@Song of the lark

Against his future releases. Art imitating life or something.

Cyber currencies are attractive because they move up and down, mostly up lately. Although I thought I saw that there is a growing short position in Bitcoin. This is a good thing for two reasons it makes Bitcoin more anti- fragile ( good for stability of Bitcoin) and it allows money fiends to play both sides. Up and down.
I can imagine for example a cyber currency based on say an extremely popular movie series (Harry Potter) for instance. The anticipation of the next episode and the febrile imagination of everyone from young people to money fiends would catapult it upward. Like the old fashion movie serials you would have to cliff hang it and keep it going. Heh! Potter coin coming right up.

....TPTB are pushing an electronic version of the failed gold standard onto the public.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard about this "failed gold standard." Sometimes I've been told, "You can't eat gold." I don't know what these things mean. Does the term "failed gold standard" come from an official government narrative? Or does it come from a timely political narrative? The only economic narrative I can find refers to a time when Richard nixon began recklessly manipulating the price of gold and then deliberately broke the Bretton Woods agreement. Typical economic narratives read like this:

...Richard Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard in 1971. From that year forward, the world's currencies were all floating, with no one currency having a fixed value -- a circumstance that led to the establishment of foreign exchange markets: the forex.

Did Bretton Woods Succeed in Achieving its Goals?

In one obvious way, it ultimately did not: since the abandonment of the gold standard, all world currencies float against one another -- a situation inherently less stable than the preeminence of the U.S. Dollar from 1944 until 1971.

Aside from the abandonment of the establishment of the Bretton Woods-initiated gold standard, there is no clear answer to the question.

Both the World Bank and the IMF exist today -- itself a remarkable achievement in a volatile world -- but they are widely criticized....

The economic world is constantly evolving and adapting along with the geopolitics situation. The reserve currency, however, is traditionally backed by something beyond military invasions and doomsday devices. In recent years, it was backed by oil (priced in US Dollars), but it could be backed by any commodity of established value.

The reality is, the system is currently being reset back to the gold standard. Oil will be priced in both Gold and Chinese Yuan, and the world seems to be fine with that. Enthusiastic, even. I think the "failed gold standard" was fake news and US propaganda push on the American people by the Nixon regime. That toxic spill should have been mopped up a long time ago.

@Pluto's Republic

....once you get over the shock.

In the past two weeks there have been a couple of discussions here about Michael Hudson and about using MMT as a lens for viewing macroeconomic systems. He's a wonderful economist, despite the astonishing fact that he was trained inside the US. (I assume that the University of Chicago provided the fiber that allowed him to transcend the barren soullessness of the ethics-free Ivy League influence.) As an aside, there seems to be a buzz in certain corridors of publishing where there is amusing speculation about why Michael Hudson has the shittiest book jackets of any pop economist currently in print. The CT falls along the predictable political divide, but publishing doesn't have a history of such going's on. But I digress.

When QE came along I was apoplectic, but it was hard to raise a popular alarm because QE was too "esoteric." In other words, the economic familiarity among the people was too thin support any flashy logic showing QE for what it was. While many understand the economics of a fiat currency, the real action comes when QE is pushed into a global reserve currency, like the US Dollar. The turbocharged privilege of the US really lit up. The cavalier aggressiveness of QE was violently breathtaking, as the US began exporting its excess inflation to every smaller nation we traded with, and they all had to suck it up and stagnate. This story was never told with the cynical delivery it needed to stick. But it didn't really matter, because those who were captured by their 401Ks were all in on equities, so they were riding a sure thing to the top. That what QE guaranteed to do.

If you weren't in the market, you went into debt. You were holding the bag. Some time back, I calculated that between 1999 and 2015, the annual personal income in the US went from $5 trillion to $15 trillion. It tripled. So I ask people, "Did your income triple over that fifteen year period?" If everyone's income had tripled, the US would have the same type of economic expansion we had from 1940 to 1980. That's when earnings all went up about the same percentage across all brackets. That's how the New Deal regulations were designed to work. So, if your income didn't triple between 1999 and 2015 — and if no one you know experienced a 300 percent increase — then who got all that excess income, and was it taxed as income? That is, did Federal government revenues triple between 1999 and 2015? They should of. Deep thoughts....

::

On to cryptocurrencies, I have a different take on it. However, my knowledge is shallow here, and I am probably very influenced by what I've read. Arendt, you ask:

….TPTB start this bandwagon for electronic currency - whose main purpose is to hijack what little real value remains in money and channel it straight to the crooks who already stole most of the real value in our economy - because they're the ones who own most of the Bitcoins.

Does anyone else think e-currency is the way TPTB plan to dump all of the losses of the next crash onto the peasants?

I don't think that's what's going on. I see them doing what they can to block the most important applications of crypto-currencies. The strange old-fashioned regulations thrown at this new money in the US is driving ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) out of the US, and that is driving out innovation and growth. Here's why and how: The US clearly has a poverty-stricken Federal government that must snatch food out of people's mouths and deny them health care in order to pay for their bullets and murder weapons. That means it is not a government that can fund big ideas and global aspirations. Crypto ICOs were poised to boost venture capitalism and to expand funding to innovators. But they found themselves blocked by strange new rules that don't really apply. So, the Crypto economy has wasted no time in jumping to smarter nations that can feel the pulse of the future, where they can operate with fewer inappropriate regulations. The Crypto ICOs have gone to Japan, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Israel, South America, and the Middle East to bloom and to open innovation markets. Additionally, the public in those places can move in or out of the crypto currencies all day long at ATMs — a process that is draconian and punitive in the US. That's because the US banksters and their paid regulators do not want currency competition in the US. They certainly don't want to do any extra work that might entail. In their view, it's unfair competition that BitCoin isn't a unit of debt, like "normal official" money is.

The push for a cashless economy would turn the US into a gulag of black money. Just like US sanctions, this type of imperial money manipulation always cuts the US off at the knees with unintended consequences. This doesn't mean they won't find some way of making it happen. But using Bitcoin or real cryptos to get there is unlikely. Block chain currencies confer too much power on ordinary people, elevating them to the level of "sovereign." I think the banksters will go with credit cards or something similar, giving them complete control as well as a transaction record for their dossiers.

I know currencies fairly well, but I am a low-info commenter on crypto-currencies. I'm winging it with what logic I can see.

@Pluto's Republic
My brother, who has traded stocks for years, wanted to play with cryptocurrencies (ccs), and asked me to investigate. Here's what I've learned so far.

They're simply computer programs creating "money" out of nothing, which is the way money has always been created. They are a wet dream for libertarians, and I expect that libertarians' blind ideological faith will support ccs far beyond the point a normal financial bubble would burst.

Anyone with programming skills can create ccs. I read a couple weeks ago there are now over 800. Bitcoin is the first, and the largest (both by units issued and by market value). CT is that the program was actually developed and launched by the NSA. Given its behavior and effects so far, I rather doubt it. A number of big banksters like Dimon of Chase Morgan have made noises of great dislike, but a lesser known cc that the big banks, the Bank of England, and some other establishment institutions are working on is Ripple. Ripple is being developed to replace the international interbank system; the motive is for the banks to save money by cutting out the middlemen.

The holdings of ccs is reportedly more concentrated than global wealth. Also, hackers have already stolen an estimated 14 percent of all ccs. So, my view is that ccs are entirely monopolized by people with very advanced computer programming skills. The NSA CT makes sense in this context.

Basically, a cc is a computer program that must be installed on a number of independent computers, exactly the same way TCP/IP and other "protocols" (computer programs) that enable computers to communicate with and understand each other, must be installed an all independent computers that want to use them. In the case of ccs, the computer program includes very advanced cryptographic capabilities to code and decode all transactions in a particular cc. Once some set number of independent computers solve the cryptographic coding and agree, then the transaction is entered in the "blockchain" of the network of independent computers that have the cc program installed. This process of coding and decoding transactions, then storing them, is called "mining." Nobody gets paid for "mining" in anything other than the cc they are mining, and willing to make their computer a part of the network, or "blockchain." In the case of Bitcoin, the cryptographic problem to be solved is programmed to become more and more difficult as more and more Bitcoins are "mined" and issued by the software.

CCs are stored in "wallets" which is merely the word used to denote the software you must install on your computer or cellphone to conduct a cc transaction. The wallet stores your user codename, which is some godawful complex aggregation of two dozen or more random letters, numbers, and characters. Wallets are so insecure, that holders of ccs are advised to transfer their ccs from their wallets to "cold storage" which is the term used to denote a computer or other device that also has the wallet software on it, but which is never, ever connected to the internet.

Actually buying ccs is incredibly frustrating, as the exchanges are often overwhelmed with transactions, and just plain crash. Many of the exchanges are mere one person operations, and since there is no regulatory authority or professional accreditation, lots of these people appear to have gotten in way over their heads in regards to programming skills and ability. But anyone with enough money can but a computer, install the software, and try to do some "mining."

The cryptography is very advanced and very complex and takes an incredible amount of computing. This is the reason ccs are rapidly becoming notorious for the amount of energy they consume. Do not expect this environmental concern to register with the programmers and miners, since most of them are libertarians, and pretty hardcore libertarians at that. These are the types of people who worship Ayn Rand and go to rallies protesting Obamacare with signs proclaiming "selfishness is a virtue." Allow me to mount by soapbox here. This belief system is a frontal attack on the republican ideology on which the USA was first founded, and the popularity of this belief system is a fair measure of how corrupted the citizenry of the republic have become. Nobody apparently understood the danger this ideology represented, including, I think it is important to note, those parts of the left that had come believe the USA was not at all revolutionary, just more rich old white guys telling other rich old white guys to fuck off. This misinterpretation is now showing itself to be fatal, as the left has utterly failed to understand and withstand the ideological warfare of which libertarianism is just one part.

....once you get over the shock.

In the past two weeks there have been a couple of discussions here about Michael Hudson and about using MMT as a lens for viewing macroeconomic systems. He's a wonderful economist, despite the astonishing fact that he was trained inside the US. (I assume that the University of Chicago provided the fiber that allowed him to transcend the barren soullessness of the ethics-free Ivy League influence.) As an aside, there seems to be a buzz in certain corridors of publishing where there is amusing speculation about why Michael Hudson has the shittiest book jackets of any pop economist currently in print. The CT falls along the predictable political divide, but publishing doesn't have a history of such going's on. But I digress.

When QE came along I was apoplectic, but it was hard to raise a popular alarm because QE was too "esoteric." In other words, the economic familiarity among the people was too thin support any flashy logic showing QE for what it was. While many understand the economics of a fiat currency, the real action comes when QE is pushed into a global reserve currency, like the US Dollar. The turbocharged privilege of the US really lit up. The cavalier aggressiveness of QE was violently breathtaking, as the US began exporting its excess inflation to every smaller nation we traded with, and they all had to suck it up and stagnate. This story was never told with the cynical delivery it needed to stick. But it didn't really matter, because those who were captured by their 401Ks were all in on equities, so they were riding a sure thing to the top. That what QE guaranteed to do.

If you weren't in the market, you went into debt. You were holding the bag. Some time back, I calculated that between 1999 and 2015, the annual personal income in the US went from $5 trillion to $15 trillion. It tripled. So I ask people, "Did your income triple over that fifteen year period?" If everyone's income had tripled, the US would have the same type of economic expansion we had from 1940 to 1980. That's when earnings all went up about the same percentage across all brackets. That's how the New Deal regulations were designed to work. So, if your income didn't triple between 1999 and 2015 — and if no one you know experienced a 300 percent increase — then who got all that excess income, and was it taxed as income? That is, did Federal government revenues triple between 1999 and 2015? They should of. Deep thoughts....

::

On to cryptocurrencies, I have a different take on it. However, my knowledge is shallow here, and I am probably very influenced by what I've read. Arendt, you ask:

….TPTB start this bandwagon for electronic currency - whose main purpose is to hijack what little real value remains in money and channel it straight to the crooks who already stole most of the real value in our economy - because they're the ones who own most of the Bitcoins.

Does anyone else think e-currency is the way TPTB plan to dump all of the losses of the next crash onto the peasants?

I don't think that's what's going on. I see them doing what they can to block the most important applications of crypto-currencies. The strange old-fashioned regulations thrown at this new money in the US is driving ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) out of the US, and that is driving out innovation and growth. Here's why and how: The US clearly has a poverty-stricken Federal government that must snatch food out of people's mouths and deny them health care in order to pay for their bullets and murder weapons. That means it is not a government that can fund big ideas and global aspirations. Crypto ICOs were poised to boost venture capitalism and to expand funding to innovators. But they found themselves blocked by strange new rules that don't really apply. So, the Crypto economy has wasted no time in jumping to smarter nations that can feel the pulse of the future, where they can operate with fewer inappropriate regulations. The Crypto ICOs have gone to Japan, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, Israel, South America, and the Middle East to bloom and to open innovation markets. Additionally, the public in those places can move in or out of the crypto currencies all day long at ATMs — a process that is draconian and punitive in the US. That's because the US banksters and their paid regulators do not want currency competition in the US. They certainly don't want to do any extra work that might entail. In their view, it's unfair competition that BitCoin isn't a unit of debt, like "normal official" money is.

The push for a cashless economy would turn the US into a gulag of black money. Just like US sanctions, this type of imperial money manipulation always cuts the US off at the knees with unintended consequences. This doesn't mean they won't find some way of making it happen. But using Bitcoin or real cryptos to get there is unlikely. Block chain currencies confer too much power on ordinary people, elevating them to the level of "sovereign." I think the banksters will go with credit cards or something similar, giving them complete control as well as a transaction record for their dossiers.

I know currencies fairly well, but I am a low-info commenter on crypto-currencies. I'm winging it with what logic I can see.