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A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

economist.com

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Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#81
post #72

I'm amazed noone has quoted Warren Buffet on this subject: “[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” The principle point being: "It has no utility". Like crypto, it's primary function in the modern economy is financial crime..…

Being a store of value is utility.

> Being a store of value is utility.

It has utility because it's a store of value, and it's a store of value because it has utility because it's a store of value, and it has utility because it's a store of value because it has utility because it's a store of value...

That explains it perfectly...

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#82
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than gold in what aspect? Good luck trying to move to a different country and bringing all your gold with you without filling out a hell of a lot of forms and risking confidcation for "money laundering". Bitcoin doesn't have this problem The supply of gold is always inflating. One day we will have asteroid mining of gold and it will be inflated even more. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. Nobody will accept y…

Doesn't bitcoin have a big potential problem of someone breaking asymmetric cryptography.

Every single financial system that currently exists has a big potential problem if someone breaks asymmetric encryption. Every single government power also has a very big problem as well.

Almost every entity in the world has an incentive to find the solution to this problem, and when it is found Bitcoin will just do a soft fork and include it into itself.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. Money is probably the most misunderstood thing in the world. While saving money seems logical from an individual perspective on the macro level of the economy it can be a huge problem because everybodies income depends on money constantly being spent. This is a classic case of a "fallacy of composition". To illustrate that it's often helpful to think in extreme scenarios. Imagine every household starts t…

Very well put. I'd add Money and Goverment by Skidelsky to the list of recommendations.

Good one as well, thanks for the recommendation.

The main issue with mainstream economics is that it is some cargo-cult fairytale of a world that doesn't exist where everybody individually behaves rationally and that is supposed to lead to a desired outcome overall. But this is simply a fallacy of composition because individual behavior (especially if it involves spending/saving/investment decisions) is always liked to others through balance sheets, basically simple accounting.

A simple illustration of the fallacy of composition: One person can stand up in the cinema to improve their view. But it would be a mistake to think that therefore if everybody in the cinema stood up everybody improved their view. In fact already the first person standing up, while improving their view, did impair the view of the person behind them. This is the fallacy of composition and when it comes to saving money it's known as the "paradox of thrift" which states that an economy as a whole can not save any money.

Saving by definition means that you spend less than your income in any given period which necessarily requires one or more other entities to spend more than their income to make the math work. Therefore savings and debt are the same thing, the two sides of the same coin.

Instead of just looking at a single individual you can divide the economy into sectors and watch the flows between those sectors which always have to add up to 0 (this is called sectoral balances or stock-flow-consistent modeling). If we take a simple closed economy (so not considering the government and there is no foreign sector) and divide it into households and companies and we also assume that the household sector as a whole wants to net save 5% of their income in every period (which is empirically about correct) that means to keep income for the households steady the companies have to run a deficit of equal size in every period (i.e. spend more than they earn). What that means is that savings always and necessarily equal investment which is usually stated as I = S. But if households try to save more than the companies expected and which will lead to less sales than expected companies are forced into a deficit in p1 which they will likely react to by decreasing their investment in the following period p2 even when the interest rate dropped because any investment is pointless if there is no demand for the products to invest in producing. So the propensity of companies to invest is mainly influenced by their expectations of future sales and this is genuinely uncertain. If companies do not invest at least as much as households save the economy will inevitably shrink and both income and investment will drop together in the following period. Of course when we consider a government it could also run a deficit to compensate for the gap (the US would be a prime example for that) and/or a country could run a trade surplus (Germany, China).

The main issue is that other than neoclassical mainstream economists think we are not living in a world where there is only Robinson Crusoe on a lonely island that knows when he saves some fish it's because he wants to manufacture a fishing rod. But that is essentially what neoclassical models model, they pretend that everybody is basically acting like a hive mind that knows all future spending and saving decisions in the future and where money is merely an infrastructure to facilitate barter. This is entirely wrong. Money is non-neutral and it is not just another commodity. It is created when somebody incurs a debt (e.g. by taking a loan from a bank) and it is destroyed when the debt is repaid. Banks create money, they are not acting as intermediaries between savers and borrowers. This has long been argued by Post-Keynesians and is well known for at least 100 years but mainstream economists only admitted that publicly just a few years ago.

See "Money creation in the modern economy" by the Bank of England (2014) for an example of that recognition.

Closing with to quotes:

"I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows" - Michal Kalecki

“it is much more realistic to say that banks "create credit", that is that they create deposits in their act of lending, than to say that they lend the deposits entrusted to them. And the reason for insisting on this is that depositors should not be invested with the insignia of a role they do not play. The theory to which economists have clung so tenaciously […] attributes to them an influence on the 'supply of credit' which they do not have. " - Joseph Schumpeter

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#84

I've read elsewhere that one of gold's biggest virtues as a store of value on planet earth is that it isn't so rare as to be useless, but it's rare enough that it functions as currency or high value storage. A goldilocks material for the purpose of wealth transfer and storage.

Gold never really served as a currency, rather as collateral. If gold is a currency than any marketable asset is. A good definition of "currency" or "money" would be one that distinguishes its characteristics from commodities and the only useful one I know of is the "credit theory of money". Money is a promissory note, an accounting device and that is true for at least 5000 years of monetary history tracking it back all the way to ancient babylonia. Throughout that history money has taken many forms reaching from clay tablets, metal coins, tally sticks, paper money all the way to digital currency but all those share a common principle which is that they are all records of indebtness, promises to pay. Barter is not and has never been the default mode of commerce at all or a anthropologist Caroline Humphrey put it:

“no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described… all available ethnography suggests there has never been such a thing”.

Barter as a form of commerce pre-dating monetary economies is a myth, a post-hoc rationalization of how money might have came about from the perspective of somebody that already lives in a monetary economy and it's entirely an armchair theory that does not rest on any historical and anthropological evidence.

What is true is that between parties that do not have an established relationship barter occurred and it is true that people seek to hold assets and demand tradable collateral during periods of unrest. But barter has never been a primary way to do commerce between parties that had a long-standing relationship. A theory of credit-money is way more useful to explain real world behavor than a metalist approach is. Gold isn't used in daily transactions, it primarily sits in basements and is also is not an input to allmost all of production. What makes us rich in real terms is not gold but knowledge, machines and technology.

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