Comment on Gonna be a great day!
theneverfox@pawb.social 7 months agoI was being glib, because I find our monetary system so ridiculous I have to embrace absurdity or it’s upsetting
Obviously the JFK conspiracy is light on evidence, but the entire situation is definitely a conspiracy - something happened, it could’ve been geopolitical or the people keeping tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald really messed up. His story alone is pretty crazy… But anyways, every time I dive into it I find myself leaning more towards it being related to his banking statements than the alternatives, but who knows.
The foreign interventions are mostly declassified though, they’re an absurd read. It wasn’t always the US, but it was always one of the 5 eyes who got involved when alternate systems started to gain traction.
The IMF/World bank piece wasn’t even exaggerated though. Obviously they make it sound a lot more innocent, but I don’t think I even exaggerated this - it’s a legitimate conspiracy working out in the open. It’s truly horrifying. I didn’t even know how it worked until I took an install in a relatively rich Caribbean country (aka big tourist Island with a large “white” population).
It was a tiny contract - I took it to help someone out and see somewhere beautiful, couldn’t have been more than $15k all together - literal hobbiest level gear. It’s not working and I’ve only got a day left to make it work (at least it turns out it wasn’t my fault), and this dude comes up with a big camera like he owns the place, says he’s from the world bank, and starts “politely” asking me to pose for the camera and do an interview about how this will help the country. I have no idea how to answer, I’m sunburnt, this isn’t really my field, and after seeing the computer center has all the computers on dirty blocks because it floods, I genuinely doubt this would be helpful in any situation… It’s basically a backup for if their Internet goes down, but in that case the place is probably flooded anyways
Turns out, the country was getting a pretty big uptick in income from tourism, so the world bank “offered” to fund a bunch of (from my perspective at least) unhelpful infrastructure projects. They’d had decades of austerity before that, their roads were worn out, the power grid was janky, obviously there was seasonal flooding in important places, and although tourism was their main income they didn’t have transportation or hotels… Just bed and breakfasts and a dude I could arrange to give me a ride in the mornings.
So instead of fixing anything critical, they had some plan to build a road straight across the mountain range, with some crazy long tunnel for an insane price and a multi-year time frame.
People were pissed. Their economy was basically government funding allocated by the IMF “recommendations”, which come with the stick of “we’ll pull out and downgrade your credit if you don’t pass this”, and people hanging around waiting for odd jobs from the people on the government payroll.
So the world bank was doing a bunch of little projects that changed nothing, and covering them like the staged rescue effort videos China loves so much.
This felt very weird to me. Google any 2-3 descriptions of the IMF (just read an and you’ll notice they allude to a lot Investopedia, first result, just read the IMF part carefully, then hit Wikipedia if you want to go down the rabbit hole). It’s pretty dark, it’s stuff you’d think was from a century ago, but it’s actively happening still.
So if anything, I think I undersold the reality of that real life conspiracy.
I’d be genuinely interested to know if I was actually wrong about any of this… I’ve found a lot of post-hock justifications why things are the way they are, but to me, monetary systems seem like layers of justifications for an organization too powerful to call them out on it when they cheat. Debt doesn’t produce value when housing prices go through the roof, when you take on credit card/payday debt, or when you get stuck with medical bills… It seems to me like it only works when you take out a loan for a small business, something that used to be big, but now more and more it creates nothing, expands no capability. It just flows upwards endlessly
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I only got so far as interventions and the IMF but the IMF is not in the US, so your entire point about “bending over for the US” is absurd.
I am generally pro US intervention, especially in opposition to communism.
theneverfox@pawb.social 7 months ago
Yeah, that’s why I gave you some starting links… It’s a complicated topic, and I’d hope you’d at least take a look…I gave my anecdote. It’s not hard to find reputable accounts of them being straight up monsters, and the results speak for themselves… They have not been a good thing for the “third world” no matter how you slice it.
And I didn’t mean the US government, I meant spreading those cheeks for investors to buy up the underdeveloped resources at an extremely low value, and they’re forced to drop export taxes to the ground and maintain the roads from their mines to the port, they miss out on both the money leaving their country (reducing their tax income, because velocity of money is a huge part of taxes, and it’s not bouncing around their country anymore). It’s crippling.
But the alternative is economic warfare, a tool that the IMF has and does use with anyone who doesn’t play ball. They downgrade your currency, lowering the exchange rate. You then have to print more, until you get to balance between hyperinflation and getting cut off from global trade, because now you have to use dollars, and the exchange rate only gets worse (cough Argentina and Venezuela)
But again, this is complicated and I can’t do the necessary reading for you.
I’m more worried about your understanding of value… Friend, I don’t know how to tell you this, but money is symbolic. Categorically.
It is representative of actual value… It’s not the value itself - if money had intrinsic value, you’d just be bartering with commodities. We used gold and silver notes, because they were worth almost nothing themselves… It’s a necessary aspect of money, because if the underlying commodity, say iron ingots, suddenly had a critical shortage and shot way past the value of the notes, you’re back to bartering.
And money isn’t valuable because of intrinsic trust - you have to be able to buy things with it or it’s just paper.
You need actual value, otherwise we could all just print money and be billionaires. When a person or company is able to do a new thing, do more of the old thing, or do the old thing better - that’s value. There’s more of the things people want, or better things to buy, and that justifies more money being introduced into the system.
This is like age of mercantilism economics, this is why money is minted, and they used carved shells, beads, and pretty rocks pretty much everywhere beforehand. The value of money is the value of all the stuff divided by the money in circulation, and the king would hoard and spend to keep things healthy (ideally)
So debt is sort of like negative money. But it’s not really - it’s just the promise you’ll give them more money later. A payday
The amount of things didn’t change - but neither did the amount of money. Let’s go with payday loans since it’s clear cut. These people still have to pay rent, they still have to eat, and the positive money doesn’t melt when it encounters negative money. You introduce money with the debt, people buy the things they had to buy anyways, and maybe they buy a little less… Except we don’t live in a mercantile system, we live in a consumerist system that is transitioning to some sort of unholy techno-fuedalism hellscape.
In consumerism, the amount of money doesn’t matter as much. Velocity does. Velocity generates taxes now that we don’t do straight tithes to the lord, it drives production, increases worker wages, hires more people, pays for r&d. At every stage, things get cheaper, people can buy more, the whole pie grows. I think it’s horrifying, but that’s the value of money - it used to be normal for factory workers to have a vacation house and/or a boat.
They create new things and make a demand for it. Everyone got more stuff, science and technology chugged along fantastically. Basic needs were met, and they made new shit… Value
Then we get to regenomics, the mofo actually convinced people that what we really needed was more inequality.
And here’s the problem… They’re not putting that money into r&d, they’re putting it into gaming the system. Money begets political power begets money. It’s far more lucrative to play with money than to create value
When someone takes a payday loan, where does the value come from? The amount of money is the same… But now it goes to someone not because they created value, but because they had money to lend. The guy paying his mortgage isn’t creating value - the money flows up to bounce around with people who use it like points in a game. You now make someone on the edge just a little closer to producing no value, because homeless people have less subjective value in their life now, because now they get to scramble to balance staying healthy with doing something, and the guy with the money either puts it in the quants, unfair advantage side of the investment markets gatekeep, he invests it into lobbying or media, or he stashes it in his hoard in the Caymans.
You can’t spend a billion dollars on adding value to your life - there’s only so many mansions to buy and so many that yacht a guy can buy before it becomes a chore (2… Boats are a pain). The money doesn’t have velocity, we’ve slashed taxes on hoarding too thanks to neolibs/conservatives.
One guy gets less value for his money, the other guy gets respect from his peers for screwing over a few million poor people on the edge.
Where’s the value? I don’t even agree with these systems of value, but I don’t think even post hock undergrad economics sees value here
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I couldnt force myself to read this entire thing because it’s full of very incorrect gems like
That’s not how demand works at all
theneverfox@pawb.social 7 months ago
… Ok dude, I literally got that from a macroeconomics course.
But you’ve just called me crazy a bunch of times, I left a bunch of tidbits for anyone who sees this later, and you haven’t really made any argument. Maybe something I said will pop into your head later, you’ll crack a book to attempt to disprove it, but I accept I’m not going to educate you today.
But let’s hear from you - there’s one answer I’m really dying to hear.
What is value?