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Pandemics can't be stopped with monopoly bills

R

relator

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The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
 
Pandemics are stopped by strong leadership and decisive action. Trump is a moron and ****ed it all up.
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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I hear if you make a tonic with real silver it cures ya, enlarges your penis, and makes you super attractive to womens.
 
EU countries I don't think are monetary sovereigns. Debt is serious to them...but the EU can I think still act to help nations with debt issues.
The U.S. is a monetary sovereign, it creates money as it sees fit, so debt to ourselves ....within some reasonable proportion to our economic capacity/state, is not a boogeyman.

many people in the U>S. live in a home paid for with "monopoly money". They seem to enjoy the nice digs, and most handle that debt well enough.
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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All monies are monopoly money. It's just paper currency that is circulated for transaction-related purposes of goods and services. All this money to bail out companies or the airlines or handed out to Americans monthly in checks are just numbers on paper. The US Treasury just prints more to keep the flow of funds moving. Pandemics are stopped by mitigating the spread of the virus until the numbers of new cases recede so low that the virus is no longer a threat to the public.
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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Good grief....

Monetary and fiscal actions are being implemented to mitigate the recession.
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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I'm curious as to your definition of "real money." (This is a serious question.)
 
ecofarm said:
Pandemics are stopped by strong leadership and decisive action. Trump is a moron and ****ed it all up.
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If Trump claimed the benefits of breathing, some people would suffocate out of sheer spite.
 
JohnfrmClevelan said:
I'm curious as to your definition of "real money." (This is a serious question.)
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Krugerrands and casino chips from Foxwood.

Issac Newton was knighted for this currency theories, not his theories of gravitation, allowing Britain to build a colonial empire. Don't hit me on head with an apple while I'm napping under a tree with an empty bottle of ale.
 
ecofarm said:
The poor, poor victim.
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The same people who spent years criticizing the man for allegedly being an authoritarian megalomaniac are now spending their time playing arm chair communist dictators. This kind of procedural incongruence is unlikely to ever hit them in the head because it rests on a pretense of knowledge and wisdom they apparently ignore to not possess.
 
JohnfrmClevelan said:
I'm curious as to your definition of "real money." (This is a serious question.)
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Any sufficiently liquid asset is money. Depending on where you draw the line for that, you can include more or less stuff.

Of course, all such assets may become illiquid at some point in time, though I wouldn't exactly worry about the USD becoming illiquid anytime soon. For starters, as long as the government collects taxes in dollars, you have at least some use for it. More to the point, we know that in sufficiently harsh times, it is possible to increase the supply of money a lot without causing even mild inflation. That isn't a theoretical conclusion, but an empirical fact: it's possible because it happened about 10-12 years ago. We also know for a fact that if we are disposed to eat our socks, even high inflation rates can be killed because, again, that happened across North America and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.

But for some reason, there are people who think that there is something "more real" about a lump of gold than about paper money or its digital format. This is incredibly puzzling to me since gold as a medium of exchange would nonetheless rest on a social convention. More to the point, what exactly would make a social convention any less real than something you touch?
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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What is "real money"? Money is a concept, and in our system it's funneled to those who do nothing but leach off of those who actually produce.
 
phattonez said:
What is "real money"? Money is a concept, and in our system it's funneled to those who do nothing but leach off of those who actually produce.
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Who are "those who do nothing but leach"?
 
relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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Haven't you heard? Neo-classical economics died when Herbert Hoover left office and Keynesian economics is on its deathbed. All hail MMT! :lol: Japan is the guinea pig for this line of thinking, and so far I'm not impressed. Now we seem to be joining the club. I mean, my stocks are going back up--for the moment, but, yeah, I agree that some day all of this debt is just going to come crashing down on our heads. When that happens is anyone's guess.

A short rundown of the Japanese version of Modern Monetary Theory: Run up huge fiscal deficits building infrastructure and paying pensions to old folks until your national debt exceeds 2.5 times your GDP. Don't worry about the debt, because your Ministry of Finance can just float bonds and sell all of them, if necessary, to the Bank of Japan. The Bank of Japan can then swap the bonds for dollars or issue yen to trade with other central banks for the foreign currency it needs and still have a currency thought by foreign traders/investors to be a "safe haven." Japanese banks dealing with negative interest rates can swap yen for dollars by discounting them and then investing in dollar-denominated assets, AT LEAST until the Federal Reserve pulls the rug out from under them and lowers its Fed funds rate to zero. European and Japanese banks could make money on yen/dollar or euro/dollar interest rate spreads, but that will prove problematic in an environment where a 10-year Treasury pays 0.80% interest. One would think it's more difficult for foreign banks to do much discounting to entice American banks to engage in swaps agreements in such an environment, but then what do I know? I'm not a banker.

In the meantime, the remedy? Possibly even more debt:

Japan's government is considering a fiscal stimulus package worth roughly 10% of annual economic output to combat the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, the Nikkei newspaper said on Wednesday.

The package, worth more than 56 trillion yen ($503 billion), will include cash payouts to households who have seen their income fall due to the epidemic, the paper said without citing sources.

That size of stimulus would put Japan in line with interventions from other major developed countries to fend off the shock from the health crisis that has closed shops and offices, locked down national populations and stretched supply chains close to breaking point.

Japan considering stimulus package worth 10% of GDP -Nikkei | Nasdaq
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I don't see this ending well in the long run. It could, I suppose, go on for many more years, as it has already, with the Japanese economy limping along under the burden of massive public debt. But I wouldn't be a big purchaser of yen at this point. And if foreigners decide to stop buying yen the drop could be steep and swift. Central banks that have tried to manipulate the value of their currencies in the FOREX markets generally haven't succeeded for long, but only time will tell if this time it's different.
 
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TheEconomist said:
But for some reason, there are people who think that there is something "more real" about a lump of gold than about paper money or its digital format. This is incredibly puzzling to me since gold as a medium of exchange would nonetheless rest on a social convention. More to the point, what exactly would make a social convention any less real than something you touch?
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But at least the "social convention" regarding gold has some basis in logic in that it is tangible, durable, relatively rare, and finite. There is something "more real" in knowing that the value of an ounce of gold can't be easily debased on the whim of a government. It has a history and tradition of serving as a currency for thousands of years. On the other hand, modern fiat currencies have absolutely no intrinsic value and are based solely on faith the governments will keep them relatively rare and finite. Once that trust is shattered, look out below.
 
Ahlevah said:
But at least the "social convention" regarding gold has some basis in logic in that it is tangible, durable, relatively rare, and finite.
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Whether or not it is tangible is inconsequential for the question of value. As many as a hundred million corpses have been left behind communism, at best in the pursuit of an ideal and at worst in the pursuit of power and influence, neither of which are tangible. Moreover, as far as human purposes are concerned, there is nothing about the durability of gold that makes it more suitable than the assets we today consider to be money: all of it will outlive you, very likely several times over. I also have yet to run into anything that was not in finite supply and that includes all currencies, even under hyperinflated regimes.

As for scarcity, I am afraid we have a bit of problem here. Suppose that the moon is up for sale. There might be only one such moon orbiting the Earth, but if no one has any desire or use to own it, it is not scarce in any meaningful sense of the word. Stated differently, scarcity is a notion of distance between supplied and demanded quantities. It literally means "insufficient for the demand." If you allow me to paraphrase Carl Menger, all the gold of Fort Knox is without value to a man stranded on an island. That's why contemporary economic theory begins with the simple idea of supply and demand. It's the minimum you need to make sense of things.

Ahlevah said:
On the other hand, modern fiat currencies have absolutely no intrinsic value (...).
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Then, you misread me. I meant to say that absolutely nothing has intrinsic value. You have a market for gold, you have a market for currencies, each with actors making choices from both sides of the market.

Ahlevah said:
There is something "more real" in knowing that the value of an ounce of gold can't be easily debased on the whim of a government. On the other hand, modern fiat currencies (...) are based solely on faith the governments will keep them relatively rare and finite. Once that trust is shattered, look out below.
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And there we have it. The only reason people actually go down that rabbit hole is distrust in governments. It's not unwarranted to a certain degree, even if I don't think it's a reasonable expectation for countries like the United States or Canada. Even setting this aside, it's unnecessary to go further than saying you distrust the government generally. I don't know if ever heard of Carl Menger and the "marginal revolution," the debate surrounding the nature of value in economics has been settled over a 100 years ago. We think in terms of preferences and opportunity costs because it is manifest to everyone involved that value doesn't manifest itself as an objective property, but as the consequence of human interactions.
 
TheEconomist said:
As many as a hundred million corpses have been left behind communism, at best in the pursuit of an ideal and at worst in the pursuit of power and influence, neither of which are tangible.
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I used to work with a Vietnamese gentleman who had been a pilot in the South Vietnamese Air Force. After the North Vietnamese communists invaded in 1975, he was imprisoned for five years in a so-called reeducation camp. After his release, he escaped from the country on a fishing boat in the South China Sea, ultimately ending up in a UN-administered refugee camp in the Philippines. He was able to bribe and pay his way out of the country because he had gold. Assuming you could keep it dry, imagine trying to do that with nearly worthless Vietnamese currency. Notwithstanding the fact that the notes had Uncle Ho's portrait on them, even the communist cadres didn't want that crap. But GOLD? You betcha!

TheEconomist said:
Moreover, as far as human purposes are concerned, there is nothing about the durability of gold that makes it more suitable than the assets we today consider to be money: all of it will outlive you, very likely several times over. I also have yet to run into anything that was not in finite supply and that includes all currencies, even under hyperinflated regimes.
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Long after you, I, and all the banknotes on the planet have turned to compost, the gold mined in the days of the Pharaohs will still be here. :2wave:

TheEconomist said:
As for scarcity, I am afraid we have a bit of problem here. Suppose that the moon is up for sale. There might be only one such moon orbiting the Earth, but if no one has any desire or use to own it, it is not scarce in any meaningful sense of the word. Stated differently, scarcity is a notion of distance between supplied and demanded quantities. It literally means "insufficient for the demand." If you allow me to paraphrase Carl Menger, all the gold of Fort Knox is without value to a man stranded on an island. That's why contemporary economic theory begins with the simple idea of supply and demand. It's the minimum you need to make sense of things.
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I tell you what. You can have the moon, and I'll take all the gold in Ft. Knox. ;)

TheEconomist said:
Then, you misread me. I meant to say that absolutely nothing has intrinsic value. You have a market for gold, you have a market for currencies, each with actors making choices from both sides of the market.
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Nonsense. A basic rule of debate is to, wherever possible, avoid words defining absolutes because: 1) there are few absolutes; and 2) all it takes to invalidate your position is one example. You've managed to use two words defining absolutes--"absolutely" and "nothing"--in the same sentence. :lol: Of course, in our discussion it depends on how you define the word "intrinsic." It would be difficult to place a monetary value on an igloo in the middle of an inhospitable, desolate Arctic, but it does have value in and of itself to the Eskimo who inhabits it, unless he wants to freeze to death.

TheEconomist said:
And there we have it. The only :doh reason people actually go down that rabbit hole is distrust in governments. It's not unwarranted to a certain degree, even if I don't think it's a reasonable expectation for countries like the United States or Canada. Even setting this aside, it's unnecessary to go further than saying you distrust the government generally. I don't know if ever heard of Carl Menger and the "marginal revolution," the debate surrounding the nature of value in economics has been settled over a 100 years ago. We think in terms of preferences and opportunity costs because it is manifest to everyone involved that value doesn't manifest itself as an objective property, but as the consequence of human interactions.
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Yeah, I don't trust governments to preserve the value of their currency. And why would anyone, given the stated goal of monetary authorities to devalue their currency at a steady rate, which they seem to think they can control over the long term. But do I own gold because of that? No, actually, I don't own ANY gold, either physical gold or in the form of a proxy such as a gold ETF. But I'm not dumb enough to loan the federal government dollars for 30 years at 1.45%, either. I would rather own a productive asset like shares in a corporation that should increase in value over time, unlike gold which really will just maintain its purchasing power over time. Maintaining a stable value is supposed to be a prime trait of a currency.
 
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relator said:
The debts of the countries convert the money of those countries into monopoly bills, and pandemics must be stopped with real money, not with monopoly bills.
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Got news for you... pandemics can't be stopped. Period. All of this isolation business is just to slow the spread of the virus. About 70%+ of the population is going to end up getting this thing. That's already in the cards. What's not in the cards is when we get it. If we all get it at one time, that's obviously going to swamp the healthcare system and a lot of people are going to die who don't have to... but if we can spread it out over a longer time period, then the healthcare system at least has a fighting chance to keep up. Or at least not get swamped any more than it has to.
 
Ahlevah said:
Long after you, I, and all the banknotes on the planet have turned to compost, the gold mined in the days of the Pharaohs will still be here.
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You're missing the point. As far as human purposes are concerned, anything that can outlive you several times over is sufficiently durable to be used as a medium of exchange.

Ahlevah said:
Of course, in our discussion it depends on how you define the word "intrinsic." It would be difficult to place a monetary value on an igloo in the middle of an inhospitable, desolate Arctic, but it does have value in and of itself to the Eskimo who inhabits it, unless he wants to freeze to death.
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An intrinsic property of an object is something which is an integral part of an object, something which cannot be dissociated from the object. Value is the consequence of human desires and needs as they meet the cold hard fact that not all of them can satisfied. In the economic jargon, value is a matter of supply and demand; in the sociological jargon, value is a social fact. There is nothing about gold itself that makes it valuable independent of the judgement of human beings. The reason I made an absolute statement is simple: it's a tautology. Litterally nothing is intrinsically valuable. To find out what something is worth, you need to find out what someone is willing to sacrifice to acquire it.

The example you give above: there is a demand for a shelter and there is a limited amount of sheltered space. The value of the igloo is whatever the Eskimo is willingto sacrifice to acquire it. That's a statement about their preferences, not about the igloo.

Ahlevah said:
Maintaining a stable value is supposed to be a prime trait of a currency.
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Stabilizing the price level is completely pointless. Making choices requires comparing alternatives and the relevant metric here are price ratios, not prices. We could decide tomorrow to work using pennies instead of dollars. This would multiply every price tag, account balance, paychecks, etc by a unique factor of 100 -- and it would have exactly no relevance, whatsoever. If you prefer, we could use a factor of 20 billions. Besides being a mouthful and requiring us to print new bills, it changes nothing.

The little story above should give you a hint as to what actually is important: stabilizing the inflation rate. We suspect that rapidly changing prices tend to cause both more susprises and more dispersion in prices which leads to unanticipated redistribution of ressources. There are also reasons to think that inflation is costlier than most macroeconomists would have thought, especially because of the large impacts it can have on pricing adjustments in imperfectly competitive markets (such as on wages in the labor market). So, we should try to make sure it's not too high and that it's rather stable. You might ask if we should make it zero. I doubt that it would be such a smart move because there is an obvious difficulty in convincing people to accept a reduction in income. A mild positive rate of inflation can give you a fall in real income without having to bring the nominal figures down.

If someone wants to bet that the Federal Reserve will generate hyperinflation through QE, I am more than willing to take that action. It's not going to happen.

Ahlevah said:
But I'm not dumb enough to loan the federal government dollars for 30 years at 1.45%, either. I would rather own a productive asset like shares in a corporation that should increase in value over time, unlike gold which really will just maintain its purchasing power over time.
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You're comparing apples and oranges.
 
Mach said:
EU countries I don't think are monetary sovereigns. Debt is serious to them...but the EU can I think still act to help nations with debt issues.
The U.S. is a monetary sovereign, it creates money as it sees fit, so debt to ourselves ....within some reasonable proportion to our economic capacity/state, is not a boogeyman.

many people in the U>S. live in a home paid for with "monopoly money". They seem to enjoy the nice digs, and most handle that debt well enough.
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Government debt is a serious issue. 'Paid' is past tense. This is a discussion about the future. The EU owns their own printing press so they are fiscally sovereign.
 
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