any value. Shelter is literally third on the list of human needs after water and food. Make something desirable and people will leave their previous (possibly decent) place behind to move in. I'm not sure how anyone can say real estate doesn't create value just because they a…
So people use unfair property rights in order to extract a rent from an essential human need, without doing labour or providing any service in return. Is that your argument?
> If you complain you're just jealous
Everytime.
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
In densely populated areas, the value of real estate has very little to do with what's built on the property, and everything to do with the land it is build on. GPs point is that owning land is not creating value. It is, however, very profitable.
You either have a sufficiently large land value tax or let the government rent out land instead of selling it. In both cases the land would become a liability that you constantly have to take care of instead of being an "investment". Productive work like building on top of land should be rewarded, waiting for a train station to be built in your neighborhood is not productive work that should be rewarded. Pretty much…
Hi fellow Georgist! What a great summary.
And yes it does not stop at LVT which encourages useful development and discourages speculation and keeping land/homes empty. It extends to anywhere where society/the public/the commons is not being adequately compensated by private interests for the benefits they take. Goes from natural resources to pollution and paying for the waste processing of the products you produce (no more saving 5c by using a plastic bottle which costs the public 10c to dispose of).
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And nobody so far managed to explain convincingly, in which ways investments in (existing, residential, not for self-use) real estate creates any value. Shelter is literally third on the list of human needs after water and food. Make something desirable and people will leave their previous (possibly decent) place behind to move in. I'm not sure how anyone can say real estate doesn't create value just because they a…
So people use unfair property rights in order to extract a rent from an essential human need, without doing labour or providing any service in return. Is that your argument? > If you complain you're just jealous Everytime.
> So people use unfair property rights in order to extract a rent from an essential human need, without doing labour or providing any service in return. Is that your argument?
That wasn't anyone's argument, I think you hallucinated all of that. The person I replied to said real estate has no value.
> > If you complain you're just jealous > Everytime.
I did not say this, you hallucinated that too.
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#379GME is actually quite a solid gamble, and could lead to what people are referring to as the MOASS. https://iamnotafinancialadvisor.com/DD/GME/og/GMEv14.pdf It hasn't alreadys been like this, but everything has been turned into overdrive. Where people were talking about 10% returns on investments, people are getting 1000% returns on investment. There is some bubble going on at the moment with the repo-market, hyper in…
Why doesn't gamestop just sell back a ton of stock? They repurchased >100 Million shares in 2019 for dirt cheap. I saw the news about the share selloff, but a paltry 3.5M shares isn't what I was expecting, and thats part of the reason I was extremely skeptical about GME, why wouldn't the company simply sell directly to the shorts so that they could cover? https://ycharts.com/companies/GME/stock_buyback
Not screwing over ~9M wallstreetbets users, possibly resulting in a short squeeze, nets you millions of loyal customers for life. On top of that, the whole reason the stock is currently priced so high is the lack of available shares. Release slightly too much new shares and stock prices will plummet. It's not a linear relationship.
Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
The gold, land, art reference 2 posts above yours almost certainly refers to the Rothschilds, so I don't know why solosoyokaze is being downvoted as the Rothschilds most definitely funded wars to their own profit.
Well actually if solosoyokaze had said something more like "This is probably referring to the rothschilds based on (link to historical information). It's reasonable to extrapolate that they were war profiteers based on (reasoning)" Then I think it really could have added some insight into the world instead of being like the drive-by ignorance the parent comment refers to.
The parent comment had no more sourcing than my comment, I'm not sure why you're singling my comment out. Yes the Rothschilds fit my description, but I'd argue anyone who maintained generational wealth in the time of colonization, slavery and zero labor laws, did so through non-ethical means.