71–80 of 99 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way for gold to inflate is for someone to dig up more gold, thereby increasing its supply.
Gold can be inflated the same way as any other currency. Since people don't typically trade in physical gold, but in certificates used to represent the gold, it is possible to print more certificates than you have gold. While this is a fraud, it is an increase in the money supply.
Anyone want to put odds on this starting bank runs across Europe?
What is going to happen is lots of politicians blatantly lying and saying: "Something like this is unthinkable in our country, even if we're in the eurozone our situation is not the same as that one of Cyprus".
Just as politicians from Cyprus blatantly lied throughout all this week when that option was mentioned: they said it wouldn't happen.
And people didn't bank run.
Cyprus is too small (0.2% of the GDP) to be detonating factor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the cost of living in a group. Your receive all the benefits of living in the group, and when the group as a whole is in trouble, you need to do your part. If you want to be libertarian, go be a hermit in the mountains. You'll be the master of your domain there, and won't have to pay taxes or pay a penalty when other people screw up.
Which benefits? Education level going down the drain in France? Police force unable to stop rising crime? Army fighting wars in Africa and Middle East just to put dictators in place? Crazy high taxing of the private sector, so high that it's nearly killing the private sector and then taxing 21% on everything I consume? And then yet taking another 10% on what I managed to save? The problem with "doing your part" is th…
I do have offshore company with Cyprus company current account. Does this tax also affects my company?
This is already a crazy tax but if they're confiscating money on private companies' bank accounts they'll be killing the economy.
I've submitted this first but it didn't take off... Anyway: this is just the beginning and it's not going to stop anytime soon. The Eurozone is in big trouble: it simply cannot work when you have people who only want to work 32 hours / week and stop working at 60 years old (France) while on the other side you have hard-working germans. The crisis we're witnessing since a few years in the eurozone is really simple: th…
Socialism is basically government spending. That is all. Capitalism is the bit that raises the money for the government spending. The very simple problem is when the balance goes wrong. The balance has gone wrong, every where.
Thing is, what the anti socialists seem very keen to forget is that this all kicked off with subprime loans, badly regulated, free market loans, not government loans or spending. That was us, the public and its ever increasing demands for personal borrowing, and capitalism absolutely lapped it up, until it failed. Capitalism failed, not socialism. Capitalism ran rampant and crashed. Luckily socialist levied money was there to bail it out. The bail outs are government spending. If government didn't have money to bail them out, they would have catastrophically failed. I assume the anti socialists wanted the banks to fail? Fair enough actually, that is how capitalism works, the weak fail. In some ways, I think the banks should have failed. But, if we are to get angry at 10% of people money being converted in to bank shares (did people miss that? It is a bullet point here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21818598 ), then losing everything in a bank fail must be very much a no no. So, we do like government spending when it suits.
So, one cannot complain about the spending when it was the money provider, capitalism, that screwed up in the first place, leaving no money to spend.
Put it this way: If Mr Hubby lose his job, its not the wife's fault for spending the family budget each week, is it? Equally not the wife's fault if she asked Mr Hubby if she could take out a loan, he agreed, and not cant pay it back because hubby lost his job. More, over, if Mr Hubby was pushing her to take loans, it is even more not her fault.
So stop with the finger pointing rightard anti socialism hate stuff. It doesn't work, its childish, and way too Glen Beck for sensible discussion.
Now, of course the socialism bit has to do its bit and contract so that the capitalism bit can breathe and rebuild, while regulating it enough such that insane lending and borrowing cant happen again. The balance must be restored.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the cost of living in a group. Your receive all the benefits of living in the group, and when the group as a whole is in trouble, you need to do your part. If you want to be libertarian, go be a hermit in the mountains. You'll be the master of your domain there, and won't have to pay taxes or pay a penalty when other people screw up.
You miss the larger picture too markdown. I pointed straight at it and you're still squinting. This won't work. When the government undermines the trust of the people so that they will no longer use the financial system they are trying to protect, that's called "shooting yourself in the foot". A bank is only in business if people trust it. Money only works if people trust it. Governments only work if the people trust…
Considering that we learn about bank runs and trust in the financial system in high school economics class, I highly doubt that these people don't know about them.
In all likelihood, they chose the option that with the information they had, appeared to have the highest chance of success.
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To paraphrase Silvio Gesell, an economist in favor of symbolic currency almost a century ago, "All the physical assets of the world are at the disposal of those who wish to save, so why should they make their savings in the form of money? Money was not made to be saved!"
Except for the fact that the majority of the physical assets of the world are perishable.
There is only one asset you need though, and that is the same physical asset that Central banks hold that is not an IOU from another country. It is that asset only that will be able to be revalued and reflate the balance sheet when the currency 'assets' have burned to the ground.
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> Except Pretty sure the OP was talking about the present times...
Have people changed significantly since then? Plus, he was saying that prior to banks being how they are now, things were different. That prior period encompasses the middle ages.
I don't know. Your question is sufficiently general that a plausible answer could be given to support either "yes" or "no" answers. It is very dependent on what you mean by "change". And therein lay my answer: I don't know what you mean by "change".
The poster in this case was touching on a point that going out and taking a farmer's property (or generally anyone for that matter) explicitly was very unlikely to happen, but taking it from a bank is considered something else entirely. I think that's fairly reasonable in the first world. Could a scenario arise in the future where that isn't reasonable? Sure. But, that's kind of beside the point here I think.
If you extend your reasoning to the extreme, you could pretty much say to anything, "Well, humans have done it before so what's stopping them from doing it again?" The answer is nothing, but it's a red herring: it ignores the possibility that the chance of some Event X has gone down with the passage of time. Perhaps it has gone down so much, that it is no longer reasonable to address it if one want to maintain a modicum of concision.
Anyone want to put odds on this starting bank runs across Europe?
Not gonna happen. Several countries moreover already have withdrawal limits per day / week / months to precisely prevent bank runs. Those limits have recently been lowered (for example in Italy). Laws are passed nearly on a daily basis to lower the maximum amount of "physical" money (bills) you can use to buy stuff. What is going to happen is lots of politicians blatantly lying and saying: "Something like this is unt…