What is money?

[eaglespirit]

And I will add the more dreamer, idealistic, spiritual side of the money matter.

Money is what I can buy an airline ticket and a donut with!

Seems everywhere I look today this is coming up in some way.

I have lived on the 'volunteering' side and getting compensated fully and then some these past few years.

Yes, fiat money was there too...but I truly feel we are getting closer to a form of sacred economics.

In the meantime...
money without the mingling dishonesty would be nice, as is talked about in a number of ways here.

This was posted elsewhere by a friend:

Sacred Economics
http://vimeo.com/36843721

[aheb]

Posted by Soulboy (here)

Posted by aheb (here)
hence the looting of Crimea's gold..

Wasn't it the Ukraine's gold instead of Crimea's?

Yeah it could of been, I was just making the point.

[RichD]

I can just imagine ET's looking in on our controlled money system think OMG what the **** are they doing??????????

Without a greater degree of consciousness the 'masses' are easily controlled by what ever new toy or distraction the powers that were come up with. Knowledge is power, and the human race needs a 'poke' from somewhere to realise who it is.

Maybe more of this

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...happened-to-me

[skippy]

[GloriousPoetry]

Money is an Idea for a service rendered.....everything on this planet has turned into a business.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by TargeT (here)

Posted by Paul (here)
I have no clue how we get from the world I know to that theoretical world, however .

Bit-coin, or one of the crypto-currency variants.

I doubt that .

Most potential crypto currency users end up depending on crypto currency servers for storing their crypto wealth, either because they aren't focused on the particular technical skills and resources needed to run their own mining systems, or because they have "smart phones" that lack the requisite compute and storage power.

If cypto-currencies were to benefit from more wide spread usage, then the proportion of users depending on someone else's server would increase to almost all users.

The result is that the bastards in power have two ways, at least, to subvert crypto currencies. They can target the major crypto currency servers, either with open take downs or covert operations, and they can overwhelm the compute power contributed to generating new crypto coins. The same bastards control the main stream media, by which most ordinary people hear of crypto currencies. The same bastards can also track most bitcoin and other crypto currency transations. The public block chain structure of these crypto currencies requires that transactions be verified by publicly sharing encrypted details of each transaction, which sufficient compute power and Internet surveillance can, I'm confident, read like an open book.

The end result is that crypto currencies present less (far less) of a challenge to the power of this planet's elite than Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, or Presidents Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy of the USA.

Like all currencies, crypto currencies are controlled by those who control their supply, whether through generating them, mining them, printing them, regulating them, taxing them, or stealing them. The notion that crypto currencies are controlled by ordinary geeks running PC mining software is not correct however, as we have already seen. Anytime a crypto currency becomes a threat to the bastards in power, they can and have co-opted that currency, rather easily. Those bastards have the compute power, the full spectrum surveillance, the control of the mass media and legal jurisdictions and the armed thugs, all sufficient to overwhelm a few of us geeks in our mother's basements and Texas trailers.

[meat suit]

thats the bunny Jake!
cant bump it enough....

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tGk5ioEXlIM

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
The issuance of whatever society accepts as money is perhaps the greatest practical power in our money based civilization.

As Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild remarked "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws".

[TargeT]

Posted by Paul (here)

Posted by Paul (here)
The issuance of whatever society accepts as money is perhaps the greatest practical power in our money based civilization.

As Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild remarked "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws".

that’s the only reason I lean to a crytpo type currency... since it is algorithm generated and cannot be inflated to infinity.

I cant think of another thing that is less corruptible.

in my mind the power lies in the control / issue of the currency (and MOSTLY the "issue") if you can ham string that a lot would change...

now, not even I believe in my above statement about crypto-currencies; not at this stage in the game.

Personally (and I hate to get all negative like this) I look at the math and can only come to the conclusion that we are irrevocably F'd in the current system and any follow-on system that shares the capitalistic mind set ("currency" as a value store).

Maybe the "battery wallet" idea is better; I haven't given that much thought.

[Agape]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s-pFAFsTFTI

Money is a trade . Trade is invented by any society that starts missing core human values aka love and installs smarts in their place .

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by TargeT (here)

Posted by Paul (here)

Posted by Paul (here)
The issuance of whatever society accepts as money is perhaps the greatest practical power in our money based civilization.

As Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild remarked "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws".

that’s the only reason I lean to a crytpo type currency... since it is algorithm generated and cannot be inflated to infinity.

The algorithm is sweet - yes, modulo various flaws, such as here and here.

That's rather like saying a particular hand gun model is exceedingly reliable.

When one freeman faces ten thousand armed thugs, or a couple of high tech drones supported by full spectrum surveillance, it matters little the model of gun the freeman holds.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by meat suit (here)
thats the bunny Jake!
cant bump it enough....
Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tGk5ioEXlIM

Yes - delightful video. Really puts the screws to the current US Federal Reserve and the Rothschilds and Rockfellers behind it, and the unnamed dark entity behind them.

Delightful.

Such bad publicity for the Federal Reserve and current "Too Big to Fail" banks makes me suspect that they are heading for a fall, after a grand crisis.

But "the unnamed dark entity behind them" remains hidden. We are in grave risk of that same entity being behind the Solution offered to this great Problem in the face of our energetic Reaction to such a grand crisis.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Posted by shmoopie_3119 (here)
Money is information.

Money represents a particular form of information - the commercial trade value of all that can be bought and sold in our civilization.

Money is not all information . Not by a long, long, shot.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Eram (here)
Hi Paul,

tyvm for taking the time to explain all this.

I was just thinking about the creation of money tonight and maybe you know the answer to a question that arose.

At the moment, the Fed is printing money like crazy right?
About 75 billion a month if I am correctly informed.

What is this money used for?
I mean... it is physical paper money if I understand it correctly.
...

• What happens with the printed money and how do they bring it into circulation?
• What is the interest of the FED to do this? Are they only serving the public interest of the USA economy (there is probably much more to it)? This is where it becomes puzzling to me.

As others have noted above, the US Federal Reserve is not printing (nor having the US Treasury print) that $75 Billion per month.

The US, its allies, and major Western banks are so far past bankrupt it's silly.

If they were still dependent on honestly lent money coming from honest holders of sufficient wealth, then they would have collapsed some time ago.

The Federal Reserve is monetizing debt ... playing shell games with various debt instruments (mortgage backed securities, sovereign debt bonds, etc) in order to keep this game going a bit longer, while they maneuver for whatever comes next (which surely will include some events that their masters intend to control.)

The present end result is that more and more worthless debt paper ends up on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. The small guys that the elite bastards don't care about simply go bankrupt. The big guys (JP Morgan Chase and the US Treasury, for examples) get to pretend to be solvent a little while longer.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Eram (here)

Posted by Paul (here)

Since banks rather insist on keeping their interest rates greater than the inflation rate (the rate at which the purchasing power of the currency declines over time), Y is therefore greater than X not just in nominal dollar terms, but in real spending power for goods and services.

This only works when the real economy, the actual amount of goods and services per person, is expanding. So long as I can be confident that I will be getting genuinely wealthier (as I was when I was taking my computer degree in the mid 1970's), then it makes fine sense for me to borrow money, as I know I can easily pay it back later.

Is this the sole reason why it is necessary to have an ever expanding economy? I have always wondered about this and never understood the reason for it.

That's the essential reason an expanding economy is needed yes - for more is promised to be paid back in the future than is available in the present. Such a ever increasing promises can not be extended forever.

That economic expansion is essentially the illusion presented to us, of what is really increasing control of our civilization by the Bastards in Power, the hidden elite behind the currently powerful Banksters.

Posted by Eram (here)

Posted by Paul (here)
Lending money into existence with interest bearing notes is guaranteed to fail for two reasons:

1. The basic problem that all money schemes have with sociopaths gaining control, and
2. The additional problem that the promised repayments eventually exceed the capacity to repay.

What happens when it eventually fails? There must be examples from the past I presume. Was Argentine an example?
What happens to the people in power (in control of the money system) when it fails?

Argentina and many other such smaller collapsed countries are examples of individual countries or regions (e.g. the fall of the Asian tigers Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and South Korea in 1997) going through the boom-bust cycle of lending and economic austerity that is caused by our essentially unsustainable debt-based monetary system.

What we are facing now is the economic and monetary collapse of that same debt-based monetary system on a world wide scale, as the main engines of the world monetary system, the US, Europe, Japan and their various allies, face a (perhaps somewhat controlled) demolition of their monetary/economic/financial/trading/banking/... systems. The pyramid scheme of tens of trillions of dollars of sovereign debt, hundreds of trillions of promised retirement and social benefit payouts and quadrillions of derivatives ("financial weapons of mass destruction", in the famous words of Warren Buffet) will collapse.

It may turn out to be like the difference between the conquering of a Roman city by some Germanic or Islamic invader, and the fall of the Roman empire itself.

[zippy]

I did not follow the whole thread. I'm very deep in this topic and there is a solution for the money issue described theoretically be Thomas H. Greco Jr. here: http://reinventingmoney.com/ and practically by Olga Foertsch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ha5hyenazk...r_Everyone.pdf
The latter is a whole book but for the guys in the alternative money scene I know something like a bible.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
-------

Essential viewing (simple, animated, and extremely well done):

Money as Debt

Yes, well done, and yes fractional reserve lending and money as debt form a broken system. Well, actually, it is not broken, rather it an effective system for the enslavement of humanity.

However, it matters not the means of money creation, if the intention of the ultimate controllers of that creation is the enslavement of humanity.

Beware of whatever system is offered to replace the current centralized national lending bank monetary system, once the grand collapse happens and motivates a large scale overhaul.

Our greatest power is wider awareness amongst humanity of the real powers and processes, their physics and history, and the personal power we are all endowed with, that are in play here.

That is why I have been spending so much effort on this good forum the last three years .

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by zippy (here)
I did not follow the whole thread. I'm very deep in this topic and there is a solution for the money issue described theoretically be Thomas H. Greco Jr. here: http://reinventingmoney.com/ and practically by Olga Foertsch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ha5hyenazk...r_Everyone.pdf
The latter is a whole book but for the guys in the alternative money scene I know something like a bible.

Interesting stuff, from someone who has been working this field far longer than I have.

A couple of papers on this are at Beyond Money - Recent Articles.

Several interviews of Thomas Greco are available on the Youtube Playlist: Greco Presentations and Interviews.

My initial sense, quite preliminary and therefore rather unreliable, is that Greco is a bit naive about the fundamental cause of the challenges facing humanity, hence a bit optimistic and simplistic in his proposed solutions. He does correctly identify some of the flaws in the present dominant monetary system.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Eram (here)
Is this the sole reason why it is necessary to have an ever expanding economy? I have always wondered about this and never understood the reason for it.

Posted by zippy (here)
I'm very deep in this topic and there is a solution for the money issue described theoretically be Thomas H. Greco Jr.

In the following recent interview for the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, Thomas Greco does a decent job of explaining the need for an ever expanding economy in the first five minutes, and then goes directly into his proposed solution, which I still consider a bit naively optimistic.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PuTqSTtda9Q

However, I don't entirely agree with Greco even on the cause of needing an ever expanding economy. It's not, in my view, a problem of the money due to be repaid always growing larger than the currently issued (lent into existence) money. Rather it is a problem of the promised available goods and services in the future ever growing and eventually exceeding all practical bounds.

In short, we can't all be rich .

This is not just a money issuance problem. It is also a problem with promised retirement and social benefits that cannot be delivered.

I used to joke to my son (for some strange reason, he never laughed at my humor when I did this) that he was going to have to get to work and work really hard. When I was in my working prime, five or ten working Americans were supporting each single American on Social Security, and what's more, these retired Americans had come through the Great Depression, and were quite skilled at pinching pennies. Now we will soon have just two or three working Americans supporting each retired person, and we younger retirees are used to living high off the hog. So ... you dang youngins better get workin!

The money issuance problem (the need for an ever expanding economy) could be solved with continued inflation. This resembles the way that bitcoin proposes to address its essentially deflationary construction. The debt-money issuers would put more and more zeros before the decimal point (what used to cost $1 now costs $100), and the bitcoin issuers propose to put more zeros after the decimal point (what once cost 1 bitcoin would later cost 0.01 bitcoins).

However the problem of there being 2 loaves of bread and 4 hungry people is not so easy to solve, and is evidence of the ongoing success of the efforts to enslave humanity.

[T Smith]

Posted by Eram (here)
Hi Paul,

tyvm for taking the time to explain all this.

I was just thinking about the creation of money tonight and maybe you know the answer to a question that arose.

At the moment, the Fed is printing money like crazy right?
About 75 billion a month if I am correctly informed.

What is this money used for?
I mean... it is physical paper money if I understand it correctly.
How do they bring it into circulation and how does it help the USA economy?
Especially, since the FED is a privately owned institution, how does this relate to the public interest of the USA government and the struggling economy.
It seems that by printing this money, the FED is doing the USA government a service (at least the seem to try to) and this is puzzling me, since their interest is not that of the masses, but only to those who own the FED.
So my question is two fold I guess:

• What happens with the printed money and how do they bring it into circulation?
• What is the interest of the FED to do this? Are they only serving the public interest of the USA economy (there is probably much more to it)? This is where it becomes puzzling to me.

Wow. A lot of loaded questions there. If these questions are puzzling you, I recommend just picking up a copy of G. Edward Griffin's excellent book, The Creature from Jeckyl Island. This historical look at the Federal Reserve will answer 90% of all those questions.

But to provide an abridged answer to some of your questions:

The Fed, via quantitative easing policies, purchases Treasury bonds, both directly at auction and through proxy banks by issuing electronic credits to the banks' accounts in exchange for their assets. These assets include Treasury bonds (which the banks have already purchased) and Mortgage-backed Security Bonds. In short, the United States Government needs money; the Federal Reserve Bank facilitates the government's need (as a drug dealer facilitates a junkie's fix) by purchasing bonds, both directly and through proxy banks. This is where 85 billion goes a month. The "dollars" the Fed loans to the government are generated out of thin air, as they say. The money is simply created. Every dollar in circulation is thus loaned to the government by the Federal Reserve Bank. The government is obligated to pay back the bank each dollar, plus interest. Being that the "interest" on every dollar doesn't even exist yet (the Fed hasn't created it yet), the government has to borrow the money (which the Fed then creates for them) so they can pay the interest. And so on and so on. This may sound puzzling to you, but the skinny is, this really isn't complicated at all; it's simple. Some call it slavery. For sure it's one huge scam. The fact that billions of people are subject to this scam, without catching on or breaking it up, is nothing less than amazing. It's simply astounding. One has to be in awe of the Federal Reserve as an audience in awe of David Copperfield sawing himself in half. It truly is amazing.

To address your other questions: The pretext is, the Fed buys up all toxic/non-preforming assets at banks (via quantitative easing) to stimulate the economy. The idea is (in theory) to free up the bank's balance sheets so they can to loan out to the public, which in theory should stimulate the economy. But as productivity is low (the real measure of the economy) consumers are in no position to borrow, and the truth be told, the banks are afraid to lend. So in practice all the liquidity the Fed pumps into the market never reaches the consumer market--or "Main Street"-- for a number of reasons. Much of the money simply goes back into the Treasury market (keeping bond prices high and interest rates low), some of it goes into the stock market (which is why the stock market is bloated).

Finally, in my estimation the very last thing for which the Fed is chartered to do is to serve the public interest. Yes, this is pretext. But nothing the Fed does serves the public interest. The Fed serves its cartel of banks. Period. Their only service to the public is to keep the economy limping just enough to keep its host government enslaved.

[Wind]

What is money? A medium of exchange. What is the monetary system? Enslavement.