[ExI] Money and Human Nature (was Re: Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal)

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Thu Nov 17 20:39:50 UTC 2011


On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:42 AM, Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:
> The main point people appear to miss is that currency and money are not
> the same thing. Currency is a receipt for money but it is not money.
> Money is a long term store of value. Currency is not.
> Money is backed by itself (there is no counter party risk), currency is
> backed by money (like the gold standard) or by something else like
> government promises and reputation.
> Money is an emergent feature of a complex economic system, currency is
> an imposition of the government.
>
> As usually happen, the promises and reputation of the governments, in
> the long term, have a value of zero. Gold, silver, copper also, stay
> gold, silver and copper.

Mirco,

  This is a point not lost on me. I routinely handle currency that no
longer has any value as money. Some of the more interesting pieces are
from the Weimar Republic Mark, and the Zimbabwean Dollar... printed in
denominations up to $100,000,000,000,000... the kind of numbers we
usually reserve for public debt, distances in space, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar

Let us not forget that gold, silver and copper, while seemingly closer
to money than fiat currency, are really not money either. They are
just normally convertible to money more easily than hyper-inflated or
devalued currencies. Money itself is just whatever is taken in
exchange for goods and services that is likely to be taken in exchange
for other goods and services later. We seem to feel pretty secure in
our bits and bytes money... but the people exchanging siege notes, or
playing card currency of French Canada would probably find our belief
in non-local microscopic magnetic fields induced into microscopic
magnets on fast spinning media to be at least as strange as what they
did.

http://www.thecurrencycollector.com/seigenotes.html

Yes, money is a strange thing, and what we consider money could become
absolutely worthless... very easily.

I leave with a very telling picture from the Weimar Republic...
http://endoftheamericandream.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Weirmar-Republic-currency.jpg
Interestingly, the domain hosting this image is "end of the American
dream"... so someone apparently thinks this is where we are headed,
and soon. They may be right, you can never tell.

-Kelly



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