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Money do expire! There is inflation... I would like similar system for land ownership and buildings. Property taxes at level of 5%. In China land can not be owned, but only leased for 70 years.
Uh, our money does already expire. It's called inflation.
There is a difference between inflation, which affects the entire monetary system, and money expiration which affects individual units of currency. In the first case, there is no incentive to use the money any faster, and as long as inflation isn't too high, there could be incentives to hoard/save it. In the second case, each unit has an expiration, and like the game of hot potato, you want it out of your hands quick…
(the later has an interesting side effect as it would incentive to make transactions legal)
Uh, our money does already expire. It's called inflation.
There is a difference between inflation, which affects the entire monetary system, and money expiration which affects individual units of currency. In the first case, there is no incentive to use the money any faster, and as long as inflation isn't too high, there could be incentives to hoard/save it. In the second case, each unit has an expiration, and like the game of hot potato, you want it out of your hands quick…
- Mac McDonald, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between inflation, which affects the entire monetary system, and money expiration which affects individual units of currency. In the first case, there is no incentive to use the money any faster, and as long as inflation isn't too high, there could be incentives to hoard/save it. In the second case, each unit has an expiration, and like the game of hot potato, you want it out of your hands quick…
I’m not seeing the difference. If I have $1 that’s worth $1 today and $0 in one year, doesn’t it stand to reason that in 6 months I could exchange it for $0.50 with a one year expiration? Taken further, every day I could exchange all of my wealth which now has 364 days left for slightly less wealth with 365 days left. That sure sounds like inflation.
Depending on the country and other events, entire fiat currencies or specific denominations of fiat currencies can expire and become color paper worth almost nothing. We’ve seen this many times over the last several decades that fiat currency (not backed by gold or other physical asset) has existed.
It’s all about trust from every angle and every motive.
Even normal money expires via something other than inflation. I have a bunch of CHF that can only be exchanged at the Swiss national bank now. No idea if I’ll ever be able to do that.
An anecdote: few months ago, my partner actually exchanged a 100 CHF note in the big SNB building on Bürkliplatz, and it’s essentially a Jason Bourne scene (although that wasn’t really Zurich in the movie). You walk in, a guy speaking with a stereotypical Bünzli accent takes your name, then brings you individually into an office where you can hand your gross old bank note to a man wearing a suit. Next to arguing about chess in German over a beer on the train, this is the most Swiss experience available.
EDIT: Maybe more to the point, like everything else in Switzerland, apparently you can resolve this by sending a registered letter. In this case, if you mail them the banknotes at the Cashier’s office in Bern, along with your account information, they will wire you the money.
Beyond a certain amount of wealth and cash in the bank people and institutions stop thinking in an entrepreneurial way and start thinking about the economy at large, or predicting the economy at large.
And GDP is very much like performance anxiety, when everybody is thinking about that, then it becomes very difficult to get it up. Or you do get it up but it's not nearly as rewarding because it becomes an artificially inflated number without any connection with actual welfare of the population and developement of a country.
Physical paper bills also do wear out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/old...