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Anonymous Coward writes:
"http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/ 18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, 'there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'
Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Boxzy on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:47AM
Not one word of that was a proof that value of money exists after monetary collapse and that value of products is tied to money. Face it, the barter economy will survive capitalism WHEN it fails.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:50AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:23PM
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @01:22PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:32PM
> Products don't lose value like that.
Yes, they do. It happens often, and frankly as a visitor of this site you should have seen it happen a thousand times by now. Value is complicated to measure and that's why it's tempting to think of it as 'faith-based', but it doesn't actually work that way. If it did we wouldn't be able to have this discussion right now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:25PM
that value of money exists after monetary collapse
How does that support your claim? Markets for concrete things can collapse as well.
Face it, the barter economy will survive capitalism WHEN it fails.
You were speaking of money not capitalism which is merely the private ownership of capital (something which incidentally can continue even in a barter economy). It's worth noting that many monetary collapses have happened over thousands of years of recorded history since the development of money. What happens is not that society permanently devolves to the barter economy, but rather that it finds new mediums of exchange and keeps on moving.
One merely needs to consider a few real world examples. Consider what happened to the economy in the multiplayer version of Diablo II. The game is a fantasy-themed resource extraction game. Players kill "monsters" in the game which generate a variety of loot. There is a lottery aspect to the game since a variety of items can be randomly transformed into new gear with somewhat random benefits. The game has an official currency, "gold" which is dropped by most monsters and for which virtually all items can be sold in NPC stores. But gold became so prevalent and the use of it in game so limited, that it was near worthless. Did the gaming community then devolve to the barter economy? No, they instead used certain scarce items as currency, particularly, a magic ring called a "Stone of Jordan" [diablowiki.net].
This is the thing that people don't get about money. It has extraordinary usefulness when it is honored as a medium of exchange. So even when markets don't have a viable currency for some reason, they often will make, ad hoc, a new one to replace that.
(Score: 1) by Boxzy on Wednesday March 26 2014, @10:10PM
that value of money exists after monetary collapse
How does that support your claim? Markets for concrete things can collapse as well.
Jeez, explaining the obvious gets really old. THE MARKET is just another way of saying MONEY.
When markets collapse, when your whole monetary system collapses, the money vanishes into thin air. Concrete things can be bartered for other concrete things. CONCRETE THINGS DON'T VANISH. Sure you can't sell them for Market price after the market goes away, but I would have thought that was obvious. The thing to do, to increase your ability to survive, is to trade in USEFUL goods and products. ie. not gold, not silver, not various futures, not shares in facebook or whatever flavour of the month BS artist is generating faith this month. Remember Apple? how the products are sub-par but the perceived value is high? MARKETING. Yes, marketing is the entirety of the 'market' there's no there there. Just a lot of hot air and a strong smell of BS. and yes, I'm prepared for another round of downmods, just shows how angry and you all are and how much you need what I say to be wrong. How many of you downmodding me are athiests? You depend on this belief system that the almighty dollar and the pursuit of profit are above all criticism yet claim that those who believe in other non-physical ideology are crazy. Lots of hypocrisy around today.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 27 2014, @07:24AM
Yes, I'm aware of how it works because this sort of collapse has happened before (for example, hyperinflation). But in modern times, it hasn't been hard to reestablish a currency and markets again after the collapse. One merely needs to look at real world examples to see that you haven't thought this through.
And MARKETING != markets. You conflate two unrelated concepts.