commentary by Roger Erickson
The only thing worse would be mathematicians pulling numerals from the Strategic Numeral Reserve. :) Don't think we have one? Ask the NSA & CIA which specific Fed accounts they pull their cash from.
The only thing worse would be mathematicians pulling numerals from the Strategic Numeral Reserve. :) Don't think we have one? Ask the NSA & CIA which specific Fed accounts they pull their cash from.
Surreal. We're trying to reduce ourselves to the madness of hoarding fiat while wasting coordination. That's far, far worse than mixing up pennies & dollars. The onset of virtual psychosis can be even faster and just as bad as organic psychosis.
What's the opposite of a tax haven? A tax ogre? The impact of currency-tax ogres? Warren Mosler suggests that "they probably go to actual vault cash."
There are 3 sides visible in this process. One side involves those few bankers who are just trying to do their job - and are not yet crooks. Another side involves the 1% of people who mindlessly sequester fiat currency from their communities, and hoard it. The 3rd side involves all the rest of us citizens, letting such silliness persist.
Personally, it's staggering to think that there actually are a fair # of people who literally have more currency than they know what to do with. So they hire personal bank advisors, to avoid losing 0.02 % of what they'll never use anyway.
Yet which of these 3 sides is more stupid? The situation is rather like that involving a deranged mathematician, who has to hire people to hoard his stash of numerals for him. That alone is a bit comical. Yet something that stupid wouldn't matter if the rest of us weren't dumb enough to believe there aren't other sources of and pathways for expressing "fiat." If you, yourself had to put 2 + 2 together, would YOU go complain to that mathematician, saying "Look here, sir. It's fine for YOU to hoard, but out here, we're running out of numerals!" At that point, just who is kidding whom?
How much longer can this madness go on? If we let the 1% employ bankers & politicians the same way they do gardeners, maids & nannies ... are we all doomed?
Currency can't become more important than the real assets and the clever transactions which currency denominates, when used at will by smart people. The scale, alone of modern fiat currency, after all, increasingly makes it only virtual record keeping. How did we get to the surreal state where transaction records became more important than the real transactions being tracked, and the people making those transactions? Why are we still stuck trying to yoke our necessarily dynamic currency supply to static assets, instead of yoking it to the dynamic value of our own level of coordination ... i.e., to our organizational state, and hence to our adaptive rate?
Fiat currency value has to float, and depreciate, if a populous with increasing capabilities is going to accelerate the rate of pursuing their growing options ... not just hoard the virtual unit of exchange. One analogy would be the day when carpenters quit building houses, and instead only hoard tape measures - or "inches" themselves. At this rate, someday we'll have a war over the exchange rate between inches and centimeters!
If a nation viewing emerging options waits for someone to tell 'em who "owns" the virtual methods for exploring those options ... it'll be too late. They won't even get the license # of the real truck that drives off with their former options.
What part of "quality [including tempo]" of distributed decision-making don't hoarders understand? You can't hoard group agility, or adaptive rate.
We can hoard coordination capabilities ... but precisely by hoarding it distributed throughout our communities, not under the micro-management of any arbitrary subgroup.
