BEST ANSWERS: (But there's still something missing I'll be reveling soon)
1) @Contra
Banks create money by typing two ledger entries. A loan asset and a deposit liability appear at the same instant. Nothing was transferred from a saver. The Bank of England admitted this in 2014. Roughly four fifths of dollars in circulation were spoken into existence this way. It spends like money. By the older test it is not money. Real money is a bearer asset with no counterparty. A deposit is a claim on a thing the bank has already lent out many times over. Mises called it fiduciary media. The plain word is fraud.
It is immoral because it violates honest weights. Every dollar created without prior production dilutes the dollars already held by people who did the work. Inflation is theft on a long timeline. The new money routes to those nearest the spigot. Banks, asset holders, federal contractors. Wage earners and savers pay the bill. It funds wars no household would fund by honest tax. It rewards the leveraged and punishes the patient, which inverts every virtue a free people depend on. It breaks inheritance, because a father cannot store thirty years of labor for his children in a unit that is being diluted in real time.
Most people miss it because the mechanism offends intuition, the vocabulary hides the substance, the textbooks still teach a model the central banks abandoned, and every institution that could expose it is funded by it. The damage is diffuse, so people blame the grocer, the landlord, the boss. The real cause sits upstream of every symptom. Bitcoin is the first credible exit in a hundred years.
2) @npub1futs...vwhk
Commercial banks trade in fiat currency. It is not money.
Fiat currency is debt, backed by nothing but the promise to pay it back.
It is literally a "trust me, bro" financial system.
Let's call it money for the sake of this conversation...
The banks lend money into existence. When you get a mortgage for example, and IOU is created (your mortgage), and a ledger entry is created on the bank asset side to balance the accounts.
That's it. And you pay interest on that balance. Which is usury. Which is immoral because having someone pay you interest on something that costs you nothing and which you have no risk exposure is predatory.
If the bank requires capital to meet regulatory requirements, it goes and borrows it from the central bank. The central bank types the number into a computer, and the amount is loaned to the commercial bank just like a mortgage, but at a much lower interest rate.
Most people don't understand it because it is an inversion of what money actually is, and what people intuitively think it is.
They simply can't wrap their heads around examples like if you buy a coffee at Starbucks with your credit card, you are creating money, but if you pay with cash, you destroy it.
3) @npub1vzvg...fw46
The bank is legally required to keep only a small fraction of our deposits (the reserve) and can lend out the rest. This creates an expanding supply, also known as the money multiplier.
For me, it's not money; it's just credit.
It is definitely immoral and dishonest for a bank to tell a depositor that their money is available on demand, while simultaneously lending that same money to someone else. This also creates credit bubbles that eventually burst.
People don't understand it because they are financially illiterate by design and trust institutions.
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Replies (17)
I’ll be waiting for the missing piece!
“It is immoral because it violates honest weights.”
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late for entry 🤣
but my answers:
1a) by decree.
1b) yes 💯 absolutely money.
2) it is formal slavery
3) the illusion of comfort is tempting
im a philosopher, i simply dont care about what any economic theory classifies money as.
The only answer to “is it money” is to look at the essence of money, its function, its form.
money is essentially the tool we use to communicate value.
any object people use to exchange value is money.
categorically
which is why the entire “broken money” thing pisses me off so
much. it’s just wrong, it’s false, and obfuscates the truth that the money is evil.
people are using fiat and debt as money.
it’s evil money, but money all the same.
I get what you are saying.
The philosophical point is that you are starting from a theoretical framework of economics.
Which already assumes money’s existence, and then creates abstract distinctions to explain relations.
theories can be useful or not useful, so i’m not saying theories have no place.
Whatever money is, it’s real.
So that’s why I like Aristotle’s approach to answering the “what is money” question.
Was there a world before money?
Yes.
What was the act the brought money into existence?
The act of exchange.
Aristotle’s definition of money doesn’t take any thinking to get, it’s instantly recognizable to anyone who uses money.
in the same way it’s awkward trying to tell people their “money is broken” it’s awkward trying to tell people their “money is fake”
in their real life, the “fake” and “broken” money is what puts food on their table and a roof over their head.
i think it a lot of normal people just stop listening when the theory we espouse doesn’t match the reality of their life.
which is why i advocate for bitcoin the way i do.
or more simply, proof of work doesn’t bring money into existence.
in the world before money, people were still doing work, creating positive energy outputs.
You already say it:
“Money…… It is a medium of exchange”
just stop there, stay in reality.
everything else after that is all theorizing and abstraction built on top of the “act of exchange”
becuse you build off of exchange, all these theoretical distinctions have no essential difference in reality.
“Temperature is akin to the human labor. Heat is the first derivative (money), while Heat Transfer is the second derivative (currency).”
not a good comparison
human labor is directed, purposes, already transferring, in motion.
heat is static
money has to be exchanged by two people.
by your own example, money is heat transfer
Aristole wasn’t wrong. he got it right. i have no desire to fight wizardry with wizardry.
“entirely held together by human perception.”
no
people create value in the world
they are putting that value in real monetary objects
fiat is a evil monetary object designed to extract and control
it’s a real thing, it’s a real monetary object.
they aren’t putting the value their create in their head, it’s not imaginary. it’s real money.
this is what happens when the “subjective theory of value” over corrects the “labor theory of value”
it’s just esoteric bullshit that doesn’t resonate with the reality of people’s lives.
but our upcoming book will correct this.
if we want to orange pill the masses, we have to sacrifice macro for the moral, theory for reality, economics for ethics.
when u talk speed and acceleration, those distinctions both belong to motion.
the way you are talking about flow and heat transfer, it all belongs to motion.
what i’m saying, and what Aristole argues is that money is the same category of thing as motion is.
the way you attempt to differentiate money and currency, “real money” and “fiat” would be the same as saying acceleration isn’t motion, only speed is real motion.
the way you use money and currency both equally belong to “exchange of real value”
when the government prints new dollars, they have no value in them.
they are exchanging those empty dollars with other people for real value.
if people didn’t accept printed money from the gov, it would never be injected into the economy.
if they didn’t exchange their value for fiat, fiat wouldn’t be money.
since people treat dollars fungibly, the empty dollars siphon out the real value contained in all the dollars already in existence.
the value equalizes across all containers.
that’s the “inflation” due to monetary debasement
my point is that if the gov prints dollars and you sell them your sheep, that is real and not just a perception in anyones head.
the value you created with your sheep, was exchanged for an object that now contains real value.
yes, perception, our subjectivity plays a part in our actions, but it does not negate the reality of objective consequence. it does not make it “all in our head” or “held together by perception”
i enjoy the back and forth.
thanks for clashing ideas in the yard with me. it defiantly makes me think. 🫡
“It simply grows until the spell breaks, and confidence/perception collapses.”
At that moment, what happens?
What action takes place in reality?
You are describing the real act of people taking their real value out of fiat dollars and putting them into other monetary objects, with abstract theoretical rhetoric
If done so in mass, the demand for those other monetary objects would skyrocket, and people would be happy to get them at any price.
nothing snaps, no thing breaks.
people are doing what they always do in an economy, create/store/exchange value, just with a different monetary objects
using abstract rhetoric of “breaking the spell” does not negate the reality that there is real value contained in fiat dollars.
this is the danger of approaching the domain of reality from abstract economic theories. inevitably something real and relevant gets abstracted away and we lose our tether to real life
Historically (there are multiple instances of fiat currency collapse) is happens very slowly, and then all of a sudden it happens fast. Historical accounts show something like this happens:
Moves are made by the government to prevent the use of alternative forms of payment (black markets). They use preventing criminal activity to sell this to the people.
Withdrawl and then transaction limits are imposed on accounts. Again in the name of preventing criminal activity.
Contagion starts in the inter-bank lending space, where one bank won't lend to another because they don't trust the other bank will be solvent enough to pay back the loan.
Central bank steps in to provide the bridging liquidity. This triggers private investment funds and offshore sovereign wealth funds to start moving capital out of that nation. They have to move slowly in order to keep the system stable while they extract their investments.
Central banks issue more currency to offset the fleeing capital. Government uses nationalization of key assets as a public good to cover the central bank activities.
Foreign investors stop purchasing treasury bonds due to the risk. Bond interest rates rise accordingly. Interest payable on outstanding government debt increases proportionally until it exceeds their ability to make the minimum interest payments. So they default.
No foreign country will export to a defaulting nation because the commodities contracts likely won't be honored.
This hits the real world in the form of things like fuel and food shortages. Banks impose further transactional limits that impact the ability for business to make payroll.
At this point the general public gets uneasy.
The leader of the country almost always goes on live TV / radio and announces everything is just fine and this is a temporary situation.
10 days to 2 weeks later the banks close at the end of day Friday, and don't open for business on the Monday. Internet banking is offline over the weekend.
On Monday the government announces that all physical currency is no longer valid, that a new currency is being issued and people have x weeks to exchange old for new at some ratio that is in the order of 10:1 or even 100:1. All electronic funds automatically adjust.
In countries that have bail-in laws, there is a depositor tax levied on all balances. Between 25 and 50%.
World bank typically is the lender of last resort to restart the economy, and the government sells off the previously nationalized assets to private foreign owners at pennies on the dollar.
Retail bank deposits are revalued downward, yet retail debt is not. This is how the people get skinned alive.
Nice break-down. However.....
Much different if the currency world reserve, correct?
who got the satos? 👀