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OWS - Finger-Wiggling Their Way To a Better Tomorrow
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When you back money with a physical good, any use of that good for non-monetary purposes has it's price basically fixed if you can exchange it. At least gold had no real uses aside from jewlery until relatively recently. You have to make the per-unit price so low that it's not worth it to go to a beach somewhere, scoop it up and ship it to the US to exchange
Okay, so you have a bank and you make no interest loans. So you give them money and they pay you back exactly what you lent them, only later on. Where is your killer ROI? What if someone defaults?
this never got proved. I mean, that would be a huge fucking deal if true.
I guess what I am saying is:
@Fallout2man
citation please
I mean, I'm all for looking at how to improve it, but ending it? That's ridiculous.
As a lover of meritocracies, I think the Fed is a pretty great model. Do people criticize it often? This is a new argument to me.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Agreed.
I mean, I've never heard someone who isn't drinking the Paul Kool Aid talk about ending it. I'd love to hear a good, practical solution to its problems, if the problems do indeed exist.
Outside of printing money and managing bonds(?) and stuff I'm not actually sure what the Fed does, but I've never understood why any of what it does is bad.
On principle, I'm open to looking for ways to improve anything though.
They don't print money though. That's treasury.
In addition to controlling the bond interest rates, one of their main functions is to back up the whole banking system by making short term loans to banks in crisis. This slide deck explains it better than I can.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/files/bernanke-lecture-one-20120320.pdf
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Constantly, ESPECIALLY the ones with "new ideas" that have read the works of Rand or Marx and think it's a brilliant new idea no one understood before them.
And those who understand how it works but are crazy enough to burn down the world to deal with a roach infestation
And those who don't understand how it works but think they do.
I mean they take the people who are so rich they can create money through witchcraft (and credit default swaps) and give them MORE free money which they have a gentlemen's agreement to sort of piss away into the economy. And the entire thing is based on clapping your hands and believing until the money Tinkerbell comes back to life.
It might work, it might be our best option, but certain parts of it are scary as fuck for a damn good reason.
Excellent, thanks for the link, SKFM.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/lectures/about.htm
You can find all the materials related to Bernake's college lectures at that link.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
In my opinion, getting rid of this private institution is a precondition to fixing the other problems we have with economic justice because democracy (and even Monarchy given 19th century Europe's example) has no force or power when the economy is subject to the whim of an unknown group of bankers. When you can increase or decrease the supply of money through refusing loans to other private banks or by buying more Treasury bonds (which the Fed can actually turn into 100 times the original purchase of Treasury Bonds through fractional reserve lending, then you can have an immediate and massive inflationary or contractionary effect on the economy and pretty much control people's likelihood of keeping politicians or replacing them. All this can be done by the Fed and they are not subject to auditing or revealing their shareholders.
To answer @Pyphor's inquiry I will quote wikipedia's Fractional Reserve Banking page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking: Naturally, we have more than one bank, making this slightly more complex in practice, but that's how it works according to every source I've read. This is how many Islamic banks make money while not charging interest. Some call this practice legal counterfeiting, since they have actually created money, just not by making bills. The Federal Reserve can actually do this a second time meaning that they only need to hold 1% of the value they loan out in Treasury Bills in their reserve. It also means that the banks aren't loaning you their own money ... That's why I could be super rich and not charge interest, but I could do it even quicker now, because I can sell the right to the principal I create from nothing to someone else as a security on the open market and immediately have the money I just created instead of waiting the duration of the loan. This means I could more quickly loan more because my reserves grow much more quickly than they would if I was actually bound to wait for the whole life of the loan to receive the full principal, and, even better, every payment and deposit will increase my reserves further and I can again apply my 10X multiplier to create even more money on those additional reserves. This process also has a lot to do with why the dollar has fallen 95% in value since the adoption of this banking system.
Edit: Sorry about the TL;DR this is sure to give you all.
So instead of charging interest on a loan, you're charging a fee to access your capital instead? You do know you can convert any lump-sum to an equivalent loan-type payment system with an interest rate yes? Which is effectively just a different way of charging interest (arguably less flexible depending on when you need the payment). Islamic banking has constructed many things that are functionally equivalent (or very similar to) standard interest based banking, they just do it to get around their usury restrictions, so they don't call it interest.
Today I don't think there's a single currency that's actually backed by a physical good anymore. As for the "lost 95% of value blah blah blah" that doesn't account for increased income, and I'm pretty sure it includes time when you were still on the gold standard too. Inflation is not something that only occurs in fiat systems!
Inflation is ever present and one of the many defenses that is presented for the privately owned central banks is that they provide stability than hard currency or public central banks, yet their history shows very much the opposite. Nothing can prevent inflation except reducing the supply of money, which is usually associated with high unemployment and recessions/depressions and this is perhaps a good motivation to stick with a fiat currency, but there is no reason that we should owe bankers $14 trillion for the privilege of doing what Congress was explicitly authorized to do in the Constitution.
Now, you don't actually have 10 million, you have one in your vault (or to make this even more fun, you have a million dollars in an account with your central bank so you don't physically have any dollar bills). But, you can make loans to the total of about 10 million. Let's say you do that.
You have 1 million in deposits / capital, 10 million in assets (present value of your loans), 10 million in liabilities (the "money" that has been EFT'ed away). Fast forward to when all the loans are repaid and you have... [dr evil voice]one million dollars[/dr evil voice]
When you create money as a bank, you give that money to somebody who will then use it. Their use of this quasi-existant money causes it to be transferred from you to another financial entity, which then adds it to it's depositories. This causes you to basically go well into the red as that becomes a liability to you. So, without interest or fees, on net you're even.
You seem to think that the dollars you'd get paid back with are more "real" than the dollars you'd be giving people in the first place
The fear under any meritocracy is that the people at the top will do things that hurt us. I think that even in America a lot of people are comfortable with the idea of the benevolent dictator, it's just hard to find one who actually is benevolent and stays that way.
The Fed is most certainly not a democratic institution, but then neither are most executive agencies. The main difference is that the Fed is truly nonpartisan, and is allowed to pursue its mandate as it sees fit, without a requirement to seek public comments on its actions, and without having its leadership changed with each new president.
Edit: @ronya or @goumindong can probably explain the way the Fed influences the economy much better than I can.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Surely that's because the people you're lending the money too are creating value, and essentially the bank is betting on enough of them to make some improvements to something. There's not a set amount of use in the world so the bank is lending out the same million dollars ten times to different people knowing that enough of them are going to produce something worth the initial investment - so the money you get back is slightly more real, because it's use that can be exported more widely, whilst the money you lent out to the investor is really only usable by him (since you've loaned it out multiple times already and can only repay it if your investments are successful).
The dollar bills you get back are worth more than the dollar bills you leant out, due to the total increase in available use (assuming inflation is zero)
But isn't that only true if the bank will in fact put that money to some use other than making further investments?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
It's the general theory, an entirely reliant on the banks judging that by their investments they'll get back more than they invested. There's really nothing different with banks investing in local (to the investment) banks, and setting up a communal fund that pools you and your friends money together in order to get a higher rate of interest. The assumption is that at some point that money is used for something, rather than cycling through never ending banks with the assumption that it will be used for something at the end. Each step theoretically increases the chance that the money has reached the hands of someone who knows where to spend it, but at the same time reduces the potential profit from it as each player takes their cut.
Because this is a degenerate generation that doesn't know the value of real work and expects everything to be given to them for free! :rotate:
Or because we're staying in school much later, and a lot of young people have extremely large student loan debts which bring the average down for everyone.
>.>
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http://gothamist.com/2012/04/13/wall_street_occupation_shifts_from.php
http://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/nfs/uploaded/u498/2012/04/phillyprotest.MOV
The thing that bothers me about this... and honestly find it chilling... is the 'mic-check' thing that seeks to silence opposition in what strikes me as a very... robotic, brainwashed footsoldier sort of way.
Anyhow, I thought you'd find it interesting, and maybe my reaction interesting. I'm not sure if you guys see this sort of behavior as heroic or laudable, but if so, I'm telling you it doesn't play the way you maybe think it does.
Want to find the story somewhere reputable?
It's just as dickish as it was from the Tea Party in the summer of '09.
I don't see how it's "chilling". It's annoying, but it's hardly chilling.
National Review doesn't espouse racism, and is quite reputable.
I thought so too, but then I read some of their articles.
You really don't get it if you are trying to paint mic-check like that; everyone who participates in a mic-check is volunteering their voice to over come a lack of a microphone, if at any point they don't agree with what the speaker who is the center of that town crier gone crowd sourced, they can opt out and not pass the message along - messages that do not resonate with those protesting do not get passed along. Calling them robotic or brainwashed is straight up BS - the powerful emotional impact of a crowd of people speaking with one message that echoes through the rest of a crowd like a boisterous game of telephone was probably an unintended side effect but now that crowds realize it has emotional weight and entertainment value, so it captures people's attention, it has empowered them.
The mystery to me is why a crowd who disagrees with the other crowd doesn't just crowd mic check them back with their own messages. The variety of different groups that make up Occupy do not have exclusivity of the use of this technique of in person social crowd sourcing and in a civil environment the mic check is something people take turns at, waiting till others have finished calling upon the crowd for assistance - if it comes across as shouting down, you aren't really listening to the message are you, instead you are trying to shut it out but are too disorganized in your own crowd to form a response other than a reactionary calling in the violence of security personnel by those considered the leaders of your crowd.
It's different though - a crowd of people angrily shouting someone down is dickish, but it just doesn't have the same.. I don't know, ominous overtone as a crowd of people repeating the same unrelated phrase over and over like that.
But I gather it's a common tactic and it's being taught by OWS organizers as an effective way to disrupt meetings and speeches.
Teapers use mic checks, Paultards use mic checks. OWS uses mic checks.
The connective tissue is that it's annoying all the time, there's nothing ominous about it outside of it threatening your political interests, Spool.
Outside internal OWS meetings and such it's just an effective, preplanned heckler's veto.
No it strikes me as ominous in every situation I've seen it used, including teapers and Paul supporters.
Well, I guess I'm saying it shouldn't. It's annoying, but it's not ominous.
It'd be better if they actually had something to say rather than just repeating slogans.
I love posts like this. It shows how little you know about the topic you're posting about.
The internal meetings never had a use for the mic check. It grew out of the fact that NYC prohibited any use of amplification.