Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

greatdemocracyinitiative.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 106 posts

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#51

Post by freeone3000 »

hammock wrote: post #24

So "Great Democracy" is how they are going to wrap this, huh. "This" being helicopter money AKA digital dollars AKA direct fiscal injection into private Americans' bank accounts. Been a long time coming. Who is The Great Democracy Initiative, and where does their funding come from?

This appears to be a banking account and a payment processing system, and not actually giving any money to individuals above the standard index interest rate (which is already given out, but retail banks take their cut).

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#52

Post by pm90 »

_gx90 wrote: post #47
pm90 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What has been happening for the past 40 years is not natural, and what banks are doing now is almost entirely driven by central banks and not some natural order resulting from the free market (which throughout history has always selected a decentralised banking system with thousands of small local banks). In my opinion we need to protect what little we have left instead of just yielding to the central planners at t…

>Yes, we've had sustained economic growth and wealth generation to a magnitude never seen before in the history of the world (although not equitable, but that's a different policy problem). There are many ways I'd like to rebut this, but instead I'll just ask for who and how? Technology has improved that is for sure as it is a incredibly deflationary, but what else has improved in your eyes? The vast majority in the…

> We didn't "choose" to have a free market. A free market is simply the voluntary and spontaneous interaction between free individuals, nothing more, and is entirely natural. Central planning and using coercion to force market outcomes, on the other hand, is definitely not natural.

So what? A free market was the only possible market when society did not have the tools to organize and control resource allocation on the scale its possible today, due to advances in technology and expansion in education. We have better tools today, and we as a society can choose other methods for resource allocation that are now accessible.

This kind of thinking baffles me: horses are the only "natural" way of transportation, by your definition. But we discovered automobiles, trains and all that shebang.

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#53

Post by hammock »

hogFeast wrote: post #37
hammock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to convince ZH detractors. A naive perusal of the site is definitely packed with of, at its most charitable interpretation, a bunch of gobbledegook, and at its least charitable, pure propaganda. But between the lines there is a lot of truth, and importantly, many facts and analysis that you will never find in any mainstream sources, neither NYT nor Fox News nor the Atlantic nor whatever else. It take…

Yep: I worked in finance for years, have degrees in economics...and their coverage is useful. To name one example of many, they were saying that JP Morgan was rigging commodities markets for years. I know people not in finance who heard that ZH story (years ago now, when ZH was in their pomp): lololol, tinfoil hat...that JPM were rigging commodities markets was known in finance for literally decades, it was common kn…

Totally. Curious, do you have any other news/blogs you recommend? I'm always looking for new ones. Epsilon Theory has been a new one for me, although its "pomp" as you put it didn't last long and seems to be on a politically motivated decline, as happened to Venkatesh Rao's blog

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#54

Post by rvense »

_gx90 wrote: post #50
rvense wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which throughout history has always selected a decentralised banking system with thousands of small local banks The free market in my country has produced two banks that provide banking to 80% of the population (6M people). It has also more or less killed off cash in favour of credit cards and more recently a single, 100% privatized smartphone app. Accepting cash is still a legal requirement, ie. it is being kept a…

>The free market in my country has produced two banks that provide banking to 80% of the population (6M people). I don't want to assume where you are from, but almost every developed country has incredibly complex, expensive, and insurmountable bank licensing procedures which make it impossible for startups to compete. That is not a free market, it is a crony capitalist market which shields incumbents.

That's probably true but we also have like two major supermarket chains, so I think it's hard to make the case that government regulation is the only cause of monopolies.

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#55

Post by bergstromm466 »

pm90 wrote: post #49
true_religion wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a really hard time naming any law that benefited the common people the most. Usually a good law will end up expanding the number of people who are elite, but still give marginal benefit to the commoner. For example, statutory jurisprudence as opposed to rule by nobility, let people who were only good at trading become part of the elite. Previously you had to also have a private army, in order to be elite.

Labor laws greatly expanded protections for the commoners, as did Social Security and other welfare programs.

> commoners

When you use the word 'commoners', is this akin to the word consumers, in contrast to producers - who make and invent the things commoners/consumers buy and use? I'm asking because this definition comes up from Wikipedia:

"Commoner: The common people, also known as the common man, commoners, or the masses, are the ordinary people in a community or nation who lack any significant social status, especially those who are members of neither royalty, nobility, the clergy, nor any member of the aristocracy."

> Labor laws greatly expanded protections for the commoners, as did Social Security and other welfare programs.

Many argue those post-war gains are being wiped out [1]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-clas... or video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#56

Post by mempko »

hammock wrote: post #24

So "Great Democracy" is how they are going to wrap this, huh. "This" being helicopter money AKA digital dollars AKA direct fiscal injection into private Americans' bank accounts. Been a long time coming. Who is The Great Democracy Initiative, and where does their funding come from?

Fiscal injection into private American's bank accounts already happens all the time. So what is your concern here exactly?

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#57

Post by mempko »

_gx90 wrote: post #25

This is an obvious trojan horse for totalitarian central planning. Easier to enact negative interest rate policy when everyone is holding an account at the Fed and no one can take out their money since cash is either banned or made severely inaccessible (like in some EU countries). In my opinion private banks are perfectly fine, the problem isn't the idea of independent banks, the problem is government and central ba…

You honestly think there isn't already central planning? If you believe private banks are perfectly fine, what exactly happened in 2008?

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#58

Post by hammock »

pm90 wrote: post #41
_gx90 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not sustainable when we have an unsustainable and quite frankly insane monetary policy which is being pushed by central bankers. In a sane world credit provision would be decentralised and provided by local banks who are close to the borrower rather than people sitting 1,000 kilometres away. Remember: the most important role of banking is not the provision of payment services (although that is important too), i…

> What has been happening for the past 40 years is not natural, and what banks are doing now is almost entirely driven by central banks and not some natural order resulting from the free market (which throughout history has always selected a decentralised banking system with thousands of small local banks). In my opinion we need to protect what little we have left instead of just yielding to the central planners at t…

>Yes, we've had sustained economic growth and wealth generation to a magnitude never seen before in the history of the world

Citation needed. I'm pretty sure the growth of real GDP in the US was higher in the 50 years prior to the end of the gold standard, than in these ~50 years since.

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#59

Post by nickff »

rvense wrote: post #54
_gx90 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The free market in my country has produced two banks that provide banking to 80% of the population (6M people). I don't want to assume where you are from, but almost every developed country has incredibly complex, expensive, and insurmountable bank licensing procedures which make it impossible for startups to compete. That is not a free market, it is a crony capitalist market which shields incumbents.

That's probably true but we also have like two major supermarket chains, so I think it's hard to make the case that government regulation is the only cause of monopolies.

The USA actually has a history of disallowing large, centralized private banks. So-called unit-banking, driven by a powerful small-bank lobby created a great deal of instability in the 19th and 20th centuries. Canada and Scotland have a history of much freer banking than the USA. This is a very interesting subject, and I highly recommend reading a bit about it.

Re: Central Banking for All: A Public Option for Bank Accounts (2018) [pdf]

#60

Post by _gx90 »

pm90 wrote: post #52
_gx90 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, we've had sustained economic growth and wealth generation to a magnitude never seen before in the history of the world (although not equitable, but that's a different policy problem). There are many ways I'd like to rebut this, but instead I'll just ask for who and how? Technology has improved that is for sure as it is a incredibly deflationary, but what else has improved in your eyes? The vast majority in the…

> We didn't "choose" to have a free market. A free market is simply the voluntary and spontaneous interaction between free individuals, nothing more, and is entirely natural. Central planning and using coercion to force market outcomes, on the other hand, is definitely not natural. So what? A free market was the only possible market when society did not have the tools to organize and control resource allocation on th…

> A free market was the only possible market when society did not have the tools to organize and control resource allocation on the scale its possible today, due to advances in technology and expansion in education. We have better tools today, and we as a society can choose other methods for resource allocation that are now accessible.

Many have thought like you, some have even tried to architect society into something like you are describing, and fortunately those that did failed so spectacularly that they are remembered in the history books with names like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cuba, and maoist China. They all failed because centrally planned societies, either done through envisioned high-tech computerised/AI systems or through at-the-time high-tech 5-year plans like the Soviet Union, all suffer from the knowledge problem. It is simply impossible for someone to know everything about an economy to be able to plan it efficiently.

Perhaps a more tangible argument for the tech-crowd on HN is the lack of understanding that non-engineer managers in some companies have for the software development process and the disastrous results that follow. Now imagine having a Politburo dictating what every little work group in a country should do from software engineers to janitorial staff and you can see where this leads.

>But we discovered automobiles, trains and all that shebang.

Ironically things that were discovered and developed in the 1800s, the times of almost unrestricted capitalism and market price discovery.

Post reply on HN