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Let's face it: catastrophic devaluations as seen in Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe are actually rare and preceded by political instability. With currencies you kno
by HarryHirsch 13y ago
Let's face it: catastrophic devaluations as seen in Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe are actually rare and preceded by political instability. With currencies you know where you stand, the political history of a nation tells you.
- atom-morgan 13y agoRare? Quite the contrary. The average life expectancy of a fiat currency is 27 years [1]. This is across 775 currencies. [1] http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/average-life-expectancy-for-fiat.html http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/average-life-e...
- dllthomas 13y agoI expect that's dominated by "infant mortality", because situations that cause currencies to die aren't fixed by rolling out a new currency. If that's the case, it tells us very little about the safety of well established currencies.
- atom-morgan 13y agoThey aren't fixed by rolling out a new currency if they're just repeating the previous process (printing money aka inflation, backed by nothing, etc).
- dllthomas 13y agoSure, but the ones rolling out a new currency here are bitcoin, which fixes only some of the issues. Incidentally "printing money" is not "aka inflation" - it causes inflation if the money supply grows faster than demand for the money but they are different things.
- mpyne 13y agoA figure that might actually mean something, if we were able to assume that any given fiat currency was the same as another.
- atom-morgan 13y agoWell they're almost all monopoly currencies (not a reference to the game) that are run by people who can increase the money supply.
- mpyne 13y agoSo basically we can just plug your 27 year figure into a probability density function to find out how many more years we can expect the USD to be kicking around? How many years does it have left, at varying levels of probability?
- dllthomas 13y agoThe incentive of a monopoly is to underproduce.
- atom-morgan 13y agoThe Fed and a government that likes to spend has proved otherwise.
- dllthomas 13y agoNot at all. If production of dollars was competitive, they would be priced near the cost of production. I'm not saying there are no valid critiques of USD and our monetary system. I'm saying that it is not bad for the reasons monopoly is usually bad.
- VMG 13y agoYou might want to brush up on that list of yours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hyperinflation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hype... Anyways, insuring against political instability is not a bad idea
- dllthomas 13y ago"Anyways, insuring against political instability is not a bad idea" So, because A precedes B, we're assuming B causes A?
- pjc50 13y agoMoreover, that kind of currency collapse is connected to balance of payments; in the case of Weimar, having to ship a substantial amount of gold continuously to France, and in the case of Zimbabwe a collapse of local agriculture due to land confiscation and redistributing to people who couldn't farm.
- dllthomas 13y ago"having to ship a substantial amount of gold continuously to France," And having to print Marks to buy that gold, at whatever price was being asked, from people who had no particular need for Marks.