What is money?

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by Michaelangelica, Apr 3, 2012.

  1. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    What is the Bristol Pound

    The Bristol Pound is a complementary local currency designed to support Bristol’s independent businesses, strengthen the local economy, keep our high streets diverse and distinct, and help build stronger communities.

    The Bristol Pound is the UK’s first city wide local currency, the first to have electronic accounts managed by a regulated financial institution, and the first that can be used to pay some local taxes.

    The Bristol Pound is run as a partnership between the Bristol Pound Community Interest Company and Bristol Credit Union. It is a not-for-profit social enterprise.
    https://bristolpound.org/what
     
  2. Farside

    Farside Junior Member

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    Thank you very much Annette. That is some piece of legislation. I imagine NZ will be very similar. I'll be passing this on to my friends in Aussie so they can promptly have their gold "stolen" :).

     
  3. Pragmatist

    Pragmatist Junior Member

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    There is a difference between fiat currency (the stuff the government issues) and the vast majority of what we think of (and spend) as money. Most "money" is actually credit created by private banks out of thin air whenever they issue a loan. Too hard to believe? Consider how many people would need to have massive deposits in the banks to balance out the sheer volume of mortgage out there.

    This video has an unfortunately conspiratorial tone but contains no factual errors that I can see:
    "Money as Debt" (YouTube link)

    For a more academic (but still accessible) description of how our money is created, have a read of this excellent piece by Professor Steve Keen (head of Finance and Economics at University of Western Sydney):
    The Roving Cavaliers of Credit

    In both cases, what occurs is an open secret known as Fractional Reserve Banking. Basically, banks get to lend out money that they don't have and then charge the borrower interest for the privilege.
     
  4. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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    Farside, Annette and Pragmatist are correct. Money is debt because it was created out of thin air for the purpose of lending. The paper/credit money becomes money only after it is lent to someone by a bank. Then the borrower must pay it back (through labor) with interest. When the bank prints $1,000,000 for loans they do not put a million dollars worth of effort into accumulating the money. All they do is add ink to paper, or click a few keypads, yet the person/company who borrows that money will have to work hard to "pay it back" with interest.

    It's like a game of monopoly, except the bankers can play the game with the money from an infinite number of monopoly games (they can just print more), while everyone else can play with only the money they were given from one game. Who do you think will end up owning everything? Our governments pay their expenses with this counterfeit money, which increases the number of dollars in circulation, which lowers the value of all of the other dollars. That is the real cause of inflation. The artificial expansion of the money supply. That's what "quantitative easing" means. That's what the bailouts were all about too. It means every dollar you have in your pocket or bank account will soon be worth less and less, because to pay their "debts" the governments are using more freshly created money to do it. They're "borrowing" more money to pay back the debts they have for borrowing money in the first place, and yet what they "borrowed" was really just ink on a piece of paper. We have to accept it as money and use it to pay our expenses because of legal tender laws. In other words, the governments tell us that it is money because they said so, it doesn't matter that it required virtually no human effort at all to print it. Think of how easy it is to print a million dollars (or a billion for that matter) compared to earning it by working for $30.00 an hour. So what right do the banks really have to collect interest on that million dollars? They didn't have to work for it, they just turned a printing machine on, yet you'll work many, many hours to pay it back.

    G. Edward Griffin explains it very well in his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island. Here's a good interview with him.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhMacPvc5qc
     
  5. mouseinthehouse

    mouseinthehouse Junior Member

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    But commercial banks don't print money....
     
  6. Farside

    Farside Junior Member

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    No they don't. But modern money is digital. The printing is merely for convenience and is performed by the treasury or certified agent.

    Now, money is debt today so every time debt is created, money is created. Commercial banks create money automatically through the issuance of debt. Interestingly, we all create money (debt) every time we use a credit card.

    So consider this. Every time we (the people) buy our morning coffee from Starbucks with a credit card, we increase the money supply. When the money supply increases, then every dollar in existence is worth slightly less (because money is actually a claim on the finite resource of human labour). So technically, when a person uses a credit card, they debase the money supply, effectively stealing a tiny bit of wealth from every holder of money. We see this manifested as the phenomenon called inflation.
     
  7. Robert Knops

    Robert Knops Junior Member

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    I don't like money because it's anables people to make living things less valuable than dead things, makes biodiversity scarce, makes differences between wealth and corruption possible. For example in the Netherlands the goverments thinks that nature is something that only costs money and therefore they don't invest in it anymore. They also wan't everything that increases the livalibility to be done as volunteers, wherefore people can't live from increasing the livability. And people live in a dream that says that the economic world can grow forever. And ofcourse people are already fighting for the recources of the planet and thereby distroying everything. The people give money a valua, but it's just paper with inkt. It's madness that a cleaning lady is less valuable than a doctor, because whitout the cleaning lady everyone would die on an infection or virus. Anathor example is al the subsidising in Europe, because of that people in soud Amerika and Afrika are dying on honger, there are coming more and more unemployments, de sea gets overfisht and the agriculture is getting more and more a dessert for wildlife. I don't believe that's people can live in harmonie with themselve and nature when there is something like money. Not ride now, but maby in a future when people are a little bit more wise.
     
  8. Robert Knops

    Robert Knops Junior Member

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    and one other thing. There can only be rich people when there are pore people. Money will only distroy us and this world, because there are to many influence acquisitive people and ofcourse they should be stoped.
     
  9. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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    That's right, I forgot that. This site explains the "printing" of money.
    https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/no-fed-does-not-print-money-just-explain-150433185.html

    Here is something I don't recall hearing before. Quote, "Prior to 2008, a bank could earn no interest on reserves, and could get some extra revenue by investing any excess reserves, for example, by lending the reserves overnight to another bank on the federal funds market." "All that changed dramatically in the fall of 2008, because (1) the Fed started paying interest on excess reserves, and (2) banks earned practically no interest on safe overnight loans." Is this why banks were more reluctant to make loans to small businesses?
    https://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/18/how-the-fed-prints-money-without-any-ink/

    I know that the plan in the future is to eliminate all paper and coin currency and have only electronic money, via RFID chip implants.
    This is a good site about the chips.
    https://www.spychips.com/
     
  10. Farside

    Farside Junior Member

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    This is possibly one reason, however the main issue here was one of bank solvency.
    Remember that the laws were changed so banks didn't have to declare the value of their assets at market rates. This was because if the banks did this, then they would be insolvent. In fact, they ARE insolvent but are hiding it behind an accounting technicality.

    The banks were way, way over leveraged. A 5% reduction in deposits would have been enough to sink them completely so a bank run was a serious concern. The banks aren't lending simply because they're trying to get rid of some of that debt (de-leverage) before TSHTF, which is only a matter of time before it does.

    The more they can de-leverage, the smaller the crater will be when it all blows up. This is why banks aren't lending.
     
  11. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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    This is a presentation that Katherine Albrecht did about 6 months on what is currently happening with RFID (radio frequency identification). It is one of the most extreme threats to our freedom.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUPrCEoH8U
     
  12. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

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    As soon as I figured out that the video was going to be about conspiracies, I stopped watching(the big jesus sign in the back should have been an indicator, but some of my best friends are christians). If you're trying to link it to the mark of the beast, then it's pointless since it's bible prophecy and god's will(if you believe in that stuff). I'm sure the illuminati are involved with that part of the "conspiracy". Stop using credit cards if you're worried about it(or just in general, it's better for you in the long run). Cold hard cash doesn't have RFID's, and even if it did it couldn't be tied to you personally. As far as I can tell, it's just a way to advertise to you better(better for them, not for you). I don't really care if somebody tracks everything I buy to be honest, because they can only change my mind by changing what's available to me. If a single shop stops selling what I want, then I change shops. Company loyalty stopped for me when companies kept being bought and sold along with their names en masse. Now I track down family owned businesses if I'm going to be a loyal customer. Having said that, there's no way in hell(no pun intended) that somebody is going to knowingly put one of those things inside of me. I already get the feeling that I'm cattle, and I don't need one of those to prove it!
     
  13. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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    So because the real agenda behind RFID chips is a "conspiracy" you won't listen to her? What do you think our fiat money is? Our money itself results in the confiscation of wealth from the productive side of humanity (those who actually work for it), while the bankers who create it grow ever more wealthy. Real conspiracies are the norm and they are everywhere you look, that is if you bother to recognize them for what they are. People are branded as "conspiracy theorists" in the media so that most other people will dismiss what they are saying without ever trying to verify it, out of fear of being ridiculed. Many conspiracies can be proven, which takes them out of the "theory" category. That's a conspiracy in itself.

    Whether there is a being called Satan behind all of this or just evil people doesn't make much of a difference. If you add up what their plans are for the future, and what they have done in the past, evil is about the best word you can use to describe it.
     
  14. mouseinthehouse

    mouseinthehouse Junior Member

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    Yep, I would have had the same reaction as Unmutual.
     
  15. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

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    That pretty much sums it up. When people start to talk about large scale conspiracies, I leave the room unless I'm looking for entertainment.

    The ONLY way to make money is by taking it from somebody else. Period. That's how money works. Bankers have figured out a sneaky way of doing it while not really providing any kind of service or product that you can't get for free. You don't have to stash your money in the bank, and right now the interest rates on a savings account are negligible, so using a bank is pointless outside of keeping your money safe.

    There are conspiracies, then there are imaginary conspiracies. The imaginary conspiracies are usually massive in scale and generally end up being propaganda in nature(I used to listen to a radio show that talked about UFO's and the Illuminati all the time and it was mostly to push his own agenda...working graveyard shift sucks). I know most businesses are out to screw me one way or another. I know government is getting pretty good at that game too. That might look like a pretty dark view on society, but it's normally true in my perspective.

    It does make a difference if you use Satan or evil people as the antagonist. When people start talking about Satan being behind conspiracies, I stop listening. Unless I'm looking for a good laugh, I stop listening when people start talking about the Illuminati. I think greedy is a better term than evil, but that's probably a personal choice since I think words like evil and hero are used too often and in the wrong context.

    Our economic system is largely a farce, a house of cards if you will. I think what we're seeing are the death throes of capitalism. This is no longer a bursting bubble, it is no longer a recession. Sure there are some bright spots in economic news, but I believe we're starting to see the limits of capitalism. Good riddance I say. We are overdue for an upheaval anyway(over 40 years since our last social upheaval?), so it might as well be time to get rid of a serious blight on our history and move towards something better.

    Of course you don't have to be a part of most of this if you make the right choices. The first, most important choice, would probably be to live within your means. Credit is too easy, try your best to avoid it like the plague it is. There are many people that don't have credit cards and they're really not a necessity. All of this crap is happening because WE let it happen. Our personal choices make the difference and that is what enslaves us or frees us in the end.
     
  16. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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    The United States has not been a true capitalist society since the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The countries of Europe are no different either, and I'm certain that's true in Australia as well. China has far fewer regulations on businesses than the United States does, and that's a big reason why so many of our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced there.

    When a government interferes with the free enterprise system by giving entitlements, subsidies, bailouts, etc., the laws of supply and demand (capitalism) can not function. In G. Edward Griffin's book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, he wrote, "Our present-day problems within the saving-and-loan industry can be traced back to the Great Depression of the 1930's. Americans were becoming impressed by the theories of socialism and soon embraced the concept that it was proper for government to provide benefits for its citizens and to protect them against economic hardship." "Once the pattern of government intervention had been established, there began a long, unbroken series of federal rules and regulations that were the source of windfall profits for managers, appraisers, brokers, developers, and builders. They also weakened the industry by encouraging unsound business practices and high-risk investments." And that's what happens whenever and wherever government sticks its nose into the free market.

    Aaron Russo said in an interview that he was told by Nick Rockefeller that Americans had to be convinced that capitalism is socialism. He was also told that the women's liberation movement of the 1960's was actually funded by the Rockefeller's for two reasons, to collect federal income tax from women, most of whom weren't working back in those days, and to get access to their children at a younger age (to feed them government propaganda). And he received some information prior to 9/11 on the "war on terror", which is to continue indefinitely to allow the globalists to take all of our freedoms away to "protect us." Here is a part of the interview, but I highly recommend you watch the whole thing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuinaIm-kd4
     
  17. Grahame

    Grahame Senior Member

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    I'll start by apologising that I haven't gone through this thread in depth so if I repeat something someone else has said please take it as support for that statement :)

    I see money as a kind of a battery. It is a very inefficient energy storage and transference device. This is why people like to collect more and more of it - because its value leeches away. Lets say we do some work in the garden and produce some beetroot. The beetroot has real value and contains real energy. But if we have a surplus say 1kg of beetroot we can store that energy in the $5 the consumer gives us. If you held onto that $5 for a while eventually it would have negligible value, it's energy would dissipate. Similarly if we transfer that money from hand to hand eventually it would lose some value in each transaction, as the each person holds onto a small amount of the energy for themselves (all the middlemen take their cut). etc etc.

    If you trade your beetroot for an egg then there is no energy loss, you don't need to store the energy.

    I could take the metaphor of a battery further but I've got to go to a farmers market and collect a few batteries, unfortunately some folks demand payment with batteries!
     
  18. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

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    Yes, but it's easier to use the term capitalism, free market, democracy, etc. in their current usage rather than their proper definition or to have to give a lengthy explanation each time you try to use one of those words.
     
  19. Roy

    Roy Junior Member

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