"Intangible money?" Who cares?

macx stirner — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:00:22 +0000

I've never understood why people who think bank deposits/fractional reserve banking are somehow evil can't just hold cash or gold coins instead. Well, gold coins are likely to be difficult to fob off in transactions, but then them's the breaks! Get into that, and you start arguing that people should have a positive right to a convenient life, rather than a negative right to engage in voluntary contracts (eg. borrowing from/depositing money in a bank). As for the business cycle, well, if it's so damn easy to predict the collapse of "the system" then why aren't you a millionare from making contrarian investments? You might not be able to save everyone, but at least you could save yourself (and hell, even use the money for a good purpose if that's what floats your boat).

Now don't get me wrong, anyone who owns derivatives, of which there are $900 trillion or whatever floating around, has to know that "not everyone will get to cash out at once," so to speak, just like a fractional-reserve bank. So you'd have to be an idiot to count on that money always being there for you - keep a few million in used twenties and junk gold and silver just in case. But I don't see how their play-money games violate mine, or anyone else's, rights. And if I could sit at the table for long enough to take a profit, I would, so attacking it will always have a whiff of hypocrisy for me.

2% of pound coins are fake? Big whoopie do!

Jock — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:17:53 +0000

...it's more like 2% of our money that is actually real, tangible stuff.

You're lucky if you happen to have some of the real stuff in your hands in fact. Why shouldn't the good old coin counterfeiter have a go. The Masters of the Universe who are at this very moment plunging us all into financial depression are the ones who are really the counterfeiters. And on an unimaginable scale. So unimaginable that we would rather believe it's not been happening.

The fact is that what we think of as pounds and pence are really only represented in the real world by, at the last calculation, about £45bn worth of notes and coins. Yes, that's the sum total of what the state has ever issued in our name.

But add up what we all have in our bank accounts and the humungous numbers represented by our outstanding mortgage balances and so on, there are more like £1,800bn or one point eight trillion.

Is it any wonder that this house of cards is teetering? And the fraudulent pound coins and notes that sometimes inconvenience us when a shop assistant tells us we can't use the money we thought we had are only the visible manifestation of a fraud so much grander we'd prefer not to think it exists.

debt money, fiat money, monetary reform

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"Intangible money?" Who cares?

2% of pound coins are fake? Big whoopie do!