Outside the box thinking. Covers a lot of ground in a few paragraphs.
Our Kingdom — Power & Liberty in Britain
A Crisis of Money: the demise of national capitalism
Keith Hart | Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Goldsmith's, University of London.
Hart co-directs the Human Economy Programme in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria. His main research has been on Africa and the African diaspora. He has taught at numerous universities, most significantly at Cambridge where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He has contributed to the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of Money in an Unequal World. One recurrent theme of his work has been the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society. — Wikipedia
BEW, I fished this out of the comments on the Smith post at Zero Hedge. Not everyone over there is bonkers.
4 comments:
This paragraph doesnt make sense to me and is full of contradictions:
"The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. The crisis should be seen as the collapse of the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century. This has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971, a new regime of floating currencies emerged and money derivatives were invented in 1972."
The "gold standard" was the lawless regime (tautology) ...
The "money circuit" is not global anymore since we went OFF gold...
"lived by in the 20th century" yet he says right here that we went off gold in the 20th century so manifestly we are not "living under" the same "money system" in the 20th century....
etc...
The ability to discern contradiction is important.
Tom sounds to me par for the course at ZH...
rsp,
"Polanyi argued against the primacy of money as a medium of exchange and for a multi-stranded model of its evolution."
Systems of state currency didnt "evolve from the apes" or something ... they were designed and created by our Greek ancestors.
Aristotle: "Nomisma by itself is a mere device which has value only by nomos (law) and not by nature; so that a change of convention between those who use it, is sufficient to deprive it of value and its power to satisfy our wants."
"By virtue of voluntary convention nomisma has become the medium of exchange. We call it nomisma, because its efficacy is due not to nature but to nomos (law), and because it is always in our power to control it."
Plato: "Further, the law enjoins that no private man shall be allowed to possess gold and silver, but only coin for daily use"
Mat 17: "those getting the double drachma came to Peter and say, "Is not your teacher settling the double drachma tribute?.... (Peter) you will be finding a stater. Getting that, give it to them for Me and you."
Or I suppose we can ignore our history... and try to figure out how these systems "evolved" by random chance...
This is like when we humans desire the construction of a bridge system over a river chasm... what you always see is some people randomly show up out at the construction site and help some local materials evolve into a bridge... you see this happening all the time...
"Nation-states have been so successful in a relatively short time "
???????
What I find odd is that in my trading account my bonds are market priced and the values gyrate radically, I make more money by buying and selling the bonds than I do from collecting interest. In my treasury direct account, I buy bonds when I like the rates and the value is always the face value so I focus on getting a good return. In my trading account I don't care what the price, I care if I think I can better price later, I buy and sell thirty year bonds several times each month. Go figure.
Is isn't only bonds, our entire system of capitalism has become this way, including labor, where most value is captured through opportunism and playing markets and macro events. It has profound consequences because it means that markets aren't efficient when the masses, people with no good information, like me can make more money trading than holding.
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