This Varafoukis Lecture on The Nature of Money was brought to mind today after watching a more recent interview he gave to a French interview channel in February 2019, recommended to me by a French friend today.
In the second one He is asked to explain the Exponential Function. @ 24.08 income was around 55 trillion just say
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55 there are too many zeros to worry
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about 55 the total size of financial
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derivatives was 70 okay so total income
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another world 55
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total derivatives 70 2007 exponential
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growth okay this is this global income
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had risen because of globalization from
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55 to 70 from in six years as a lot from
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55 to 70 growth in the size magnitude
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volume of the river
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others from 70 to 780 sooo nice so to
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put it bluntly planet Earth was not big
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enough for this bubble say burst in 2008Steve Keen A good friend of Varafoukis has published and been linked to here on the Physiocrats and the Energy aspects of the Economic System.
The point is though that it’s not only about Energy qua energy.
Which brings me to Dominic Cummings?
I actually read all of the linked-to papers and blogs,After the whole exercise I have more doubts about Dominic Cummings before I started, The Un-necessary, “I will bin you”, machismo is rather off-putting.
This Talk on the Edge web site is very good, Cummings would do well to watch it and internalise the ideas.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lee_smolin-the-causal-theory-of-views
This is a very good video on Di-Electric Magnetism, now this guy is a proper misfit. What’s more, he is I think very close to scientific truth as we would get to, absent vested interests.
Smolin really is onto something as is this man.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/stephen_wolfram-mining-the-computational-universe
MR CUMMINGS’ BOLD ENDEAVOUR
As we’ve been discussing here, Dominic Cummings, senior policy advisor to British premier Boris Johnson, has issued a clarion call for “data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos” and others to join an effort to transform the workings of government.
Here is how Mr Cummings defines his objectives:
“We want to improve performance and make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant. At the moment I have to make decisions well outside what Charlie Munger calls my ‘circle of competence’ and we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public”.
Let me start by making two points about this initiative. The first is to commend Mr Cummings for taking it. New thinking is needed as never before in government, not just in…
View original post 935 more words
IRAN – a SEEDS take on the economy
Re. assessing the tensions between Iran and the US/West, here are some findings on the economy of the Islamic Republic, drawn from SEEDS.
I should caveat that available data for Iran is not wholly satisfactory, particularly over debt numbers. IMF data is useful, the BIS doesn’t list Iran in its credit data, and official Iranian stats are hard to navigate. Other sources are patchy on Iran.
Starting with estimated GDP for 2019, the local number translates to $450bn based on market F/X rates, but the PPP equivalent (about $1,450bn) is probably much more reliable. C-GDP is probably very similar, in that there seems, unsurprisingly, to have been little or no ‘debt-bingeing’ “credit effect” behind Iranian GDP.
ECoE, put by SEEDS at 7.0% (2019), is surprisingly high for a significant energy-exporting country. In USD PPP, prosperity per person is estimated at $16,300 (though only $5,080 in market dollars).
Importantly, prosperity per capita is falling quite rapidly. SEEDS data shows it down by 16%, both local and USD PPP, since the recent peak in 2011. (It has dropped even further in market dollars, but what markets think about the Iranian currency isn’t ‘fact’). Prosperity in constant Rial is falling by between 3% and 4% annually, according to SEEDS.
I’m posting this comment because realistic and useful economic info on Iran seems thin on the ground. Data converted into USD at market rates is virtually meaningless.
Objectively, Iran has a problem in that prosperity per person is falling rapidly – but it hasn’t ‘collapsed’, as some might think or assume.
Iran is an Islamic state, as such, it does not have the Deadweight of usury around its neck, merely of US sanctions. The Usury point is not to be trifled with although remains one of the great enduring taboos of Finacialised Capitalism and the Dismal Science.
Prof. Helmuth Kreutz’s The Money Syndrome or Gringons Money Lent Twice to see how Usury is the problem and driver of a Growth imperative and all the absurd wastes and inefficiencies baked into the Cake to privilege the Financial parasite class.
The Islamic ban on usury is also in the Bible, and was enforced in Christian Europe until the sixteenth century. Opposition to usury seems a wise principle.
This needn’t mean that all debt is necessarily bad (mortgages have helped many). But opposition to usury means, to me, that exploitation of others is always bad, and few instruments offer as much scope for exploitation as debt.
Collapse of the credit system has likely the best chance of decreasing what you call usury. Until then, interest rates matching inflation should not be termed usurious, as retirees and those saving for it merely break even over time if rates of interest match inflation. If zero interest, they are pauperized over time.
It must be almost entirely the reduction of imports, isn’t it?
Tim we agree on that, manipulated behaviour is not the same as determined behaviour it is a flaw at the centre of atomist logic. Graeber is very good on Debt Jubilees they were the ancients solution to the “Problem of Usury”. It’s a huge subject area I actually blame Jeremy Benthams In defence of Usury for the fall of sensible political defence against Usury. Bentham wrote that in an attempt to get Adam Smith to recant from his views against Usury. It’s a delicious Irony of all the Adam Smith fan boys who have not taken the Trouble to read Wealth of Nations let alone Smiths substantial Body of other work. Darwin is in many respects as dumbed down and bumper stickered as is Malthus.
Its a tautology, Chicken and egg.
The Solution is to create bonds bearing equity returns on real investment, not Casino Captial Debt perpetuating the Hubris of the Financial Oligarchical class and its cronies sand henchmen.
Taleb calls it asymmetric Risk and its a Skin in the game problem, too many dilettantes and not enough stakeholders. Moral Hazard no longer exists in the current bankrupt Model, there are people who are to Blame for this Steven, we all must acknowledge our own part in the idiotic artifice, some are more guilty than others, we all know which side we stand on when we clean our teeth or shave whilst looking in the mirror.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/kennedy/english/
Margrit Kennedy: Interest and Inflation Free Money
(Published by Seva International; ISBN 0-9643025-0-0;
1. Four Basic Misconceptions About Money 15
…First Misconception: There Is Only One Type of Growth 18
…Second Misconception: We Pay Interest Only If We Borrow Money 24
…Third Misconception: In the Present Monetary System
We Are All Equally Affected by Interest 25
…Fourth Misconception: Inflation Is an Integral Part of Free Market Economies 29
Interest on money drives need for expansion.
Reliance on one currency ( the dollar is a defacto gold standard.with no monetisation of an analogue for silver to provide circulation and a multiplier due to velocity.
”Patriarchal Value Coherence
All patriarchal societies in history have had the tendency to impose
a monopoly of a single currency, hierarchically issued, naturally scarce or artificially kept scarce, and with positive interest rates. This was, for instance, the case in Sumer and Babylon, in Greece and Rome, and from the Renaissance onwards in Western societies all the way to today. The form of these currencies has varied widely, ranging from standardized commodities, precious metals, paper or electronic bits. But what they all have in
common is that governments accepted only that specific currency for payment of taxes, that this currency could be stored and accumulated, and that borrowing such currencies implied payment of interest. They all have in common Yang characteristics as illustrated in Figure 1.”
https://www.scribd.com/doc/34659324/The-Monetary-Blind-Spot-by-Bernard-Lietaer
The Monetary Blind Spot by … by tesasilvestre on Scribd
123
An Integral View on Money a… by tesasilvestre on Scribd
“Academic Taboo
Challenging a paradigm in any field is always a risky business. In particular, challenging
the monetary paradigm can be interpreted as violating an academic taboo. It somehow
gets in the way in being invited to the top conferences or getting published in the most
prestigious “peer-reviewed” journals. Let us take as example the most prestigious award
of all, the “Nobel Prize in Economics”. Many people ignore that there is a significant
difference between that economics prize and the other five established in 1901; the ones
in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The Economics prize is the only
one that wasn’t created by the will of Alfred Nobel, nor is it funded by the Nobel
Foundation. Its technical name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel”, and it was first awarded in 1969. Its laureates are selected
exclusively by the Board of the Swedish central bank, and its funding is coming from the
central bank. Is it surprising that none of the 64 Nobel Laureates in economics so far have
made the mistake of challenging the monetary paradigm?
Paul Krugman told the author personally in 2002 in Seoul, Korea, that he has always
followed one piece of advice that his MIT professors had given him: “never touch the
money system”. He did get the Nobel in 2008.
Conclusions
The four layers that generate the blind spot in the monetary paradigm reinforce each other
to the point of locking us into a pretty tight straightjacket around what is perceived as
“normal” or “acceptable” in the monetary domain.”
Bernard Lietaer. The Monetary Blind Spot by Bernard Lietaer
Bernards Integral Theory of Money is also very good.
https://www.scribd.com/document/31690240/An-Integral-View-on-Money-and-Financial-Crashes
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/MAD2016/essays.htm
Grigons work, not just cartoon films are excellent. Hardly surprisingly the work is massively shadowbanned and kept from a wider audience.
Regarding Mis Pricing and misallocation of resources under advanced Financialised Capitalism this paper from 2010 by Saskia Sassen
http://www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/PDFs/savage.pdf
is very good regarding Debt as an instrument of Primitive accumulation, or Coercive Aggregation. These trends are Capital / Political and Ideological in nature and not I would argue driven by Energy imperatives but a necessity for keeping the medium of Exchange scarce so as to privilege one ingroup of Finacial Capitalists, the Roving Cavaliers of Credit as Marx called them. as such SEEDS is forecasting a problem which will arrive but could be postponed a little longer by Changing the Management.
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/Grignon_Recursive_Re-lending_Analysis.pdf