Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

Per capita, so far. But it used to be a third-world country and it's now the industrial superpower.

> The US had inane financial regulations right from the start.

“FDR didn't exist”.

> And I'm not sure what you are smoking: have you heard of the Great Moderation? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

Dude, the “great moderation” is about inflation, business cycles and macro trends more generally, not about financial markets stability.

It opens with the words "Money is created in the Canadian economy in two main ways: through private commercial bank loans..."

the introduction continues "... It also discusses how private commercial banks create money..."

And then it goes on to do exactly that in detail. I'm struggling to understand why you wrote that.

>> Your view of fractional reserve banking is rather.. unorthodox

Unorthodox is not the word to describe what has at this point been published by most of the central banks in western economies with a sovereign currency. From the Fed to the Canadian central bank, from the Bank of England to the Bundesbank and so on.

We're unfortunately living in a Copernican moment. We now better understand how money works but we're not permitted to say the earth orbits the sun just yet.

It's utterly ludicrous that the idea of Fractional Reserve banking is propagated in today's world as having any relevance to how banking works in these economies.

>> why do banks bother with deposits, then

Very simply - cost of funds

They moved from dirt poor to middle income largely by strangling their economy quite as hard as the did under Mao. If they liberalised further, they could become richer.

> “FDR didn't exist”.

Huh?

I will look into it later, thank you. I don't think the stocks thing is available in my country but I will check

> Your view of exports is a bit too narrow. A 'trade deficit' mostly just means that the US 'exports' financial assets. The US is really good at producing financial assets. Eg when people globally buy into a hot US IPO that officially counts as widening the trade deficit, even though you could say in a sense that effectively the US is exporting Google shares. And they are really good at making new companies.

Y'know actually this is the crux of my comment as well.

That, America is in this particular position where its only exports are usually finance. The issue is that its finances are extremely overvalued (even more so with the AI bubble), even investing in S&P 500 doesn't feel safe to me because its a matter of (when) and not if, that the bubble bursts.

This is what I am worried about, I am not American as well but when the AI bubble bursts and People panick essentially taking in a second all the "exports" that US economy made, This is the only thing stopping America from breaking all hell loose. And I don't think this is the right thing because this export of finance or just this nationalistic focus of financialization caused the AI bubble to exist in the first place.

At the end of the day, any technological innovation just gets wedded to finance and some of them are really really shady like the AI bubble and the crypto bubble.

I am not even talking about the global influence of this leads when companies will do so many immoral things that we are witnessing in the tech giants (google,facebook,twitter,amazon,microsoft)

I think that most americans who live there are actually really net negative and they are impacted the most out of this as I said, and this is part of the struggle because I feel like that the majority shouldn't be subdued by the minority's interests or have the idea of inequality persists which actively hurts the majority.

It's mostly their country and they don't even have a say in this arguably, the most important matter.

Perhaps this is capitalism and I don't have too much faults with the capitalism model Adam smith presented but I very much have a problem with this late stage capitalism.

Much of the system is inequal but the people there are taught to be on the good side of that line and let it continue. The social and moral effects of it are already visible in the country.

The baseline of a country even with finance is inherently linked to these factors as well which America's failing in. It's not visible in the graphs the things I said in the S&P because it can be at an all time high but this just goes on to show the decoupling of finance from reality and how it can come to bite again if things go bad because if things go bad, they will go really really bad and anything that can happen will happen and the current politics of US is fundamentally shaky as well and that reflects in their finance as well.

Overall, my heart just goes out to the average american suffering from all this. Whose budgets are being cut to please the large tax cuts of the rich and who suffers the most from inflation and the bubble bursting.

America's economy right now is shaky. Anything can happen, nothing bad has happened because people think that they are rich because of the S&P so consumption still happens and things are barely okay even if there are so many cracks in the system right now.

But when S&P breaks loose due to the AI bubble bursting. I genuinely worry that America can really go through a lot of internal turmoil because of it.

So at the end of the day, I feel like AI investments financially would lead to disaster and this might impact the world as well but it will really harshly impact America the most.

Also, no, if stock markets rise then the money isn't flowing in US govt bonds where the interest rates are low, this is the first time in many years perhaps I think during the tarrifs that people weren't putting money in either of these things and genuinely looked for other outcomes and the US govt had to pay higher interest rates which is very contrary to what usually happens and that was the sign of something bad and I don't know if I am able to make my stance clear but I genuinely feel like a country's major exports shouldn't really be finance.