Wednesday, January 9, 2013

What's it Say When a Fiat-Currency-CB Promotes Microfinance?

commentary by Roger Erickson

That there's a 2-tier approach to national liquidity?

This, from the Central Bank of a country that endorsed fiat currency 80 years ago? We need to send the entire St. Louis Fed back in their own WayBackMachine, to visit Marriner Eccles.

Maybe they could pick up on the concept of increasing the income of all citizens, so we could all use the banking system we already have?

If we have a system for providing liquidity to all citizens with real options, why not use it? Is the St. Louis Fed acknowledging that our existing banking system is - in practice - only for "high-income" people?

In a fiat-currency system, admitting that we have endorsed low-fiat and high-fiat Americans equates to constrained and unrestrained Americans, as a point of logic. That is both class based and system-non-science idiocy of course, since it ignores the logic of both sexual and cultural recombination. Since we have no predictive power, we need to practice exploring fully open Options Recombination, at breakneck speed - or else. Anything less is cultural suicide. If we don't explore our options, some other nation will.

Screw the Merchant Lobby. Free Options = National Liquidity = Managed International Trade.  We need liquidity and Free Options far more than Free Trade.  The Free Trade lie is promoted by a Merchant Lobby wielding only microintellect, but plenty of propaganda. Who's fooling whom, America?  Patriotism is NOT promoting your local merchant channeling Benedict Arnold.

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Today: St. Louis Fed ‏@stlouisfed Video: See how microfinance can work for low-income Americans

They're revisiting their own review from Sept 2011, here's the

St. Louis Fed: Lessons from Bangladesh: How Microfinance Can Work in America

SEPTEMBER 2011

Daniel Davis, former community development specialist with the St. Louis Fed, traveled to Bangladesh in the winter of 2010/2011 to examine the impact microcredit has had on the developing nation.

While there, he had the opportunity to spend time with leaders of some of the world's most innovative microfinance institutions, including Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Bangladesh and founder of the nation's Grameen Bank. Davis' insights are shared here.

Related Article:
"All I Really Needed To Know about Microfinance I Learned in Bangladesh," by Daniel Davis, spring 2011 issue of Bridges | PDF presentation

Related Video:
Interview with Microfinance Expert and Kiva Co-Founder Jessica Jackley, May 2011

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

From the comments on the Atlantic article about the TDC:

***********************
Iam Maynard

Don’t Panic. Remember to bring your towel.

Actually, if you really wanted to solve all of the problems of your economic systems, you could do that with a big pink eraser and a felt tip pen. A laptop and a wireless modem would work just as well.

Here is a fun premise for a science fiction movie: You visit a planet on which a species is living within a game that that species designed and created for itself to play, but that species does not realize they are playing a game. That species believes that everything within the game is actually real. Does that sound like a Matrix ripoff?

Let me see if I have this right? An economic system is a designed and created system? Check. All of the entities that comprise an economic system were designed and created by human beings? Check. All of the rules that govern the interactions between the entities that comprise an economic system were written by human beings? Check. Ok. So, an economic system is a game that humans have designed and created for themselves to use to allocate resources on this planet? Right.

Hmm, this game is so real to humans that they invented a science to study this game. They call this science, Economics. And, this science of Economics has been successful in what way in explaining the behavior of economic systems? Well, there are many hundreds of thousands of individuals, Economists, who believe that they can explain everything about the behavior of economic systems. Theories abound. Have they been successful? No. We are still waiting for any one of these Economists who might be able to explain the behavior of any one particular economic system. Still hasn’t happened? No. Ok.

Didn’t you know that the first rule of a designed and created system is that you can design and create it to do anything you want it to do? You could have designed this system to feed, clothe and house every member of your species by now.(Corollary One.) You did not do that.

Oh, that’s right. You don’t understand the behavior of a game that you, yourselves, created for yourselves to play.

Each and every economic system that has existed on this planet was designed and created by your species. You have understood the behavior of none of them. It takes a very special type of stupid to not understand the behavior of a game that you, yourselves, designed and created for yourselves to use.

I fart in your general direction.
*******************

Now Roger, was that you?

Roger Erickson said...

Wasn't me. :) Unfortunately, those "special kind of stupid" people are us.

Pogo was too polite to use such crude terms while making introductions.

And while it hardly seems to help to fart in your own elevator, some forms of transparency are invisible.

geerussell said...

That comment reminds me of Feynman describing physics as trying to work out the rules of chess from snapshot observations of a game in progress.

Economists are doing that... with actual chess. MMT and PK keep trying to draw their attention to the game rulebook but they're too busy trying to model whether a pawn can move off the board.