> Yet we continue to treat it (economics, the global financial system) as some kind of inevitable force of nature, rather than as something that we invented and (to some degree) chose. I wish I knew why that is.
If you want a good guess; the economy is complicated, there is no consensus on how it works and the plurality position on how it works among the public is badly misaligned with reality.
> All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
> Does it strike anyone as strange how much of the economy seems to be built around bizarre, failed, often seemingly blatant scams nowadays? It almost seems as if no matter how transparently irrational and corrupt these schemes are, what’s important is to maintain the semblance of it all, the specific articulation of power.
I remember looking at the Russian economy in 2001 and thinking the same thing.
>The central bank have not power to stimulate the economy in this situation, that's the reason central bankers are pushing the governments to spend directly.
Sounds very political for a supposedly independent central banking system!
This system is a disgrace and is governed by unelected technocrats who are able to yield a crazy amount of power over the economy without ever being subject to inquiries from the public, all in the interest of experimenting on the population with highly questionable economic models.
In my opinion we would never have been in this situation in the first place were it not for the artificial credit growth and consequent boom caused by central bankers.
>> I - a relatively sophisticated, learned observer - have a hunch that at the very margins government finance collapses all the way back down to the simple rules of household finance.
On what exactly do you base this hunch? Because it hasn’t held true, ever.
> Preserving your wealth in a risk free fashion is a service the government is providing to you. That's a big portion of the reason why the army, police et cetera exist. It costs them and you a lot more than 1% per annum.
No, the government doesn't provide me with the financial tools to preserve my wealth. The market wants to do that, because there's demand for it. It's the government that indirectly manipulates interest rates and thereby distorts the market so that it isn't capable anymore of providing these services.
It seems as if all is nice and cozy from your viewpoint with this situation as long as I spend my currency (immediately!) to "help the system". But nobody asks whether this allocates my resources towards the right investment.
When the time comes and I cannot retire, because I wasn't able to save, it's now again the problem of society that needs to step in, and you will probably opt for even more debt to "sustain" my standard of living.
Again, this financial/political ideology is severely damaging our prospects as a society. I wonder how it's so hard to understand.
> which is essentially a planned economy where the over-educated manage the under-educated
Why do you feel this way? Couldn't there be a democratic mechanism to asset allocation? A democratically master-planned community wouldn't be unfathomable. Issue municipal debt with GovCoin serviced by taxes generated by the community.
> people have wacky ideas about things like economics and intelligence.
Boy howdy.
There are three major parts of the economy which are extensively regulated to achieve political goals: health care and higher education (on the national level with some state involvement) and housing (city-level zoning, with occasional other mandates particularly in places like California).
Notice then the three areas where prices have become radically more expensive over the past several decades, fomenting a crisis that threatens our prosperity as a nation: housing prices, higher education prices, health care prices...
>it is really weird how currency and economics have been hijacked by politics. such a weird phenomenon.
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