Money Is Debt: The Absurdity Of Our Financial System

[mortify ii]

Yes, it's really that stupid and self defeating

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ayg3hbhoM[/youtube]

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5yfTAFzYz4[/youtube]

 

 

Still believe in a Right vs Left paradigm?

[mortify ii]

Full documentary... educate your self

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbvCxMfcKv4[/youtube]

[mortify ii]

[Ice_nine]

wasn't zeitgeist the movie that spent an hour proving that Christianity was a bunch of bs and a copycat of ancient egyptian gods and whatnot?

[Ash Wednesday]

1 Timothy 6:10

[Credo in Deum]

wasn't zeitgeist the movie that spent an hour proving that Christianity was a bunch of bs and a copycat of ancient egyptian gods and whatnot?

 

Tried to prove, and yes.

 

@Mortify II:  Corruption in the government and it's money practices?  Say it ain't so!!   What should we do Mortify?  Coup d' etat?   

[mortify ii]

wasn't zeitgeist the movie that spent an hour proving that Christianity was a bunch of bs and a copycat of ancient egyptian gods and whatnot?

 

Yes, and I obviously don't agree with the author's conclusions there, but does that automatically mean this doc is flawed? If you feel so, prove it. 

[mortify ii]

Tried to prove, and yes.

 

@Mortify II:  Corruption in the government and it's money practices?  Say it ain't so!!   What should we do Mortify?  Coup d' etat?   

 

The system is intrinsically flawed and is bound to fail but of course I don't support a coup. The system we live in is too powerful to lend itself out to direct opposition. You can do what our Christian forebears did in the catacombs, prepare yourself interiorly for deliverance and let the epoch run itself out. In other words, stand back and let itself burn out.

 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzpcEVQu6w[/youtube]

[John Ryan]

I generally go to the post-Keynesian L. Randall Wray's Understanding Modern Money and Karl Marx's Capital for understanding the essence of money.

 

Zeitgeist and Michael Ruppert play on a concept known in Marxism as money fetishism. Zeitgeist demonstrates the shocking fact that only 3% of money is physical, and therefore that 97% of money is somehow unreal. The ominous music that sounds in the background when the narrator talks about fractional reserve banking. "Out of thin air!" The discussion of inflation is infantile, to be quite honest. It plays on the belief that dollars have an intrinsic value. Yes, if you leave your dollars in a mattress, you will lose real value. However, if you save your dollars in the financial system, you can counteract the eroding effects of inflation. Many financial savings assets are inflation protected. The beneficial aspect of inflation for the capitalist system is that greatly encourages the circulation of value. Stagnation is death. The benefit of inflation should be clear in the current financial crisis. Private debt is a major problem in the economy as of now, and therefore we should be encouraging things like wage-inflation so that private debt should be assuaged. Money fetishists ignorantly try to create a bogeyman out of the necromancy of inflation which is based on childish misunderstandings. 

 

I tend to assent to the idea that money = debt, as I generally believe the modern monetary theory of Wray. It is the spin on it Zeitgeist gives that I vehemently disagree with. So, for example, yes the national debt keeps growing. However, it is all about proportions. The danger is not in a nominally high debt, but in a debt that is high proportional to the base of the economy. 

[mortify ii]

All of it is unreal John, not just the 97% that exist solely as digital format. I'd like to engage in a discussion with you, but first if you don't mind sharing, are you full-time employed? Do you have and debt?

[John Ryan]

All of it is unreal John, not just the 97% that exist solely as digital format. I'd like to engage in a discussion with you, but first if you don't mind sharing, are you full-time employed? Do you have and debt?

 

I am unemployed at the moment, but come September should be part-time employed. And I do have quite a lot of debt from getting my masters degree. 

 

Let me just lay out my ideological predisposition from the beginning. I am a Marxist who believes that the foundational real category is human labor. The source of value is human labor. Money is an abstract representation of this labor-value. It is not unreal in that it represents something real, but it is a phenomenal form (displaying the features of externality) of the essential labor that becomes congealed in commodities. 

 

My criticism of Zeitgeist should not be taken as a positive appraisal of money. My criticism is solely based on my impression that Zeitgeist is critiquing the current system from an equally illusory position of money fetishism. The impression was that fiat money is somehow more false than commodity money. Whereas the truth of the matter is that the concept of money is itself a virtual representation of human labor. 

[Ice_nine]

Yes, and I obviously don't agree with the author's conclusions there, but does that automatically mean this doc is flawed? If you feel so, prove it. 

 

 I didn't watch the videos you posted but the zeitgeist brand makes me suspicious.

 

I don't really feel like investing a lot of time into studying these broad economic topics as I have no illusions that I will ever be able to affect any change in this arena.

[John Ryan]

 I didn't watch the videos you posted but the zeitgeist brand makes me suspicious.

 

I don't really feel like investing a lot of time into studying these broad economic topics as I have no illusions that I will ever be able to affect any change in this arena.

 

While my M.A. is in political philosophy, much of my reading has been in political economy, so I feel comfortable with all the topics they discussed in the video. I learned all of that in economics classes. The only difference was the lack of conspiracy theories and ominous music. I mean, Zeitgeist didn't really say anything that a first-year econ. student doesn't learn.

[mortify ii]

I am unemployed at the moment, but come September should be part-time employed. And I do have quite a lot of debt from getting my masters degree. 

 

Do you currently live with your parents? And will they be helping you pay off your student debt?

[Winchester]

When the power to define what is money is not vested in the hands of a few, different goods will operate as money. In the past, demand for such things as tobacco leaves, or furs, was high enough that those goods traded as money. Coin has more consistently enjoyed this status. Paper notes representing money were a convenience banks and governments exploited in order to commit fraud. Bank notes are now unbacked by money, but required under threat of force to be recognized as legal tender. Devaluation of government papaer has been forbidden under threat of force more than once, but at least in colonial times the governments that did this "promised" to eventually exchange the paper for money.

 

Federal reserve notes are not really "money". They're worthless paper backed by a threat of government violence.

[God the Father]

I have a BBA in Finance from a T20 UG business program.

 

Fractional reserve banking is pretty much a crime, along with quantitative easing. John Ryan commented that withholding your money from "the financial system" is the only way to get burned on inflation, and this is partly true--investment in financial assets is conducted by most people with the goal of generating a real return on assets, and many people have accomplished this.

 

That said, "the financial system" is a byzantine web of derivative derivatives, regulation, cronyism, manipulation, etc., controlled by an extreme minority of wealthy, connected individuals, who benefit directly from the system they've created, where your choice to withhold your own hard-earned money from their system results in real erosion of your wealth because they've designed it that way. Your investment in their arrangement, necessary to merely maintain your wealth, enriches them to a greater and greater degree while putting you at risk of a 2007-esque bubble burst.

 

Furthermore, the idea that inflation helps retail debt slaves (that's all of us, now, thanks to the same people referenced above) doesn't have a firm basis in reality. As a consumer with a lot of retail debt, the inflation that decreases my real debt burden is simultaneously increasing my real food/gas/energy/insurance/clothing/furniture/detergent/soap/razors burden. In the best case scenario it's a wash for me in terms of net income, and in a realistic scenario the savings I've built up becomes worthless while my disposable income shrinks to prole levels. Anyone who does their own shopping can tell you that inflation is already out of control in spite of the official figures: This is because the official calculation of "CPI" has been changed dozens of times since its inception, always to goalseek a lower figure. Meanwhile 100% of retail debt is locked in at a variable rate with a spread 20x above the rock-bottom index that the powerbrokers are paying on debt.

 

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

 

The graphs in the below link illustrate that the "Nixon Shock," which broke the post WWII Bretton-Woods international monetary framework tying all money to gold through the US dollar correlates pretty irrefutably with a sea-change in the trajectory of real wages and real wealth for the average American. This is because the people (they're people, not angels) in control of the money's value are not middle class and have no motivation to protect the prosperity of the middle class, and unsound money drives up the nominal price of the assets they (and fewer and fewer others) hold--increasing their own net worth while necessity purchases for the rest of us become less and less tenable.

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-explaining-wage-stagnation

 

I get that most goldbugs/libertarians/tea partiers/preppers/soothsayers are insane, unattractive, and smelly. But they're telling the story that the media, highly interbred with a political and banking elite, refuse to tell, and it's worth lending an ear to.

Edited July 11, 2014 by God the Father

[John Ryan]

Do you currently live with your parents? And will they be helping you pay off your student debt?

 

I do not know where you are going with this. Let's get to the point.

 

When the power to define what is money is not vested in the hands of a few, different goods will operate as money. In the past, demand for such things as tobacco leaves, or furs, was high enough that those goods traded as money. Coin has more consistently enjoyed this status. Paper notes representing money were a convenience banks and governments exploited in order to commit fraud. Bank notes are now unbacked by money, but required under threat of force to be recognized as legal tender. Devaluation of government papaer has been forbidden under threat of force more than once, but at least in colonial times the governments that did this "promised" to eventually exchange the paper for money.

 

Federal reserve notes are not really "money". They're worthless paper backed by a threat of government violence.

 

It depends how you define money. I would not agree with the logic of your argument. 

[Winchester]

 

 

 

It depends how you define money. I would not agree with the logic of your argument. 

 

I stated an historical fact.

[John Ryan]

I have a BBA in Finance from a T20 UG business program.

 

Fractional reserve banking is pretty much a crime, along with quantitative easing. John Ryan commented that withholding your money from "the financial system" is the only way to get burned on inflation, and this is partly true--investment in financial assets is conducted by most people with the goal of generating a real return on assets, and many people have accomplished this.

 

That said, "the financial system" is a byzantine web of derivative derivatives, regulation, cronyism, manipulation, etc., controlled by an extreme minority of wealthy, connected individuals, who benefit directly from the system they've created, where your choice to withhold your own hard-earned money from their system results in real erosion of your wealth because they've designed it that way. Your investment in their, necessary to merely maintain your wealth, enriches them to a greater and greater degree while putting you at risk of a 2007-esque bubble burst.

 

Furthermore, the idea that inflation helps retail debt slaves (that's all of us, now, thanks to the same people referenced above) doesn't have a firm basis in reality. As a consumer with a lot of retail debt, the inflation that decreases my real debt burden is simultaneously increasing my real food/gas/energy/insurance/clothing/furniture/detergent/soap/razors burden. In the best case scenario it's a wash for me in terms of net income, and in a realistic scenario the savings I've built up becomes worthless while my disposable income shrinks to prole levels. Anyone who does their own shopping can tell you that inflation is already out of control in spite of the official figures: This is because the official calculation of "CPI" has been changed dozens of times since its inception, always to goalseek a lower figure. Meanwhile 100% of retail debt is locked in at a variable rate with a spread 20x above the rock-bottom index that the powerbrokers are paying on debt.

 

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

 

The graphs in the below link illustrate that the "Nixon Shock," which broke the post WWII Bretton-Woods international monetary framework tying all money to gold through the US dollar correlates pretty irrefutably with a sea-change in the trajectory of real wages and real wealth for the average American. This is because the people (they're people, not angels) in control of the money's value are not middle class and have no motivation to protect the prosperity of the middle class, and unsound money drives up the nominal price of the assets they (and fewer and fewer others) hold--increasing their own net worth while necessity purchases for the rest of us become less and less tenable.

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-explaining-wage-stagnation

 

I get that most goldbugs/libertarians/tea partiers/preppers/soothsayers are insane, unattractive, and smelly. But they're telling the story that the media, highly interbred with a political and banking elite, refuse to tell, and it's worth lending an ear to.

 

There is no question that the system we have is monstrous (Communist here), though I would dispute some of your specific points. The problem is that the "solutions" appear to be equally perverse. The Federal Reserve might not be angelic, but economies were much more unstable and crises more frequent on the gold standard. Criticize fiat currency all you want, I still think it is an improvement over the old system. 

[Winchester]

There is no question that the system we have is monstrous (Communist here), though I would dispute some of your specific points. The problem is that the "solutions" appear to be equally perverse. The Federal Reserve might not be angelic, but economies were much more unstable and crises more frequent on the gold standard. Criticize fiat currency all you want, I still think it is an improvement over the old system. 

That depends on the gold standard and the metrics for "unstable". The Bretton-Woods scam wasn't a "gold standard", and monetary manipulation was accomplished in different ways. I think Rothbard's work: https://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf is illuminating. You can ignore the chapters on his economic theory and proceed straight to the history. He also detailed several of the scams run by different colonial governments in "Conceived in Liberty". 

 

Economists sometimes interpreted periods of deflation as equivalent to periods of depression. That's led to some mistakes. You will find that depressions were generally preceded by some sort of monetary or credit expansion, and this is most commonly accomplished by manipulation by governments. A real gold standard, sans fractional reserve, would minimize this, but the best system would be to permit competing currencies.