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A Letter from Iceland: A World without Money
- jgranby 18y agoUse this link to bypass the "register to read the whole article" rubbish: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658,Authorised=true.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&nclick_check=1 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b076...
- tortilla 18y agoThis should work: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b07658.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66c87994-aec1-11dd-b621-000077b076...
- crabapple 18y agothere's plenty of money in the world, just no value. any government can print up a trillion dollars. we have half a quadrillion dollars in total outstanding global debt (all govt, private, hedged, and derivative-based debts)...one must wonder when global citizenry will awaken to the fact that global fiat currencies are all converging at worthlessness simultaneously
- aswanson 18y agoRon Paul for IMF president and US Treasury secretary.
- Dilpil 18y agoJust because you can't touch something, doesn't mean it isn't real. Just because you do not understand something, doesn't mean it is made up.
- nihilocrat 18y agoConversely, this is also a reason given to justify stuff like Creationism. Maybe it is just 'that simple'; our current financial crisis is primarily the result of a bunch of people realizing "oh, it's bad to give out huge loans to people who are probably going to default, but sell them like they are AAA loans", or perhaps more precisely "oh, maybe we shouldn't print so much imaginary money to the point where there is not enough real money getting generated to back it up".
- ars 18y agoSigh, this stupid meme again. Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property. Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash. If I build a house there is more value in the world, so there should be more paper money too - without affecting inflation. This is what happens with fiat money. On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - you can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad. Gold money does not, and can not work unless you are in a static economy. Fiat money works in both cases. Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead.
- elai 18y agoA currency back by land makes a lot more sense than a currency backed by... nothing, which is the definition of fiat money: 'Fiat money is money that is intrinsically useless; is used only as a medium of exchange' http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/fiat_money.htm http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/fiat_money...
- tptacek 18y agoYou can watch this whole thing play out, and see how it ends, if you read about the Argentine bank crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999–2002) (I have friends in Buenos Aires, which is for some reason a security hacker hotbed). In some ways I can think of, Iceland is much better off than Argentina was; Iceland is the victim of a short-lived failure of financial engineering, while Argentina's bank run was caused by long-term systemic corruption and unemployment.
- davidmathers 18y agoTyler Cowen says "I genuinely cannot imagine what the endgame looks like." http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/iceland-what-do.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10... Since you can see how it ends you should explain it to him.
- tptacek 18y agoDid you notice all the references to Argentina in the comments for that post?
- Brushfire 18y agoThis is, by far, one of the best written articles I have read in a long time. Thanks.
- ChaitanyaSai 18y agoIt surely is well written, but distilled to its essence, here it is: Our banks collapsed and our credit cards stopped working. Bad banks! So there's no real subsistence crisis yet? I wish there was about how the people who were hit the hardest were coping, but then again I remember that Iceland's population is less than half that of Boston and wonder how much more press coverage they are getting relative to their population size. Now why a population of 320,000 would elect to face these coming hardships by hunkering down and not moving to a more diversified and larger economy, that is fascinating and the author does speak about the cultural roots responsible for that attitude.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoby far, one of the best So there's a huge gap between, say the third and fourth best articles you've read in a long time, but only a tiny gap between numbers one, two, and three?