Showing posts with label simple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simple. Show all posts

Thursday, May 28, 2015

It's Amazing How Close People Can Get To Simplicity, Before Irrationality Returns

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Image result for ben franklin & the birth of a paper money economy images
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/publications/economic-education/ben-franklin-and-paper-money-economy.pdf

For example, take our dimwit reporters ... please! In an otherwise incredibly useful article, this fateful comment was still found lurking.
"How would government pay for prolonged 'deficits?' It would get the money by selling securities to the central bank in exchange for cash."

BMHOTK! Whatever! [That dull throbbing you hear is the sound of logicians pounding their heads on tables in frustration.]

If we "get" money by selling securities, how do we pay off the securities? Let me guess. We "get" securities back by selling money? So why bother?

What do YOU do when you have a prolonged deficit in fiat? Nothing? :( 

(Does anyone bother speaking intelligible language anymore, or only sophism?)

As an alternative to "buying" fiat, a public could just track & monitor currency issuance, as north american colonies did, starting from ~1680 onwards. If not for our revolution, we might still be using someone else's currency, and in the same position as Greece today.

Today, issuing & tracking our own currency supply could be done with cell phone apps. As MRW notes, we don't need a semi-independent, supposedly private Central Bank to pretend to independently "own" or even administer our currency supply. We only need a Central Bank by any other name, without all the mystical baggage. As has been noted in past MMT discussions, all CB functions could easily be run out of a basement room in the Treasury Dept, maybe one called the "Ministry of Money."

Since we let Central Bankers simply mark up bank accounts by striking a key on a keypad, then we can also just get rid of our Central Bankers, and instead automate the process of denominating transactions between ALL debtors and creditors! Fiat by fiat. Wotta concept! Sovereign currency could be just another Automatic Stabilizer (instead of an Automatic Destabilizer).

That way we could bail out regulators instead of bailing out banksters. :( Ya think?

Wake me if this electorate ever wakes up (to logic-101).

However, until then, it's full head of steam towards convenient wall.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

"Beyond Squid" making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to EconIntersect)



When a VC whirs its blender vanes in Silicon Valley, it's never too late to short John Deere? :(

So get yer synthetic food while it's cheap .... 'cuz Vampire Squid is coming to town.
“How I Stopped Eating Food”
Initial ingredients posted here.

These techie inventors initially seemed a bit naive about basic food & fiber operations (e.g., distinction between more-hydrolyzed canola oil vs, say, less-hydrolyzed olive oil - since corrected, apparently) - not to mention water itself.

Maybe Monsanto has already patented a follow-on, Colon Cleanser, derived from ... non-GMO-FOOD!!! [Nobody could have predicted that, right?]

Regardless, the biggest revelation is that extracted nutrients are currently so much cheaper than raw food! Ponder the likelihood. That outcome is a byproduct of existing but transient industrial and tax policy. An "externality," you might say - and therefore subject to arbitrage.

Next? Look for Goldman Sachs to start buying & hoarding basic nutritional ingredients, in the same warehouses* as their aluminum & copper & politician stockpiles? Just like rentiers buy up cultural information, and hoard it as "copyrighted" material, instead of serving culture, by distributing it wherever & whenever useful.

Per the classic plot line of Greek Tragicomedy, after Guar Gum Wars story appears, look for the inevitable Return of the Rentiers.

And in subsequently expected episodes: The Vampire Strikes Back, followed by something featuring colon-cancer rates and an unfinished Barf Star doomsday weapon.

Actually, all this also leads directly to a proposed OpenSource or fiat book:
 "Beyond Squid"

making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler
If OpenSource-Fiat is the basic medium of information, which binds all culture together, then the SquidSide of the farce is the inevitable parasite, opposing culture. A Squid Lord, you say? Supposedly extinct for 80 years? And how could one exist undetected in the midst of Democracy? Hmmm. Always tentacles there are. So which is the Squid, and which are the suckers?** To unravel this mystery, we need to travel back through UMKC, to the center of the universe, and on further, to Ogden, Utah, where local prophesy holds that another Marriner will someday bring nuance to the farce.*** Even those in Darwin should approve.


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* Congress is merely a Goldman Sachs warehouse? Where bankers stockpile policy, before doling it out to the highest bidders?

** Hiding in plain sight, as rentier & renters?

** but only when ready, these electorates are