[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

I don't think the financial system is inherently evil. I do think that laws that protect against specific types of exploitation make it harder to exploit the weak. If you're bleeding from two wounds, stemming the bleeding from one won't make you healthy, but it'll help.

Or if your hand is infected, it's better to treat it than to amputate the entire arm just for the sake of fighting conspiracy. Few are better aware then economists of the issues related to imperfect information (and honestly, I'm not sure if I've heard Paisley toss critique at Standard & Poor's, Finch, or Moody's yet, but they're probably a modern example of corruption, but in such sense have little to do with "monetary system"). It's a subject with tonnes of research thrown into it. It's obviously an oxymoron - perfect information cannot really exist. However, movements like zeitgeist are nothing but uneducated flashy shows that solve the current economy's problems by simply surpassing them.

In the case of zeitgeist, a perfect resource economy - of course, if there is an infinite amount of resources, or people are happy with a much smaller a share of resources they have right now, the system will work. sadly, we're working with a scarcity - thus we need a system to allocate, and so far, the monetary system with all it's flaws has been one of the better ones. You get looped with an infinite amount of blog reports painting conspiracy theories (in the sense of JFK and the money base issue), which will probably fight against any "expert opinion" (expert opinion which is neglected, because it's a conspiracy). If this isn't a strawman, I don't k now what is.

What comes to the example case Iceland, it wasn't the banking system that got that country ****ed. It wasn't the monetary system either. I may have been through this before, but the case was about so called love letters (the Kaarlo Jännäri report is the one I'm personally more familiar with since he used to be the chairman of the local financial supervision agency. an easier to read brief rant on it can be found here - with the added bonus of EU). These were, in all sense, madness to begin with, but for some reason a central bank essentially part of a democratic system managed to accept them anyways and cause a leveraged debt bubble. None of it made any sense. The committee that researched the case a a posteriori was baffled about why the central bank had issued loans against these so called love letters. It takes a minimum of great amounts of courage (I'll try not to use derogatory words here) to blame this on "fundamental features" of the monetary system. Supervision was in place, rules were set. The rules were ignored, the supervision was fooled. What resulted? A problem of the banking system?

I'll revert to a simple analogy of a grocery store. A grocery store (in the fiat money system) operates on the premise that people pay for the products. If, however, people simply stopped paying for them, and shoplifted all instead, and this was "all okay" for the police (the supervising agent), the grocery store would soon go bust. Of course, this would be because of the fiat system and international conspiracies to prevent ordinary people from getting food (because, in the end, they all want it for free, and it pisses them off that the grocery store is breaking their 'human right' to free food). Anyone claiming that it'd be a simple issue with the supervisor not doing it's job and part of the agents being "rule breakers" would be labeled a part of a top secret conspiracy. In a zeitgeist system this problem would not exist, because the world would be perfect. You wouldn't need money. You would only need happiness coupons, the government would issue you these after working your communist day guarding the museum paintings in exchange for access to the infinite resources of everything the government possesses.

Greece can hardly blame the banking system for it's current woes. It's self-inflicted through reckless governing and greed of the nation (or the politics, or both). Greece wouldn't be the first nation to simply default on debt, either.


edit - it continued, of course
A generic problem with things like credit agencies is herd mentality, which has also been discussed in both Akerlof's books on the subject (a pre-financial crisis nobelist of economics in the field of asymmetric information). People, simply put, have huge issues behaving rationally. Housing bubbles are typical of this: people watch a trend graph and believe the fact that some ****'s claiming them the housing prices can never collapse. Or that a portfolio can never "go down" because it's so well diversified. Diversification of mortgage backed securities was the big stroke of genius behind what some call Goldman Sachs conspiracy, and we're all eagerly waiting for a similar effect to blow in say Finland. Because here, people take mad mortgages to buy houses, do not understand what the difference between interest rate and bank marginal is, yet claim to know everything and argue that "they'd always get a lot more than they paid for the flat they just purchased, should they end up in trouble paying the reductions and interest rate costs". Familiar? Much too so. Fault of the banking system, which inherently cannot completely control or know what people understand and what they don't, or what is their information and whatnot - despite trying.

In the American case, it wasn't just the banking system causing the so called shitty loans when the cash was splashed around due to balance of accounts structures. The government actively supported and encouraged lending to sub primes. Really, yes. Were they lobbied or simply too dumb to understand? The latter would simply prove they were dumb, the former would put a strange view into the democratic system at large (as a part of the evil banking scheme). I don't, for many moments, believe that Qaddafi (or however you spell it) was overly popular among the people either. Prof. Maliranta wrote a paper that sparked a lot of discussion recently, that highlighted the lack of productivity growth being a real issue to the Finnish wellfare society at large in the future. Debt is a great way to postpone the problem to the future generations. It allows you to avoid doing the hard decisions and enjoy the easier times yourself, while letting the future carry the burden. It's postponing the inevitable.

excuse the edits. i get quite tired of people blaming the monetary system of it's abuse, and much what is little short of fraud, corruption, and thievery. maybe writing longer posts would require more concrete planning of the structure.