[ExI] I Miss The King of Extropia

Fri Jul 22 17:01:32 UTC 2016

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:37 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com
> wrote:

>> 
>> A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow and you can borrow a
>> dollar today at a lower interest rate than at any other time in the history
>> of the USA, so I can sure think of a advantage to debt.  
>
>
> > 
> But why not just save?
>

Because
 a 
dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow
.

> >
>  Why pay any interest?
>

Because the people who loan you the money also know that

a

dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow
, although for various reasons (one of which is almost certainly the very
small government deficit) the interest rate today is the lowest in over 200
years.  

> 
> I would rather a company be owned by the people who made it great, not by
> the people who just supplied money.
>

But who made the company great? Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and ideas
that seem good but really aren't are even more common. In the early 20th
century everybody knew the automobile was a really great idea, but hundreds
of companies in the USA made cars, which one should you invest in? You'd
better pick smart because although the industry has grown astronomically
today only 3 companies have survived. In the late 1970s everybody knew a
home computer was a great idea and the smart money said to take advantage
of that by investing in IBM or ATT, but the really really smart money said
Microsoft or Apple.

A successful capitalist is someone who is skilled in asset management,
and probably the most important part of that is knowing when to loan money
and to who, and when to borrow money and from who.   

 John K Clark

> They get on the board and maybe direct policy in the wrong ways.
>
> bill w
>
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 9:54 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 3:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace <
>> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > 
>>>> Without debt Silicon Valley wouldn't exist, even renaissance Italy
>>>> wouldn't have existed without its banks.
>>>
>>>
>>> > 
>>> OK - but when a company gets very large, say like  GE, they can finance
>>> their own R and D without having to issue stocks
>>>
>>
>> GE stockholders are the people who own GE. Who would you rather own the
>> company than the stockholders?
>>
>>
>> > 
>>> or bonds.  True?
>>>
>>
>> It doesn't matter what I think, all I know is that the capitalists at GE
>> issued 39 billion dollars of debt just last September.
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> > 
>>> In cases like this I see no advantage to debt.
>>>
>>
>> A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow and you can borrow
>> a dollar today at a lower interest rate than at any other time in the
>> history of the USA, so I can sure think of a advantage to debt.  
>>
>>
>>  John K Clark
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
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