4 ms·

Commercial banking, together with the Intellectual Property system, is one of the greatest Rentier swindles of all time. We are literally renting the money we u

Commercial banking, together with the Intellectual Property system, is one of the greatest Rentier swindles of all time. We are literally renting the money we use, for extortionate prices [1]. "The dollar as a reserve currency transfers wealth from the rest of world to the USA One final way in which money works today that has a substantial effect on the workings of the global political economy is the use of the US dollar as the international reserve currency. This follows the decision of the OPEC countries shortly after the end of the Second World War to accept only dollars for their oil. Today, the dollar is used for trade in many other commodities. This acts as a huge subsidy to the US economy, since countries elsewhere in the world sell goods and services to the US, but instead of buying back from US companies, they keep the dollars so as to be able to trade among themselves — as well as to be able to protect their currencies from speculative attack. This effective transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to the US permits the US to be easily the world’s largest debtor nation, while driving the unprecedented widening of wealth disparity within the global community (Douthwaite, 1999)." [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzCegQVljdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzCegQVljdY [2] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/impacts-of-our-current-money-system-57c1a3628be6 https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/impacts-of-our-curre...

RobertoG 6y ago
The USA is not, in percentage of their economy, the largest debtor nation. The dollar have a special status, because of the importance (economic and geopolitic) of the USA, but that's not what explain the untroubled existence of a big public debt. If that theory was true how they explain Japan?
- jcbrand 6y ago
  37% of USA debt is held by foreigners, while it's just about 9% in Japan.
  - RobertoG 6y ago
    There is not reason why the Federal Reserve can't do the same that the Bank of Japan if they choose so.
    - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
      Sure but the Fed should not be buying REITS and equity markets. I don’t think people realize how damaging it would be to the country long-term. Financial Engineering can smooth economic cycles but real forces determine LT growth rates. The Fed knows this and has been asking for fiscal support.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently). Inflation on the reserve currency is more or less a tax in exchange for these services. Who benefits the most? Pretty sure the answer isn't the common people of (insert any country name here, including the United States).
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently) "sometimes violently" is a bit of an understatement. With the use of our current system we are literally making the world uninhabitable for human existence. We are systemically destroying mother earth's carrying capacity through ecological destruction, not to mention the misery caused by Magical Voluntarism and labour rights abuses the world over. I'm still finding ways to describe the issues with our economic system and it's apparatus, and the meaningful changes proposed by one of the projects I follow, in a way that acknowledges that in a way we are all victims to this current system (including neo-Imperialist USA), as today's money does not respect the law of requisite variety [1]. My above critique might sound anti-American, but America (together with other formal colonial powers in the Global North) is just the most powerful player in a game with outdated, harmful and inadequate economic models and governance systems. It's a painful era where we are using inadequate wealth acknowledgement systems, where the old Platform Capitalism paradigm is breaking down and showing it's flaws, and where the potentiality for Protocol Cooperativism is starting to emerge. Money is an information technology created by humans, operating a set of protocols. Tomorrow's world is governed by the practice of Commons-based peer production that is not subject to the contrived scarcity of today's value regime and system, where a neoliberal Intellectual Property system blocks innovation and monopolizes knowledge and information [2]. [1] http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53 http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53, especially: "When I’m talking with free-market business people my elevator pitch [for community currencies supported by the MetaCurrency Project's Holochain pattern] is about allowing the power of competition and the marketplace to work on the currency system itself. [...] When I’m talking with engineers and information-theory folks my elevator pitch is about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and questions of the insufficient information carrying capacity of the monetary system to handle the control problems posed by the modern economy. When I’m talking with computer geeks my elevator pitch is about cc as a peer-to-peer distributed information system and about “pushing the intelligence to the edges” as in Reed’s Law." [2] https://c4ss.org/content/52947 https://c4ss.org/content/52947 and https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

RobertoG 6y ago

The USA is not, in percentage of their economy, the largest debtor nation. The dollar have a special status, because of the importance (economic and geopolitic) of the USA, but that's not what explain the untroubled existence of a big public debt. If that theory was true how they explain Japan?

jcbrand 6y ago
37% of USA debt is held by foreigners, while it's just about 9% in Japan.
- RobertoG 6y ago
  There is not reason why the Federal Reserve can't do the same that the Bank of Japan if they choose so.
  - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
    Sure but the Fed should not be buying REITS and equity markets. I don’t think people realize how damaging it would be to the country long-term. Financial Engineering can smooth economic cycles but real forces determine LT growth rates. The Fed knows this and has been asking for fiscal support.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently). Inflation on the reserve currency is more or less a tax in exchange for these services. Who benefits the most? Pretty sure the answer isn't the common people of (insert any country name here, including the United States).

bergstromm466 6y ago
> In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently) "sometimes violently" is a bit of an understatement. With the use of our current system we are literally making the world uninhabitable for human existence. We are systemically destroying mother earth's carrying capacity through ecological destruction, not to mention the misery caused by Magical Voluntarism and labour rights abuses the world over. I'm still finding ways to describe the issues with our economic system and it's apparatus, and the meaningful changes proposed by one of the projects I follow, in a way that acknowledges that in a way we are all victims to this current system (including neo-Imperialist USA), as today's money does not respect the law of requisite variety [1]. My above critique might sound anti-American, but America (together with other formal colonial powers in the Global North) is just the most powerful player in a game with outdated, harmful and inadequate economic models and governance systems. It's a painful era where we are using inadequate wealth acknowledgement systems, where the old Platform Capitalism paradigm is breaking down and showing it's flaws, and where the potentiality for Protocol Cooperativism is starting to emerge. Money is an information technology created by humans, operating a set of protocols. Tomorrow's world is governed by the practice of Commons-based peer production that is not subject to the contrived scarcity of today's value regime and system, where a neoliberal Intellectual Property system blocks innovation and monopolizes knowledge and information [2]. [1] http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53 http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53, especially: "When I’m talking with free-market business people my elevator pitch [for community currencies supported by the MetaCurrency Project's Holochain pattern] is about allowing the power of competition and the marketplace to work on the currency system itself. [...] When I’m talking with engineers and information-theory folks my elevator pitch is about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety and questions of the insufficient information carrying capacity of the monetary system to handle the control problems posed by the modern economy. When I’m talking with computer geeks my elevator pitch is about cc as a peer-to-peer distributed information system and about “pushing the intelligence to the edges” as in Reed’s Law." [2] https://c4ss.org/content/52947 https://c4ss.org/content/52947 and https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...