Allow me to introduce you to Daniel Estulin. He has devoted his life and has risked his life to bring you the inside details of what Bilderberg is really about. You can read more at his web site --
Thank you for including references. It makes the discussion much more informative and interesting.
I've referenced before, but I'll say it again as I think it's related. It's mathematically provable that capitalism is not optimal, because using game theory you can show that collusion has some funny properties. One of these is that some colluding players can win while costing the sum of all players (themselves included) to go down. IE, players 1 and 2 get an extra $100 but it costs players 3, 4, 5, and 6 $75 each.
The reason I bring this up is that I think you might find it interesting as it relates to Daniel Estulin's work.
As for my opinion his work itself, I think I'll just let that go as our opinions will still disagree and that's OK.
But don't feel bad about this ignorance, you are NOT alone. Prescription for you: Less talk, more reading up on it. You might want to start here.
Again, you seem really angry at me, and I think it's probably because you hold opinions very strongly which many people dismiss. I dismissed some of them (but not all) and maybe I'm now an example of all those wrong headed people in the world. So be it, I'm sorry if I offended you.
As an olive branch, I would like to plug this video you linked. Nothing in the video was new to me, though as little as a year ago (before I noticed flaws in our financial system and began searching for my own answers) much of it would have been - sorry I'm not as uneducated as you would like to believe. The director does a good job explaining where money comes from. I also appreciated that the director provided a possible solution as many similar introductions would just point out the bad without even suggesting an alternative. I am still undecided on what a good solution would be, but the authors solution is one I've seen before and it deserves some consideration.
It should be noted however, that debt is something people usually take upon themselves for wants. If everyone (Federal Government included) wised up and began living within their means, it would hardly matter that bankers are allowed to conjure money out of a hat via a fractional banking system.
We are in an economic cold war with China. The latest strategy by the US is to get the media to report on all of the product recalls from mistakes in Chinese manufacturing. At the same time, we are going to devalue our currency until they stop pegging their currency to ours. I'm not really clear on what this will accomplish, but there it is.
you seem really angry at me, and I think it's probably because you hold opinions very strongly which many people dismiss.
Well, Siddha was talking about important issues and your response really confused things. I've seen it too many times, along comes someone and says "conspiracy" and suddenly really important and valuable conversations are foreclosed, <snap>, just like that.
I'm sorry I ran you over. I guess I overreacted as well.
If everyone (Federal Government included) wised up and began living within their means, it would hardly matter that bankers are allowed to conjure money out of a hat via a fractional banking system.
No. I'm still not sure you see the larger meaning of issuing debt principal money without issuing the interest money. Without debt there is no money, and with debt there is no means to pay the interest, so it is mathematically impossible to "live within our means", as a whole society, under this system.
This is hard to see because some of us can pay back our loans, but that comes only at the expense of out-competing other people who then experience an even more acute shortage of money because as a result of our choice to save and retire debt (which retires that money!). This is why consumption is encouraged: if we save, we hurt the whole society's ability to turn over money and keep using it to pay interest, and the only solution to this is even faster debt growth in some other part of the economy.
So, I still think you have it backwards, no matter how much we live within our means, this system will still be a huge problem because people either can't clear transactions without any money or they can't stop consuming unsustainably to pay the unpayable interest obligation that comes with the money loaned.
I see one and only one way this problem could potentially be avoided. Say we owe 10 trillion to banks as a nation. But there is only 3 trillion of money in existence. So we gather up 7 trillion WORTH of oil, chickens, gold, whatever, and took that plus the 3 trillion down to the bank and said, "here: this is 3 trillion plus a lot of real goods worth the 7 trillion we owe (which dosn't exist)".
This could retire the debt, but once again, we'd have no money. So, maybe if we took 10 trillion worth of real goods down there, then we'd have three trillion of money circulating without any debt on it. If no new bank loans at interest were made from then on, we would be ok so long as 3 trillion would be enough to run our economy on.
But, as far as I know, no loan can be paid off in real goods. You have to go get money for it. So there goes that solution.
I am still undecided on what a good solution would be, but the authors solution is one I've seen before and it deserves some consideration.
I find his solutions appealing but unrealistic. One of the biggest problems with paper or electronic money is trust. He suggests that we take money creation away from bankers and give it to politicians. We can't trust bankers, but we can trust politicians? It does sound preferable, but I think his view of politics is essentially naieve and utopian.
One reason why gold and silver are good money is because nobody can triple the amount of gold in the world to debase mine by 67%. The author talked about all the problems with gold but none of these benefits.
I also find it interesting that no mention was made of how easy it is to steal paper or electronic money. It seems lots of folks are not finding it too challenging these days.
No. I'm still not sure you see the larger meaning of issuing debt principal money without issuing the interest money. Without debt there is no money, and with debt there is no means to pay the interest, so it is mathematically impossible to "live within our means", as a whole society, under this system.
I would agree with this statement (and your post at large) if banks were the only entities issuing money. But some of our money is actually issued by the Federal Government. I would think most of that speculative (since you just picked a number right?) $3 trillion would be what came out of the fed, whereas the other $7 trillion is what banks issued on (mostly?) collateralized loans.
In this example, which is admittedly an underestimate because I think you singled out national debt and largely ignored personal or commercial debt, we might figure that $3 trillion is the real monetization and the bankers have basically taken $7 trillion out of everyone's pockets. Pretty good for a bunch of accountants.
With that said, I think the only [ahem] responsible way to clear these obligations would be to inflate our way out. Let the fed print an extra $10 trillion dollars, and pay that to the bankers. The market would still have $3 trillion to grease transactions, and the bankers would be paid off. Of course, the $3 trillion left to us would be worth a fraction of it's original value. So maybe it's better to just print $20 trillion. Now the currency is worth 1/7th of its original amount, but the bankers have only made 1/2 the profit expected, and there would still be $13 trillion left as a market maker.
Now for my answer to what I think the future really holds. The problem with currency is you can just print it, it has no bearing on the real world. Meanwhile, the problem with gold or silver or whatever, is that they are just too scarce. If the economy increases 10x in size, we should have up to 10x the money floating around out there. If we only have 1.5x the money, then money is too scarce and you can't make transactions. Why would I give you two gold coins for a house today when it will cost only 1 gold coin tomorrow?
In the present, and likely in the future, the manufacturing depends on energy. You need power for your computer, your car, and to bake a cake. What I see is a world where people are paid in energy credits. IE, if you work X hours, you can earn X kilowatt hours. The reason this might work is that it takes a certain amount of energy to mine for ore, and a certain amount to refine it and a certain amount to build a car out of that refined ore. Even as the economy expands and energy becomes more plentiful, the energy expenditure for a single task should remain about consistent, so the 'price' would not rise. Meanwhile, we can expand the amount of energy we produce. If we produce more tomorrow than today, everyone can become a little richer.
Obviously, there are some complications in every plan. Energy producers now become market makers, and I think Big Oil already has enough power. Plus, do we really want someone just burning coal as fast as they can to get richer? The final part of the equation is that all energy producers would need to be publicly owned, and the energy credits they produce would need to be distributed fairly (define however you like). Also, you can see that energy credits are destroyed when they are used (IE, pulling power from a socket).
Maybe it sounds like a nutty/far fetched idea. Likely it's impractical, but I still like to think that it's better than what we have today.
Siddah's ideas do hold a certain appeal for me, but they also sounds like conspiracy theories to me. Still, they echo in my head when I read posts like this:
Off topic; of course the 3.9% is annualized, otherwise we would be a banana republic. Industrialized nations grow between 3 to 4%. Our growth puts us at the high end.
Annual inflation?? You are right, I did not consider that. But doesn't that makes the cutting of interest rate even more confusing?
Based on what I know about the Skull and Bones society, I predicted in 2000 that GWB would get us into a war as way to funnel government money into the pockets of his friends. From my perspective, it looks like things played out like that. Still, I don't want to fall victim to confirmation bias.
I've had long talks about these sorts of things with friends and have come to believe two principles:
1. Rarely attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
2. Power is often self-reinforcing and does not need a conspiracy.
Our country was founded under ideals of liberty. I've come to believe that liberty for all can only be achieved when concentrated power is curtailed. The limitiation of power necessary for liberty needs to be applied to government, individuals and businesses. Our founding fathers did a very good job of putting checks and balances into our governmental system to prevent government from becoming too powerful. I don't think they thought much about limiting individual or business power. Still, laws seem to have been set up to follow this principle to a certain extent. Things like anti-trust laws do limit the power of businesses.
But when laws are designed to attack power, the power goes underground and hides. Many conspiracy theories are about hidden power. There is a circle of reasoning there that is internally consistent, yet it still sounds crazy to me.
I hope that I never have the empirical evidence to learn this lesson:
3. When you are swimming in shark infested waters, never try to cut the sharks.
Get over it already. Currency is just an abstraction that exists to simplify trade between parties that create different forms of wealth. It's not a "yoke" or any such thing created by a bunch of crazed brits with Isaac Newton and his band of merry alchemists at the helm. For the love of God, get a grip!
If you are creating wealth in any way (and by wealth I do not mean "money" -- I mean "something of value to you and others"), then you will be fine. The relationship between the value of the wealth you create and the value of the wealth anyone else creates is not going to change significantly just because the dollar fluctuates. The only reasons that will change are:
a) You form of wealth creation is easily replicated, and will soon be done by Chinese child labor or robots at a much lower cost.
b) New technology makes your skill obsolete.
c) The wealth you create is of a transient value to society.
Bankers work the margin, they make money on transactions. They depend deeply on the continued creation and subsequent trade of wealth so they can skim the transaction. If you have a bone to pick with bankers, just quit trading your wealth with others (i.e. learn to build your own home, grow your food, and make your clothing -- or invent a way to metabolize source code).
Comments
Thank you for including references. It makes the discussion much more informative and interesting.
I've referenced before, but I'll say it again as I think it's related. It's mathematically provable that capitalism is not optimal, because using game theory you can show that collusion has some funny properties. One of these is that some colluding players can win while costing the sum of all players (themselves included) to go down. IE, players 1 and 2 get an extra $100 but it costs players 3, 4, 5, and 6 $75 each.
The reason I bring this up is that I think you might find it interesting as it relates to Daniel Estulin's work.
As for my opinion his work itself, I think I'll just let that go as our opinions will still disagree and that's OK.
Again, you seem really angry at me, and I think it's probably because you hold opinions very strongly which many people dismiss. I dismissed some of them (but not all) and maybe I'm now an example of all those wrong headed people in the world. So be it, I'm sorry if I offended you.
As an olive branch, I would like to plug this video you linked. Nothing in the video was new to me, though as little as a year ago (before I noticed flaws in our financial system and began searching for my own answers) much of it would have been - sorry I'm not as uneducated as you would like to believe. The director does a good job explaining where money comes from. I also appreciated that the director provided a possible solution as many similar introductions would just point out the bad without even suggesting an alternative. I am still undecided on what a good solution would be, but the authors solution is one I've seen before and it deserves some consideration.
It should be noted however, that debt is something people usually take upon themselves for wants. If everyone (Federal Government included) wised up and began living within their means, it would hardly matter that bankers are allowed to conjure money out of a hat via a fractional banking system.
We are in an economic cold war with China. The latest strategy by the US is to get the media to report on all of the product recalls from mistakes in Chinese manufacturing. At the same time, we are going to devalue our currency until they stop pegging their currency to ours. I'm not really clear on what this will accomplish, but there it is.
Well, Siddha was talking about important issues and your response really confused things. I've seen it too many times, along comes someone and says "conspiracy" and suddenly really important and valuable conversations are foreclosed, <snap>, just like that.
I'm sorry I ran you over. I guess I overreacted as well.
No. I'm still not sure you see the larger meaning of issuing debt principal money without issuing the interest money. Without debt there is no money, and with debt there is no means to pay the interest, so it is mathematically impossible to "live within our means", as a whole society, under this system.
This is hard to see because some of us can pay back our loans, but that comes only at the expense of out-competing other people who then experience an even more acute shortage of money because as a result of our choice to save and retire debt (which retires that money!). This is why consumption is encouraged: if we save, we hurt the whole society's ability to turn over money and keep using it to pay interest, and the only solution to this is even faster debt growth in some other part of the economy.
So, I still think you have it backwards, no matter how much we live within our means, this system will still be a huge problem because people either can't clear transactions without any money or they can't stop consuming unsustainably to pay the unpayable interest obligation that comes with the money loaned.
I see one and only one way this problem could potentially be avoided. Say we owe 10 trillion to banks as a nation. But there is only 3 trillion of money in existence. So we gather up 7 trillion WORTH of oil, chickens, gold, whatever, and took that plus the 3 trillion down to the bank and said, "here: this is 3 trillion plus a lot of real goods worth the 7 trillion we owe (which dosn't exist)".
This could retire the debt, but once again, we'd have no money. So, maybe if we took 10 trillion worth of real goods down there, then we'd have three trillion of money circulating without any debt on it. If no new bank loans at interest were made from then on, we would be ok so long as 3 trillion would be enough to run our economy on.
But, as far as I know, no loan can be paid off in real goods. You have to go get money for it. So there goes that solution.
I find his solutions appealing but unrealistic. One of the biggest problems with paper or electronic money is trust. He suggests that we take money creation away from bankers and give it to politicians. We can't trust bankers, but we can trust politicians? It does sound preferable, but I think his view of politics is essentially naieve and utopian.
One reason why gold and silver are good money is because nobody can triple the amount of gold in the world to debase mine by 67%. The author talked about all the problems with gold but none of these benefits.
I also find it interesting that no mention was made of how easy it is to steal paper or electronic money. It seems lots of folks are not finding it too challenging these days.
I would agree with this statement (and your post at large) if banks were the only entities issuing money. But some of our money is actually issued by the Federal Government. I would think most of that speculative (since you just picked a number right?) $3 trillion would be what came out of the fed, whereas the other $7 trillion is what banks issued on (mostly?) collateralized loans.
In this example, which is admittedly an underestimate because I think you singled out national debt and largely ignored personal or commercial debt, we might figure that $3 trillion is the real monetization and the bankers have basically taken $7 trillion out of everyone's pockets. Pretty good for a bunch of accountants.
With that said, I think the only [ahem] responsible way to clear these obligations would be to inflate our way out. Let the fed print an extra $10 trillion dollars, and pay that to the bankers. The market would still have $3 trillion to grease transactions, and the bankers would be paid off. Of course, the $3 trillion left to us would be worth a fraction of it's original value. So maybe it's better to just print $20 trillion. Now the currency is worth 1/7th of its original amount, but the bankers have only made 1/2 the profit expected, and there would still be $13 trillion left as a market maker.
Now for my answer to what I think the future really holds. The problem with currency is you can just print it, it has no bearing on the real world. Meanwhile, the problem with gold or silver or whatever, is that they are just too scarce. If the economy increases 10x in size, we should have up to 10x the money floating around out there. If we only have 1.5x the money, then money is too scarce and you can't make transactions. Why would I give you two gold coins for a house today when it will cost only 1 gold coin tomorrow?
In the present, and likely in the future, the manufacturing depends on energy. You need power for your computer, your car, and to bake a cake. What I see is a world where people are paid in energy credits. IE, if you work X hours, you can earn X kilowatt hours. The reason this might work is that it takes a certain amount of energy to mine for ore, and a certain amount to refine it and a certain amount to build a car out of that refined ore. Even as the economy expands and energy becomes more plentiful, the energy expenditure for a single task should remain about consistent, so the 'price' would not rise. Meanwhile, we can expand the amount of energy we produce. If we produce more tomorrow than today, everyone can become a little richer.
Obviously, there are some complications in every plan. Energy producers now become market makers, and I think Big Oil already has enough power. Plus, do we really want someone just burning coal as fast as they can to get richer? The final part of the equation is that all energy producers would need to be publicly owned, and the energy credits they produce would need to be distributed fairly (define however you like). Also, you can see that energy credits are destroyed when they are used (IE, pulling power from a socket).
Maybe it sounds like a nutty/far fetched idea. Likely it's impractical, but I still like to think that it's better than what we have today.
Based on what I know about the Skull and Bones society, I predicted in 2000 that GWB would get us into a war as way to funnel government money into the pockets of his friends. From my perspective, it looks like things played out like that. Still, I don't want to fall victim to confirmation bias.
I've had long talks about these sorts of things with friends and have come to believe two principles:
1. Rarely attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
2. Power is often self-reinforcing and does not need a conspiracy.
Our country was founded under ideals of liberty. I've come to believe that liberty for all can only be achieved when concentrated power is curtailed. The limitiation of power necessary for liberty needs to be applied to government, individuals and businesses. Our founding fathers did a very good job of putting checks and balances into our governmental system to prevent government from becoming too powerful. I don't think they thought much about limiting individual or business power. Still, laws seem to have been set up to follow this principle to a certain extent. Things like anti-trust laws do limit the power of businesses.
But when laws are designed to attack power, the power goes underground and hides. Many conspiracy theories are about hidden power. There is a circle of reasoning there that is internally consistent, yet it still sounds crazy to me.
I hope that I never have the empirical evidence to learn this lesson:
3. When you are swimming in shark infested waters, never try to cut the sharks.
If you are creating wealth in any way (and by wealth I do not mean "money" -- I mean "something of value to you and others"), then you will be fine. The relationship between the value of the wealth you create and the value of the wealth anyone else creates is not going to change significantly just because the dollar fluctuates. The only reasons that will change are:
a) You form of wealth creation is easily replicated, and will soon be done by Chinese child labor or robots at a much lower cost.
b) New technology makes your skill obsolete.
c) The wealth you create is of a transient value to society.
Bankers work the margin, they make money on transactions. They depend deeply on the continued creation and subsequent trade of wealth so they can skim the transaction. If you have a bone to pick with bankers, just quit trading your wealth with others (i.e. learn to build your own home, grow your food, and make your clothing -- or invent a way to metabolize source code).