bitcoin fixes this
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The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
81–90 of 313 posts
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#82I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or…
As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25. Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.
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Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#83I'm from the US but I lived in Argentina for about 5 years (2013-2018). It was a great lesson, and I'm seeing things in the US now that I used to see in Argentina. At the bank recently, they had a sign about the national shortage of coins. That was common in Argentina. Sizes of products getting smaller in order to keep the price the same - "inflacion escondido" (hidden inflation).
The single greatest difference between the United States and Argentina is the world's debts, as tracked by the IMF, aren't denominated in any of the pesos or peso variants Argentina has used over the past several decades. Were the us to try and trade out dollars for NuDollars, they would find the dollar won't go away because the world will still be using it to trade and pay down its debts. The dollar being the world'…
If the US decides to replace 10 Dollars with 1 NuDollars, then the IMF and everyone else will just search and replace and fix all the paperwork. It's not hard at all.
The problem may be if there is for many years a high unpredictable inflation that is higher than most developed countries. In that case other countries may decide to use Euros, Swiss Franc, Yuanes, Yens or whatever has a more stable value.
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
I looked up the definitions: Theft: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property. Inflation: a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services. There you go, proved you wrong.
High inflation usually goes hand-in-hand with some degree of corruption that immensely benefits the connected and powerful.
In Venezuela the government implemented exchange rates controls which were much more favorable then market based rates. Those with privilege and connections could purchase dollars at the official rate and then sell them at market rates at 10x what they paid for them. By this method an immense measure of the nations wealth could be expropriated.
Commodities can be siphoned from producers with price controls and then liquidated at market rates. Eventually asset owners can be forced to sell when they can’t produce what is demanded at below market prices.
Those that are close to decision makers can front run markets as the everything degenerates into a command economy.
While not all inflation is theft inflation can facilitate theft on an epic scale. At some point all economic and political power shifts to those that benefit from inflation and it becomes politically impossible to “fix” inflation as power derived from it.
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#85Are there any kids book that explain these money concepts to elementary school kids? I feel one the big failings of the school system is that these are not taught early on and instead a lot of time is spent teaching things that kids will never use in their lives.
Easily illustrated for children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4XL8s1BEdk
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this is the type of modelling CNBC used for millenial spending in their infamous tweet[0]; I don't know many people that actually donate >10% of their income to charity. 0: https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1076173906455810050?s=20&t=Z...
What you want to do is set up a charity in a Third World country and give them a steady stream of money that goes to the governmental leaders for their own personal projects, like a school or something. Do this for a few years and then you're positioned to get control of the country's natural resources at well-below market prices due to, ah, corrupt local leaders willing to sell out their country's interests in excha…
I get the first part of your plan, but do you have some sources for the second part?
How is that foundation exploiting the first step, in practice?
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#87Zeihan in tears. I really enjoy his description of geopolitics, but the man definitely overestimates Argentina repeatedly for no bloody reason. When I was a child, I saved a little of my allowance to start with, but then rapidly realized that every year I was blowing away (in earnings) my savings from the previous year. Soon my porn and bootleg music high-school business was beating all the savings of the previous ye…
What are some examples of these crazy liquid assets?
In the past I've spent extra money on tools, a house and some gold and silver (as I have a goldsmithing hobby). The house is difficult to unload, at least mentally, pretty good market. The tools have kept their value, but finding a buyer is difficult. The gold and silver are a similar story, but tend to fluctuate in value rapidly.
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#881228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1].
... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported).
While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a completely different type of fund that had launched only just that year and at the time they would not have touched such small dollar investments.
... but today we now know that Bogle's idea was actually pretty good and you really can make such small dollar investments (eg. Fidelity's no-fee, large cap fund has no minimum to invest (FNILX), or you could buy a fractional share of a variety of large cap ETFs: SPY (SPDR), IVV (iShares), or VOO (Vanguard) from a variety of brokerages). Of course, a minor wouldn't be able to own shared directly... so, get your kids a UTMA account [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_exchange_rates_of_A... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group#Growth_of_c... [3] https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/31591... [4] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utma.asp
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.
If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another…
Well, I've had BTC transactions drop out of the mempool (so, they were not executed, but you don't know that immediately, you only know days later), and transactions that worked took between a few minutes and more than half a day. The fees ranged from virtually nothing to around 50 USD. I certainly would not call that predictable and stable. I mean, you don't even know when the next block will arrive.
Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.
If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ I dare you to find another…
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