6 ms·
If money rules the world, who rules money? (2008) [pdf]
- api 3y agoAnswer: the world rules money. It's a complex system, a feedback loop. Money is just a signaling protocol.
- coding123 3y agoWell no that's not the answer. There are about 7 people in the world that have the ability to double the amount of cash that exists - in the matter of seconds. Those people rule the money.
- eshack94 3y agoThese people rule the signaling protocol.
- mwsfc 3y agoYour response was to the poster who said "It's a complex system, a feedback loop." That about sums it up. Your seven people operate inside this system. They don't have complete freedom to do what they want willy nilly.
- kylebenzle 3y agoJerome Powell does actually have the freedom to do what he wants willy nilly. He might have consequences but he has the power and freedom to "set the price" of the USD.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RedCondor 3y ago1. Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation. 2. Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. […] 3. Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it. 4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […] 5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […] 6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.
- nico 3y agoSo the question is: how do we change it? How do we break out of that? What are the better alternatives?
- RedCondor 3y agoThe article I took that from discusses the communist answer to that question at length. https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/ https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/
- nico 3y agoThat’s a very thoughtful and thought-provoking article, thank you It sucks that communism and pretty much anything related to it is almost impossible to discuss in earnest I doubted even clicking on that link for a while, dismissing it just because you mentioned it was “the communist answer”
- RedCondor 3y agoYeah, it's tough out there. But there are really good resources out there, in growing number. I'm kinda optimistic!
- 3y ago
- 29athrowaway 3y agoMoney is only valuable if it is scarce. If you print quadrillions of dollars and give each person 1 billion, a sandwich will soon cost 1 billion. Then, if you manage to somehow to preserve the value and actually give each person 1 billion, they would have large families and a lifestyle with a higher carbon footprint.
- Avshalom 3y agoThat makes one unit of money less valuable than that same unit at some previous period of time. "Money" though is still just as required to not starve as it was in that past.
- pixl97 3y agoIncreasing money without increasing productivity doesn't change anything. It's a representation of something real.
- dr-detroit 3y ago[dead]
- vkou 3y ago> Then, if you manage to somehow to preserve the value and actually give each person 1 billion You're making the same mistake most people discussing these questions, by focusing on money. Money is a convenient medium of exchange, and monetary policy is one of the many inputs into the economy. But at the end of the day, people don't care about money. You can't eat t-bills. Greenbacks won't put a roof and four walls around you, and you don't burn them to keep the lights on. What really matters, and what people really care about is wealth. Material wealth. Wealth is only produced when people work. Whenever we talk about society as a whole 'not having the money' to afford something (Social security, social services, pensions, etc), money isn't the limiting factor. Our society's wealth is. And that wealth is measured in labour that goes towards producing useful goods and services - not in how fast money can be siphoned up by rent-seekers, or in how fast labour hours can be pissed away on make-work ditch-digging-and-ditch-filling. Unlike money, you can't just magic up widgets into existence, by pretending to work. On the one hand, labour participation is up. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history. But so is waste, active parasitism, and passive inefficiencies[1], due to the high upkeep requirements of modern societies. [1] Car ownership is a great example of this. A mind-boggling amount of labour is poured into providing everyone with cars, and keeping them, and the infrastructure that they need running. And there's no practical way to opt out of it in most of North America. So much of the wealth we generate goes right back into maintaining the systems that we inflicted on ourselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- salawat 3y ago1. God invented Humans (HaShem and the Almighty also credited). Humans has always been a gods' creation. 2. Having invented Humans, God then assigned to Them their own powers of creation. […] 3. Having projected thought onto a non-divinity and invented entity, Gods then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it. 4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […] 5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […] 6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators. Doesn't change much sadly except maybe ramming home we were made in a divinity's image.
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- auspiv 3y agoCtrl + F "federal reserve" - phrase not found. The Federal Reserve (which, despite its name, is not a part of the US Government) is the de facto institution that controls money in the United States. All US Dollars are created by the Federal Reserve. It was created "for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises". It is owned by member banks - "A member bank is a private institution and owns stock in its regional Federal Reserve Bank. All nationally chartered banks hold stock in one of the Federal Reserve Banks... The amount of stock a member bank must own is equal to 3% of its combined capital and surplus" https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsx0wq4jdzo82fk8nhfk/culture/conspiracy-theorists-ask-who-owns-the-new-york-fed-heres-the-answer https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bsx0wq4jdzo82... - "Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed late last year by Institutional Investor, we know the truth. II asked the New York Fed for the capital stock holdings of its members as of year-end 2018, as well as for each year going back to 2007. The bank responded with copies of what it calls its Capital Stock Master Report, a compendium of shareholdings of member banks, for each of those years. The big reveal for year-end 2018: Citibank, the No. 1 institution on the roster, held 87.9 million New York Federal Reserve Bank shares – or 42.8 percent of the total. The No. 2 holder stockholder was JPMorgan Chase Bank, with 60.6 million shares, equal to 29.5 percent of the total. In other words, the two banks together control nearly three-quarters of the regional bank’s capital shares." The Federal Reserve banks pay 6% dividend to member banks holding shares. The big banks effectively own the Federal Reserve.
- corethree 3y agoFederal reserve makes things equivalent to money and they use it to control the value of money. They do not own money. Owners of money are those that actually own it in the bank. Then there are those who own it in the form of assets which also helps divert control of value away from the Fed. In fact almost all rich people don't own money, they own some form of asset which has intrinsic value. Therefore in a non-technical sense, rich people are the owners of "money" or "value" which is what we're really getting at here. But there's another viewpoint of this. Corporations. Corporations own a lot of "value". But who owns the corporations? Rich people and also all of us. Generally upper middle class people and Rich people own most of the value and money.
- spraveenitpro 3y ago[dead]
- spraveenitpro 3y ago[dead]
- rosmax_1337 3y agoThis is actually a very important question, with some quite troubling answers.
- kylebenzle 3y agoIts not complicated though, The Federal Reserve a corporation run by a board of directors, those people decide how much money to make and who to give it to (mostly themselves/other bankers).
- rosmax_1337 3y agoRight, who are those on that board. Do they have ties to the rest of society through ethnic, religious or political means?
- kylebenzle 3y agoThe share holders of the Federal Reserve are ALL private "regional" banks, then the profit of the Federal Reserve is shared with its shareholders. The two largest shareholders (owners) of the Federal Reserve, together with over 50% ownership is Citi and Chase. So Citi and Chase own the federal reserve.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThis is simply false, though it's an exceedingly common false belief: The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress. ... Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund. <https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm> Note the mention of "legally required dividend payments" in the 2nd 'graph above. Those are in fact accrued to the member banks, and amount to 6% of the stock price (itself, if I'm reading correctly, 6% of the total asset value) of each regional Federal Reserve Bank. Strictly speaking this is not profit, though the dividends are only paid when the Fed itself has positive operating returns (which is almost always). But it is, yes, a benefit which accrues to member banks. The operating profits however are paid to the U.S. Treasury. More on Fed Dividends: <https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/federal-reserve-dividends-should-not-be-a-piggy-bank-for-congress/ https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/federal-reserve-dividends-...> <https://newrepublic.com/article/116913/federal-reserve-dividends-most-outrageous-handout-banks https://newrepublic.com/article/116913/federal-reserve-divid...> <https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/appendix-b-dividends.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/appendix-b-divide...>
- katella 3y agoAnyone have alt source, I can't access it
- yamrzou 3y agohttps://issuu.com/helyipenz/docs/margrit-kennedy---if-money-rules-the-world---who-r https://issuu.com/helyipenz/docs/margrit-kennedy---if-money-...
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- raincom 3y agoThe folks who have the power to create inflation rules money. They borrow first to buy real assets with nominal currency; later pay with inflated money. Inflation is a hidden interest rate. real interest rate = inflation + nominal interest rate
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> "neither the 87 monetary crashes over the last 25 years, nor World Wars I or II, nor social revolutions like the French, Russian or Chinese, have changed anything fundamentally in terms of the money system." the ones who rules the money, are the same ones that ruled it 100, 200 or 500 years ago. more or less.
- sdfghswe 3y agoIf you don't have an answer, saying that the answer is the same as 500 years ago doesn't contribute much to the conversation.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y agowhat i mean is power concentrates and wealth begets wealth. and what did you contribute to the conversation?
- nilslindemann 3y agoCompound interest, ego. Material root cause, spiritual root cause.
- oatmeal1 3y agoPeople believe that fractional reserve banking breaks down without exponential growth only because the natural rebalancing process is stopped by the government; every time the economy tips toward recession, there is government intervention both in stimulus programs and by national banks to halt economic downturn at all costs. It is akin to forest fires. If small, natural fires are suppressed, eventually there will build up so much kindling an inferno becomes guaranteed. Our economy is like a town built in that forest.
- raincom 3y agoThere is no fractional reserve banking; in other words, deposits don’t create loans. On the contrary, loans create deposits. If people have good jobs with stability, they can get loans for homes, vehicles, vacations, etc.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoThe evolution of the Golden Rule has been as follows Do to others as you would have them do unto you Do not do to others as you would not have them do to you He who has the gold makes the rules He who makes the rules takes the gold variation: alchemy / cryptocurrency (which are actually the same premises sitting atop different stages of technology substrate): he who makes the gold makes the rules