Yes but to converge the two sides have to acknowledge the arguments of the other side, unfortunately I am probably not arguing well enough and Im perfectly willing to just give up.

Anyway you seem to be able to research complicated topics well, you can read up about the history and end of the gold standard and about deflation for your own sake in your own time :-)

Fighting against fiat money, reserve banks, inflation and national debt is like fighting against democracy or free speech.
Sometimes democracy gives you Trump, sometimes free speech gives you porn (or worse, Fox news), sometimes the economy gets out of hand, but mostly these things work better than their alternatives and prevent or minimize crashes, based on the experience of the last 200 years. Every time someone thought better, they made things worse.

A German mark had value….until it didn’t. Your opinion of “fiat money” isn’t universal by any stretch. You say it’s universally better. I wholeheartedly disagree, and point to Germany and Venezuela as proof. They aren’t outliers either, (looking at Africa).

Gold is useful and valuable. Digital footprints aren’t. Paper notes aren’t. Printed circuits, connectors, anti oxidation, actual physical money, jewelry, etc. gold has intrinsic value, a dollar bill has about 13210 joules, so its intrinsic worth is about 1 small 1 gram stick as kindling and little more….no matter if it’s a $1 or $500 bill or a check for billions. Again, see Germany, where bills were more valuable as firewood than money.

This deflation idea again. Give me 3 examples of deflation harming/ending a nation on the gold standard please, I’ve never heard of it happening. (Edit: as far as I can find, I’m no economics professor, for the most part the gold standard was abandoned worldwide in the early 1930’s and the last remnants removed in the early 70’s by Nixon)

Explain how unsecured notes guard against speculation….don’t just claim it. I don’t see it, people made a mint short selling Venezuelan (and other failed) dollars….speculating they would crash….they did. What?

GDP is the metric that imparts value to unsecured notes offered by countries.

I think you had a mini stroke, the paragraph starting USofA is a word salad with no meaning.

Name 3. I named Germany post ww1….they didn’t get to borrow or ignore their debts. What are you talking about?

So, the only ones that don’t/can’t borrow are all the ones that need to.

Pretending basing your dollar on Bitcoin is the same as basing it on gold is outrageous idiotic bullshit. Just nonsense. Utterly moronic and pure fantasy. Don’t try moving the goalposts, that’s what you said.

Yes, the fed will take gold. They don’t take Bitcoin, do they? How about shells? Pebbles?

Jesus, you just want to argue. You’re rambling, switching positions and going off on tangents.
It’s not about whether someone might accept it, it’s about whether it’s universally accepted at one value and about holding its accepted long term value. People once gladly accepted beanie babies as payment….stupid people.
Arcata Ca printed up Arcata dollars….you could get them cheap, businesses took them. Wanna put your nest egg into them? You say that’s good money, as good as dollars. I’ll sell them to you for gold, and let’s see who’s doing better in 10 years. Or I’ll sell you pebbles for gold. Any currency you want, I’ll sell you for gold. How’s that working with pebbles or shells? Can you buy currency with them?

It has everything to do with how much it’s worth. Stop jumping subjects because your point is failing to convince. An economy based on pebbles fails because their neighbors don’t value pebbles, but if their pebbles are gold, they succeed because gold is valued universally.

What are you talking about, the gold standard’s ability to keep up? Huh?! No keep up necessary, no slow down required, gold trades exactly as fast as everything else. What is this nonsense?!?

You mean you can’t overspend and go deep into debt?! And that’s bad?! In your opinion, not many economists….and what makes you think you can’t borrow against gold? Secured loans are easier and cheaper to come by. WHAT?!?

Yes, unsecured paper money can just be printed forever, you CAN “sell the universe”. (Or sell dollars who’s overall value is based on your country’s value) over and over, then print more and sell 9/10 again, print more, sell again. Eventually that money is worth less than it costs to print, and your creditors get paid off in dollars worth a tiny fraction of what they lent you. Not if it’s backed with gold.

Miracle cure?!? Quote it. I think you misread. Secured notes being better than unsecured notes is not “miracle cure” or perfection, it’s just measurably better, safer, and more stable. No system is perfect.

A dollar has value if you can buy shit for a dollar.

Gold likewise has no exchange value if you cant exchange it for goods and services. Its rare and chemically stable and good for memorial coins, has many technical uses and looks cute, but otherwise it hardly matters what symbol for money you choose. There is 200 years of experience with fiat money and gold and silver standards and fiat money has been better, not just usually better or better in some scenario, universally better.

Symbolic money is practical and facilitates quicker turn around prevents deflation makes speculative runs on currency harder and smoothes the economic bumps in the road in general.

GDP is just a metric. Not a bad one but not the actual goal.

USofA is teh most developed. Should have used growing. Deflation in an economy that is growing kills growth.

Restarting countries not only get to ignore their debts, they immediatelly start borrowing again.

The only countries that dont borrow are countries no-one will lend to and countries so rich in some silly resource they can float high in the international currency system without borrowing. Borrowing is good for bussiness.

What is outrageous idiotic bullshit? Believing pegging the value of your paper note to some hoarded luxury makes it a better representation of the mean value of goods and services bought and sold? I could do without gold except for the jacks on my audio cables (just kidding). It does not matter what I exchange for food and gas, if it gets me food and gas, its good money.

Money is what you can pay taxes with. Do they take gold?

If you insist your dollar has the value of some weight of gold how does that influence the willingness of someone else to sell you shit? Unless they specifically intend to buy gold at a fixed price they dont care. They are going to use your dolar to buy some other shit from someone else. So if you take the actual currency out of the equation, when you decide on buying and selling shit you are intuitively comparing that decision with all the other decisions about buying and sellin that you know of. The currency is just a good way to count the measure of usefullness of a product or service and compare among many. Pebbles, bottletops, dollars, gold, pearls, all just a number.

A dollar could be backed by gold or it could not, this has zero impact on the transactions made. What matters is how many transactions are made, at what value, and how much money is available to the entire marketplace in a given period of time. Transactions quickly pass the ability of a gold standard to keep up. If you want a gold standard you have to slow transactions down because you dont have the money for them.

This is why markets need some regulation, otherwise someone might sell the universe twice and then default on one. But a gold standard, at least the type of gold standard I believe was talked about in this thread as a miracle cure, would be too limiting.

FIAT = Fix It Again, Tony.

I have a Jeep Renegade myself, it's pretty much a bit more top-heavy Fiat 500X, I really enjoy it but it's made for on-road driving and it doesn't roll in this crash test. But I won't be taking it to the top of a mountain without a good road.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Advertisers didn't put this on our screens? Who did then? The Keebler Elves? The Commercial Fairy? Aliens?
No, advertisers made it, for Dodge (yes I know Dodge is owned by Fiat, but that doesn't get them off the hook imho) and they then ran it by the estate of Martin Luther King Jr, who actually signed off on this.
The King family is however not pleased by this, which confuses me to no end as it sounds like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is up to.

Two interesting articles on the nature of fiat currencies today.

First, Stephanie Kelton has an op-ed in the NYT titled How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong.

Second, J.D. Alt notes that Italy is dipping its feet into MMT territory.

ECB Research Bulletin:

In an economy with its own fiat currency, the monetary authority and the fiscal authority can ensure that public debt denominated in the national fiat currency is non-defaultable, i.e. maturing government bonds are convertible into currency at par. With this arrangement in place, fiscal policy can focus on business cycle stabilisation when monetary policy hits the lower bound constraint. However, the fiscal authorities of the euro area countries have given up the ability to issue non-defaultable debt. As a consequence, effective macroeconomic stabilisation has been difficult to achieve.

Translation:
- all members of the eurozone effectively use a foreign currency
- they can default, because they do not and cannot issue debt in their currency
- fiscal policy has thus been completely neutered

Ergo, national parliaments have a significantly smaller policy space compared to countries with their own currency. Our parliaments intentionally surrender power to unelected technocrats, even control of the national budget, which is the primary power available to any parliament anywhere.

"Sorry, lad. We cannot pay for healthcare/pension/infrastructure/education/wages/X, we have to maintain a balanced budget to appease the market." Yet it is still illegal to call for the guillotine...

Meanwhile, Japan doesn't give a fuck. The BoJ has been vacuuming up outstanding debt like there's no tomorrow. It currently holds in excess of 40% of all government debt, effectively canceling it. It's just book-keeping. The Treasury issues the debt, the CB buys the debt. Both are part of the consolidated government sector, ergo no debt. "Hyperinflation!", they scream. Can you hear them? Except Japan has been fighting deflation for two decades, with no end in sight.

Yet the inflation-hawks are still treated as persons of authority. Flat-earthers, the lot of 'em.

And my country wants the rest of Europe to sign on to the most moronic law in German history: the "Schuldenbremse", which makes running a deficit illegal at the constitutional level (except for undefined "emergencies"). They are either a) brainwashed, b) idiots, or c) straight up evil. And I'm not sure which one I prefer.

Likewise.

You ought to know better than to believe the outrageous rebranding of censorship as something that can only be accomplished by government fiat, but in doing so you're ignoring real power structures that exist and giving free rein to regressives who want to sanitise and degrade our culture.

The Fatherhood - Fiat 500L 12" Remix (Fiat UK) has been added as a related post - related requested by ant on that post.

Thou shalt kneel before thine *religion of statism and follow thine Commandments, which include, but are not limited to:

1) Thou shalt kill and/or pay for the killing of anyone who the state deigns deserving of murder, regardless of their "crime" or innocence;
2) Thou shalt make enemies of thine friends, relatives, and neighbors so as to divide thine families and communities for the sake of vying for state-granted "privileges" at everyone else's expense;
3) Thou shalt work for the state and receive just enough "freedom" to sustain the illusion of being "free-range" chattel;
4) Thou shalt seek loopholes within the laws while aiming to restrict others within them;
5) Thou shalt only seek to create laws, but never repeal them;
6) Thou shalt vote for cronies who pursue their own self-interest (and those of their financial interests) while claiming to "represent" you;
7) Thou shalt only use fiat currency, which can be -- and frequently is -- arbitrarily inflated and devalued, at will, by those in the central bank known as thine Federal Reserve;
8. Thou shalt keep the idea of government holy, and never take the name of its offices in vain;
9) Thou shalt remember thine mafia-like extortions known as taxes, and always pay on time;
10) Thou shalt honor thine state-imposed educators and regulators and give up thine rights whenever police officers and other authorities deem it convenient for you to do so.

Thou shalt not think for oneself.

First things first: I read the article you linked as well as three others by the same author, given that he's teaching at a nearby facility. His article "The Three Types of Austerity" was quite enough to know that I'll never see eye-to-eye with him, or anyone of the same views.

"[Austerity] frees up resources for private investment" is a statement that does not match my perception of reality, given the absolute abundance of (financial) resources within the eurozone. It's a lack of demand for investments that's the problem, not supply. Savings are at record highs, investment is at an all-time low.

So, demand vs supply... we all know that discussion won't be resolved here, ever. It's utterly pointless. Same for the gold standard vs fiat, inflation good or bad, or any related discussion, really.

Instead, I'll try to reply to unrelated statements.

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"Do you think The Wire paid for their production assistants' healthcare? Did they make more than the $50/day for their 12 hour days (if they weren't working for free as "interns" for the 'privilege' of 'paying their dues' in 'the industry')?"

I know nothing about the situation on set of The Wire. My assumption is that it involved the regular amount of abuse of labour, including unpaid interns.

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"Haha, of course, "liberals" get a pass from other "liberals", but no pass for the Kochtopus (even though the Kochs give way more money to charities than The Wire would even be able to)."

Well, good for them. But I don't see why you drag them in here. You made a set of rhetoric questions aimed at hypocrisy by David Simon. I pointed out my view that any possible hypocrisy is dwarfed by the point he made vis-a-vis guilt/Perkins/watch/whatever.

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"Yeah? Like you know (the other) David Simon and can vouch for his "lack of guilt?" And "guilt" about what? Having money? Being successful?"

Feeling guilty about the discussion amongst the establishment regarding, for instance, the minimum wage. He finds it questionable how one can argue against giving a fella at Burger King 10-12 bucks an hour without feeling guilty for it. That's the disconnect we're talking about. When extremely wealthy individuals deny even the crumbs to the folks at the bottom.

Shamelessness was my addition, my interpretation. It was aimed at the demand for tax breaks and subsidies for extremely profitable corporations or extremely wealthy individuals. I would feel ashamed for any demands to my benefit if a) I didn't objectively need them and b) they would come at a detriment to others in worse situations than me.

Since I'm arguing from a different economic perspective than you, a shortfall in tax income (aka tax breaks) to me means either more taxes at another place, probably from weaker entitities who can't afford to buy their own representative, or a cut in essential services. I operate under a very broad definition of human dignity and see it as the first and foremost objective. Food, shelter, health, etc for all -- which might just be a reason why some people refer to me as a "pinko commie".

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"Does he? Really? How? And how are you doing more for "society" than that? Who are you and what exactly is your great "contribution" to society?"

He "weakens" society, economically, by suppressing aggregate demand. The more wealth you accumulate, the less of it, as a percentage, translates into demand. For an economy that depends on the circulation of goods and services, a massive and non-temporary accumulation of debt or savings (same coin, different sides) in the hands of single players (be it state, corporation or individual) chokes up the system. Less demand, less investment, less growth.
Accumulation is all fine and dandy if it translates into economic activity, but given the pathetic % of GDP that is being invested, despite mountains of unused cash that are forced into financial shenanigans looking for profit, I'd say it is dead weight and a drag.

But since you apparently share the views of Hollenbeck, all of that was probably hogwash to you.

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To answer your question: a human being and my great contribution to society is my charming personality, of course.

And with that, I bid you adieu. I've had long-ass discussions about Snowden/surveillance and other topics that led nowhere and I'm not interested in having one about economic theory, especially not in a second language. The floor is all yours, including the last word.

*dead again, account terminated. I really like this one, too

Does anyone have more details on the Fiat?