of course, there aren’t any kings any more, not like there used to be…. and as for gold, frankincense and myrrh…
When I was a young lad I saw a really crap sci fi film about this blob of stuff that doubled in size / mass every 36 hours, it was clearly based on bacteria…. the money shot in the film was some boffin using a spinning top as a model of the earth, so he sticks a big lump of plasticene in the spinning top, this is what will happen in 720 hours when the blob has eaten europe, and the top wobbles off the table, eg the earth will wobble out of its orbit and everything will die.
Of course this is crap, the entire planet could be converted to blob and stay exactly where it is in orbit, assuming the blob can convert every element in the periodic table to itself, assuming it gets some external energy source to keep doing this conversion, assuming the one thing it never starts eating is itself.. then and only then could you get the planet blob, devoid of all life and all everything except blob, but it would still be in the same orbit with the same axial tilt and rotation, and the moon would still be a lump of dead rock.
Real science vs horror film “science”
And yet, this horror film “science” is EXACTLY the basis for what we can our economies, all of which are predicated on the idea known as “growth”.
It doesn’t matter if growth is 100% in 36 hours as in the film, or 1.5% in 365 days as in a “weak” western economy, they are both, mathematically speaking, exponential functions.
As a small aside, ALGEBRA used to be taught in all schools, it was dropped, and later on, in higher education, CALCULUS was taught, differential equations and all that jazz…. Algebra and Calculus are two utterly different things… you can balance your chequebook or do the accounts for an entire army or bank or country with algebra, and while algebra will allow zero as a number, it will not allow infinity as a number..it is more “1 divided by 0 does not go” than “1 divided by 0 is infinity”
The thing that ALL exponential functions have in common, without any exceptions whatsoever, is once that curve starts climbing the y axis it very very very quickly reaches infinity.
If the sci fi blob had space-faring ability then it doesn’t matter if the growth rate is 100% in 36 hours, or 0.00000001% in 36 hours, by the time it has consumed the solar system the milky way doesn’t have long to live…. this is because the solar system is comprised of a mind staggeringly huge, but still very finite, number of molecules.
If all the gold in the world is 1.5 million kilogrammes, and it is all made into 1, 10 and 50 gram coins, and I lend you 10 grams at 10% compound interest per week, and you make no repayments;
- One week later you owe me 11 grams
- One year later you owe me 142 grams
- Two years later you owe me 20,176 grams (20 kilos)
- Three years later you owe me 2, 865,885 grams ( 2.8 tonnes)
- Four years later you owe me 407,078,825 grams, one third of all the gold in the world
- Five years later you owe me 57,822,669,934 grams, 57 million kilos, or 38 times all the gold in the world.
Fuck it, the week is doable, even the year is possibly doable, just have to mug someone, but a year later it is seriously tough, and a year later we are talking a fort knox heist, and a year later impractical for the USA & China & Russia working together, and a year later flatly impossible for the entire planet working together…
How about a lower rate of interest, not 10% a week, but a rate of interest over fifty times lower, 10% a year… it doesn’t matter, in 200 years you owe me one third of all the gold on the planet, and in 250 years you owe me 38 times all the gold in the world…
..and it is that stage of the exponential curve that goes from one third of all the gold in the world to 38 times all the gold in the world, whereupon it starts to get REALLY steep and ridiculous, that is the common feature of all exponential curves….
You can start with 1 gram of gold at the lowest rate of interest ever given and a couple of thousand years later you owe me an entire solar system made of solid gold…. once that happens I am the only one with any gold, commerce and industry and trade ceases… permanently.
“Growth” then, when spoken of by an economist, is the same as growth when spoken of by a sci fi horror doctor about the one solitary molecule of cancer in your testicles, right now it is nothing, by tonight you’ll have huge and very impressive balls, by midnight you will be 100% alien growth.
So we get to a place where qualitative easing follows qualitative easing, billions of debt turn in to tens, then hundreds, then trillions of debt.
Suddenly Weimar republic and Zimbabwe hyperinflation doesn’t seem like so much a problem any more, when there are more dollars and pounds and yen and so on owed than there are litres of brine in the oceans, and remembering the exponential curves this means there will be more global debt in units of currency than there are molecules in the entire planet……
perhaps, like the sci fi film, we need an agent that will dissolve the blob, while miraculously making no changes to the mass or spin of the planet that the growth of the blob threatened to, at least, according to the storyline…
We can hyperinflate away those burgeoning trillions and quadrillions of fiat currency debt until they are no more substantial than higgs bosons or quarks, dissolving invisibly into the cosmic background radiation.
Trouble is, the problem isn’t and never was the trillions of fiat currency debt… that’s just an inevitable artifact of the actual problem, exponential functions.
Cut to closing scene of sci fi horror film where everyone is partying down like it is 1999 after saving the planet, camera pans down to one remaining cell of the blob, which splits into two…
Because the exponential function is still there.
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Much has been talked about FIAT currency, I even mention it here, as opposed to something like a gold backed currency.
The Weimar republic and Zimbabwean hyperinflation were products of fiat currencies, where the ink and paper on a 1,000 dollar bill is worth more than 1,000 bucks, so you have to make it a million dollar bill, then a hundred million dollar bill.
Fact is, we no longer have FIAT currencies.
You can roast a banker on a stack of burning ten trillion dollar notes, and then wipe your ass with them afterwards.
This is perhaps one of the most important things you have read in 2012.
We no longer have FIAT currencies.
We now have VIRTUAL currencies, traded virtually, in a world where the lightspeed limits of moving a trading house 50 miles closer to the stock exchange can lower ping times enough to gain advantages in HFT (high frequency trading) events that are over in milliseconds.
You can’t burn bits and bytes… and unlike anything based however loosely on real world physical phenomena such as paper and ink, the supply is essentially infinite…. you can quite trivially inflate the money supply to the point where there are more virtual dollars in existence than there are atoms in the universe.
1 x 10 exp 82, that is a 1 with 82 zeroes after it.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I can make that dollars, easy peasy
$10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
“You owe me the galaxy of Andromeda”
It is, literally, lunacy, but it is where we are at, our counting system for “keeping score” of who does what, who produces what, how much things cost to make and store and ship, has become completely virtual and completely arbitrary.
It’s a bit like the 1960’s programmers using two digit year codes and not worrying about y2k, they were not stupid people, far from it, but today solutions trump tomorrow’s consequences.
The same is true of the world of finance, despite popular belief, many of the worlds leading bankers and financiers are not merely stupid or greedy or power crazed fiends.
Like everyone else today they were born into a world where we shifted from one archaic system of monetary exchange based on precious metals, to another one based on fiat currency which is loosely tied to the amount of energy in a barrel of crude oil.
Going back to gold and silver coins isn’t the solution, fiat currency isn’t the solution, and as the world outside of the upper echelons of banking, and readers of this blog, is starting to realise virtual currencies aren’t the solution either.
Introducing calculus, an exponential function, into currency was the PROBLEM, it isn’t a new problem, 2,000 years ago the bible warned about usury, not because it begats evil bankers, but because it is an exponential function, and therefore a cancer.
I suspect, strongly, that as the cure is too daunting to stomach, we will see another band aid placed on exponential function, and weimar style deflation of virtual currencies….
A simple bash script run on all the banks saying “divide every single customer’s account by 100” will do the trick, the same trick as above with the gold, by shifting the steeper slopes of the exponential curve away to the right and further into the future.
Now you earn $20 dollars and hour and have $2,000 dollars savings and $200,000 owing on your mortgage and a gallon of gas is $4
Divide by 100 and you earn 20 cents an hour, have 20 dollars in savings, a 20k mortgage, and a gallon of gas is 4 cents, YOU are in EXACTLY the same place financially, in terms of buying power etc, but the exponential curve just got shifted further away to the right.
I have five comments:
(1) If your mortgage is $200k and you divide it by 100, the result should be $2k, not $20k—or am I missing something? I think I am getting the gist of what you are saying, though.
(2) How is dividing all price tags by 100 (or whatever) going to improve the situation? Let’s say you are now paying $1,200 a month for the hypothetical $200k mortgage. At the same INTEREST RATE, if all price tags are divided by 100, you will be paying $12 a month, it will take you EXACTLY the same length of time to pay off the mortgage (now $2k) and will be EXACTLY the same burden on you since now you will be making 20¢ an hour. The key is reducing the interest rate.
(3) The trick is that mortgages and other transactions are denominated in money, NOT REAL ASSETS like gold. So, as the money supply (perceived or real) increases (inflation), its value declines, so no, the end result is that you won’t owe the Milky Way in the end because the purchasing value of money gets trashed. HOWEVER, some can actually benefit from inflation (see below).
(4) How is the slashing of all price tags by 100 going to materialize? For such a thing to be effective, ALL price tags must be slashed by 100 SIMULTANEOUSLY. I am not sure how that can be enforced. Plus, what about rounding up/off? If slashing all price tags by 100 were possible, each ¢ will now be worth 100 times more that previously. For such ÷100 measure to be fair and effective, a centicent (1/100 of a ¢) should be instituted; otherwise, there is a lot of money to be made by merely truncating the resulting quotient to the nearest LOWEST ¢. (Remember that programmer who was working in finance some 35-40 years ago, who became rich by truncating values of transactions instead of rounding them off, siphoning off the difference—LESS THAN 1¢ per affected transaction!—to himself?)
(5) Nonetheless, the requirement of simultaneity of slashing each and every price tag by 100 brings up an interesting point: Inflation can be viewed as a disturbance, as a wave propagating through the economy. I will follow your lead and give a physical example. Take a 1ʺ trace on a printed circuit board (PCB) and look at two cases, one where the said trace carries a 10kHz audio signal and a second case where the PCB trace carries a 10GHz microwave signal. (I am not considering important details pertinent to microwave design, such as PCB material, copper roughness, width, and thickness, etc., to make a point. The PCB materials will be different in each case.) In the case of the audio signal, the 1ʺ trace can be considered lumped (point like); however, in the microwave case the trace should be treated as DISTRIBUTED (transmission line): Voltages and currents (and, more importantly, magnetic and electric fields), however you agree to measure them, are DIFFERENT at each end of the microwave PCB trace at the same instant of time. You have a WAVE propagating through the trace in each case, but in the audio case the wavelength is so long that the trace IN TERMS OF WAVELENGTH looks like a point; in the microwave case, the trace is more than a wavelegth long. Similarly, “quantitative easing” is like the driven end of the microwave PCB trace; it may benefit some and hurt others. Inflation is like the wave propagating through the PCB trace. Some can benefit or hurt differently as inflation propagates through the economy (analogous to the PCB trace). Example: So-called defense contractors. Money is created to pay them, so they can pay their employees (many of whom are otherwise unemployable “independent” skank ho’s by the way). The payees of the defense contractors are exposed to the “stimulous” FIRST and stand to benefit the most because they can grab the money and buy real assets, which will nominally appreciate when the resulting inflation hits other parts of the economy (like the receiving end of the PCB microwave trace) LATER. The difference is that the microwave engineer knows quantities like wavelength, propagation constant, and how the fields look around the PCB trace, and how they vary, but I am not sure if corresponding quantities can be evaluated for the economy (certainly that cannot be done from government statistics!). Qualitatively, though, you can see that whoever is closest to the created money stands to gain the most. Unsustainable interest can only be paid through inflation. Most people view inflation as lumped (equivalent to the audio PCB trace) while, in reality, inflation does not affect everybody the same at the same instant of time, like the wave propagating trough the microwave PCB trace. Similar considerations could apply to deflation.
Comment by Tim — December 25, 2012 @ 9:32 pm
Slashing all price tags used to be fairly common, just look at all the currencies that used to be known as the “new [local currency]”. Governments would introduce a new currency at a rate of 1 new to 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 old. Eventually people would drop the “new” part of the name and forget all the lessons that they should have learnt about inflation, allowing the usurers to pull the same con again. Slashing a few zeros off doesn’t help anyone except for the usurers, and you can be sure as hell they don’t keep too much wealth in liquid (cash) assets.
Comment by Tired Guy — December 27, 2012 @ 8:00 am
http://www.rogershermansociety.org/yugoslavia.htm
Comment by hans — December 27, 2012 @ 12:36 pm
And just like Mr. Milosevic http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/worlds-greatest-unreported-hyperinflation
our “Volksverräter” (Traitors) will most likely start WW3 with China/Russia when they get the word from their “money-masters” to finally dump our non-functioning currencies.
Comment by hans — December 27, 2012 @ 12:47 pm
it’s hard to see any major reset that does not include a ground war… I wish it were not so… but….
Comment by wimminz — December 27, 2012 @ 12:48 pm
Theoretical discussions like this are necessary and fruitful, therefore nonexistent in sheeple-level politics or finance.
But without ripping out the root(heh) of this problem, namely the ruthless & parasitic individuals responsible for maintaining this slave master mechanism.
So without first getting rid of these fuckers and their minions in politics, finance and the judicature, nothing much will change.
It would just prolong the mathematically inevitable systemic collapse and thus our own enslavement.
But here´s the REAL problem.
Most people aren´t even aware of such vermin. Thus they will be obliviously helpless again when “the money-masters” reintroduce themselves as our saviors. To deliver us from the financial holocaust they themselves designed for us.
That´s the real boot they want to eternally stomp our faces with, IMHO.
Comment by hans — December 26, 2012 @ 12:44 am