152 comments on The Resurgence of Risk – A Primer on the Developing Credit Crunch
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You state that money is a physical commodity. This is a result of much wishful thinking. The article you link to may contain the phrase but not much of an argument.
Gold is a physical commodity. Whether or not you put the king or a president on a specified lump of it is ceremonial. Paper money is paper, also a physical commodity. When it says 'will pay to the bearer on demand', it pretty much explains itself as a form of debt.
If we define money as a physical commodity, there isn't very much out there. I could go on and on, but I don't think there is much more to say unless I want to get into negating the ceremonial obfuscation of the financial world since Gutenberg and Paterson brought forth the Bank Note, the official IOU or I Owe You.
While alchemy failed to turn lead into gold, Paterson turned gold into paper - just as lucrative for a while, for a few. While both paper money and gold have a notional value, only one is a significant physical commodity. Hogs or barrels of oil would do as well, but are harder to put in your pocket. All economies are, in the final analysis, barter systems; money is just a more convenient intermediary mechanism.
The rest of your post is pretty airtight, welcome, and very accessible. Well done. Too bad people only seem to realize there's a pile of dishes to do after the party's run out of booze, or credit in this case.
I realize that paper money is debt based, but the point is that even something as flimsy as paper still has a physcial existence. Short of having a large bonfire (or reissuing the currency as Russia did some years ago), it isn't going to disappear the way pure financial value does when as few as two people simply decide an asset (and by extension an asset class) is worth less they used to believe.
If that financial value was propped up by credit loaned into existence for the purpose, then when the value disappears, all that is left behind is the debt. Credit is far more ephemeral than paper.
Petrosaurus,
This is likely the time when all the gold comes out of the strong boxes and is sold for cash to prop up the economy, and gold has very little intrinsic value. It can be used for jewelry, and electronic connections, and as an art supply (gold leaf). Any other value is just an agreed upon value, just like paper money. Land and productive capacity is the only wealth, but they may not be fungible if we have no currency.
Gold and silver can get you robbed and killed. The value is likely to crash too.
My point is don't put your faith in specie, or paper anything. Good luck!
Well, I guess I'm in pretty good shape then. Sitting on a few acres of forest & farm land including mineral rights. Over the Black Warrior Basin, which also provides me with a little beer money. ;) One other thing that works well as currency, btw, is 'shine. :) Learning to make your own is worthwhile.
Gene, just tell the revenooers that your building your own home ethanol plant!
Y'all been watching too many old movies; revenoors are my best customers. They are "fuel" conscious also. :)
Heh, I was just thinking that prostitutes (or perhaps these days porn) and booze can almost be said to have "intrinsic value" in that one can hardly imagine demand for them ever being destroyed.
Not being much one for pimping I'm starting to take a real, um, shine to the prospect of distilling as a relatively bomb proof post-carbon livelihood. Desperation to run cars on anything that burns, coinciding with exploding demand for something to kill the desperation, should make for the mother of all growth industries.
Cheers,
Jerry
Ah, moonshine production. Good idea! Uh, except you'll have to stand in line with the ethanol producers and hungry people just to get the core ingredient: grain.
Then again, you could grow your own potatoes....
You can't buy bread, or pay your rent with gold or silver. You have to sell it, trade it from paper money.
If everyone is selling, and nobody is buying, then gold is little different from any other asset; it might be more liquid, but it still has to be liquidated to be of any use.
We paid off our land, and our heirloom fruit trees are two years old. Hopefully next year they will bear. Getting off the money wheel is the best thing my wife and I ever did (besides getting married... :)
What we call "money" is simply a portable and convenient mechanism for valuing real goods and labor that would otherwise be bartered for. Practically everything you can think of that can be strung on a vine, stuck in a purse, or pocket has been used to fill that role. Rocks, shells, etc.
The barter system ( I got cattle, you got women, let's trade. :) )is still alive and well world-wide, including the USA, which really irritates governments (of all types, including religions ) because they have no control of it for taxation purposes. An arbitrary assignment of value to a bag of rocks or string of seashells makes it much easier than taking a cut of veggies and livestock. Breaks my heart - NOT.