[ExI] a good laugh

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sat Oct 9 18:50:18 UTC 2021


 

 

…> On Behalf Of Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] a good laugh

 

…

>…That's the Zimbabwe lesson. The number of zeros on the ends of all the price tags don't matter. It's how long it takes you to earn enough currency to afford your needs and wants. The relative value of your needs, compared to the relative value of your labor. Everything else is just a game for financial professionals… Darin

 

 

Darin, I see the Zimbabwe experience as a useful lesson in economics to the whole world.

 



 

It would do many of the proponents of the trillion dollar coin notion a lotta good if they were to make friends with people who have been thru hyperinflation.  I have such friends, most of them from Vietnam, two families from Ukraine, a family who was travelling in South America during a time when the local grocery store took all the price tags off of everything, because they didn’t know what stuff was worth.  They had to look up the spot-price on the currency, then look at the past several days, estimate what the new stock would cost by the time they could get the currency to the bank or exchange it for American dollars, then estimate the cost of the groceries from that.

 

My son’s best friend is from Ukraine.  When his parents were married, the (very large) family gave them donations which would amount to enough money to make a 10% down payment on a relatively nice house.  Being young and carefree, they chose to go on a lark, travel all around Europe first class, blew almost all the money.  When they got back after 8 weeks, Ukraine was in the 1993 currency hyperinflation where they estimate the currency dropped in value by a factor of 37.  Had they saved the money in the bank, it would be scarcely enough to buy two coats.  Two months in Europe first class was equal to two winter coats.  The house they could have bought would have been taken from them because their lending agency failed.  They present the experience as one of the extremely rare times where youthful exuberance led them to do the right thing.

 

Minting trillion dollar coins, or even one of them, would be admitting to the world that the government pulling such a stunt will not honor the value of its own fiat currency.

 

spike

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