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

Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

jpkoning.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#61

Post by pjmlp »

speeder wrote: post #37
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too? (Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)

TVs all used to have an "adblocker" in the form of people just switching away from the channel for whatever time ads last on that channel. This means that ad companies also had to be wildly creative to make people WANT to watch them.

On my TVs that kind of adblock still works perfectly fine.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

pavlov wrote: post #7
readthenotes1 wrote: post #4

"democracies have not resorted to modern version of debasement as a revenue source due to the unpopularity of rising prices." The USA got rid of silver in its coins in 1964 and I believe copper in its pennies recently. The modern version of debasement is in the feds balance sheet, they've gotten so efficient there's no need to affect the physical substance.

Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation. The example I’m familiar with is from Finland in 1946, when the most popular and largest circulating bills were required to be physically cut in half and lost 50% of their upfront value. The Wikipedia article seems to be only in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setelinvaihto The idea was that the left half of the bill…

> Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation.

Cash debasement and inflation are the same thing.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#63

Post by Beijinger »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #43
OriPekelman wrote: post #36

For those interested, the practice of debasement actually predates the middle ages by, a lot. By 301 inflation was so bad Diocletian had to put out a price fixing edict. It didn't work. It took Constantine's Solidus (basically solid gold coin - that will stay stable for almost a thousand years) to stabilize the currency. By the early fourth century the denarius that used to have 50% silver contained almost no silver…

Between the years 150 and 100 BC, the Seleucid tetradrachm went from 95% silver to 65%. As the name suggests, it continued to weigh four drachms. Debasement occurs any time the government runs out of money and can force people to take the debased money. The previous ~150 years of the same government minted tetradrachms that were all silver, probably because their main use of the silver was paying foreign mercenaries.…

It was part of the downfall of the Roman Empire

1. Not enough mines to mine silver, exhausted based on their technology

2. China sold silk and other stuff and accumulating silver

https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/03/peak-civilizati...

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#64

Post by fragmede »

bobthepanda wrote: post #59
pavlov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation. The example I’m familiar with is from Finland in 1946, when the most popular and largest circulating bills were required to be physically cut in half and lost 50% of their upfront value. The Wikipedia article seems to be only in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setelinvaihto The idea was that the left half of the bill…

Probably the most successful was the Plano Real in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real?wprov=sfti1 > According to economists, one of the causes of inflation in Brazil was the inertial inflation phenomenon. Prices were adjusted on a daily basis according to changes in price indexes and to the exchange rate of the local currency to the U.S. dollar. Plano Real then created a non-monetary currency, the Unida…

how well did that work in practice?

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#65

Post by thaumasiotes »

Beijinger wrote: post #63
thaumasiotes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the years 150 and 100 BC, the Seleucid tetradrachm went from 95% silver to 65%. As the name suggests, it continued to weigh four drachms. Debasement occurs any time the government runs out of money and can force people to take the debased money. The previous ~150 years of the same government minted tetradrachms that were all silver, probably because their main use of the silver was paying foreign mercenaries.…

It was part of the downfall of the Roman Empire 1. Not enough mines to mine silver, exhausted based on their technology 2. China sold silk and other stuff and accumulating silver https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/03/peak-civilizati...

What's the downfall part of that?

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#66

Post by qwytw »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #51
qwytw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't plausible Why? Of course it wasn't accessible or particularly useful for the majority of people but it was central to the Byzantine economy/financial-system functioned. Soldiers were paid in gold (every 6 or 12 months so that simplified things) and taxes were also collected in gold whenever feasible. Relying on gold as your primary currnecy of course wasn't ideal since the outcome was a partially demonet…

> and taxes were also collected in gold whenever feasible Well, for one thing, most people wouldn't be able to afford a single gold coin. You might collect taxes from a province in gold; you're not going to collect taxes from a person that way. > the outcome was a partially demonetisation of the wider economy This is also an odd claim; the number of denarii kept going up. > it was central to [the way] the Byzantine e…

> the number of denarii kept going up.

It wasn't even minted by the 300s. There were multiple attempts to replace it with a new stable silver coin but none were very successful.

> Well, for one thing, most people wouldn't be able to afford a single gold coin. You might collect taxes from a province in gold; you're not going to collect taxes from a person that way.

Well yes, that was a significant problem. Often there was no other choice than to collect taxes in-kind and then the tax collectors either had to find local uses for all that stuff or sell it for gold that could be sent to the central treasury in Constantinople.

By the 500s the Empire was mainly only minting gold and bronze coinage which of course was very problematic (as you said gold is much too expensive for most transactions while bronze has the opposite problem). There were no stable, widespread silvers coins that were continuously minted until the 800s or so (Miliaresion) and then its value collapsed again after a few centuries when they went back to debasing during a period of economic crisis.

> There is no way for such a rare coin to be central to the functioning of the system

Well.. I accept that this is your opinion. Regardless, that's simply not how the Roman/Byzantine Empire worked. Gold coinage (or using gold solidus as the primary unit of accounting) was absolutely integral to its functioning. (moreover it was also central to international trade)

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#67

Post by Beijinger »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #65
Beijinger wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was part of the downfall of the Roman Empire 1. Not enough mines to mine silver, exhausted based on their technology 2. China sold silk and other stuff and accumulating silver https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/03/peak-civilizati...

What's the downfall part of that?

If your money becomes worthless?

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#68

Post by bobthepanda »

fragmede wrote: post #64
bobthepanda wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the most successful was the Plano Real in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real?wprov=sfti1 > According to economists, one of the causes of inflation in Brazil was the inertial inflation phenomenon. Prices were adjusted on a daily basis according to changes in price indexes and to the exchange rate of the local currency to the U.S. dollar. Plano Real then created a non-monetary currency, the Unida…

how well did that work in practice?

It did break hyperinflation, and it is the currency still in use today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_real?wprov=sfti1#His...

> Soon after its introduction, the real unexpectedly gained value against the U.S. dollar, due to large capital inflows in late 1994 and 1995. During that period it attained its maximum dollar value ever, about US$1.20=R$1. Between 1996 and 1998 the exchange rate was tightly controlled by the Central Bank of Brazil, so that the real depreciated slowly and smoothly to the dollar, dropping from near US$1=R$1 to about US$1=R$1.2 by the end of 1998.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#69

Post by lifeisstillgood »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #45
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #2

[flagged]

You'd think Piketty might have addressed the masses as if there was more than one person in them. And maybe used a second-person form of the verb. He's French, not Spanish.

“Thou est” ? - honestly I thought it was fake “medieval” language - like “ye apothecary tables of yore”.

But bonus points for off-topic pedantry - I love it. It’s why we are here.

Re: Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe

#70

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lazide wrote: post #57
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that’s kind of the point as well - Jeff Bezos is unlikely to spend much on Mississippi’s rural road network.

Is spending a ton of money on Mississippi’s rural road network a useful use of the money?

Missippians (#) think so :-)

(#) ok, that’s a fairly low value comment that I frankly should have not clicked send on, but I just spent ages getting that one blasted word past my own spell checker, user friendly piece of shit, and realising not for the first time that typing anything on a textbox on a mobile is its own piece of hell. Sysiphus I am with you. And yeah Musisippians is probably the wrong collective noun but at this point I don’t care. Kamala and Trump will both just avoid campaigning there because their speech writers simply won’t let them.

Post reply on HN