Quote: (12-23-2013 05:26 PM)Hencredible Casanova Wrote:
Honestly, a lot of you guys who whine about cultural shit on the internet just sound like pussies. That shit is not red pill and people who whine instead of talking about the success they are achieving - or trying to achieve - have no business hijacking that term. The most incessant whiners are the guys with the least value. Westcoast drops a lot of data, from travel to game to whatever. But there's a lot of guys that you only see in political threads trying to appeal to people's fears and insecurities instead of uplifting them with wisdom or game. That's BS. Good to see some reclamation of reality going on in this thread. About time.
What you see as whining and weak, I see as strength and empathy for my fellow man.
I am a lifelong student of history, business, and politics -- and a more recent student of economics. After the 2008 financial crisis, I read dozens of books on economics and probably over 1000 articles on the topic.
Throughout human history, money consisted of gold (and silver). When a nation ran out of gold, it simply went bankrupt.
When nations began to issue fiat currency (only since the 1800's), people developed trust in those intrinsically worthless pieces of paper only because they were backed by gold. Because gold is a finite asset, it controls the amount of currency that a nation can print and prevents inflation and currency debasement -- based on the maximum amount of gold that a nation owns.
By the 1860's, the U.K. was the primary exporter of manufactured goods and services and over 60% of world trade was invoiced in pound sterling. The British Pound became the world's reserve currency, backed by gold.
Problem #1:
After WWII, the U.S. dollar became the world's reserve currency, backed by gold. In 1971, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and created, for the first-time ever, a free-floating world reserve currency back only by the good faith of the U.S. government.
That has never happened before in world history.
So, what does this mean? It means that
the world is engaged in a massive forty-three year experiment in using a world reserve currency, backed by no asset to restrain money printing, with completely unknown consequences for the world's economy. This scenario has never before occurred in human history. What if that experiment fails? Are you ready?
Problem #2:
Most of the dollars circulating today are not in the U.S., but outside of the U.S. What happens when the rest of the world, fearful of trusting a currency not backed by any asset and a nation with a debt load that no nation has ever survived, decides to drop the dollar as the world's reserve currency? What happens when no one wants all those extra dollars?
The U.S. government can afford its current debt levels only because of current historically low interest rates (see next section) and because of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, which creates an artificial demand for dollars amongst every nation on Earth.
The USD is almost assured of losing its status as the world's reserve currency within the next ten years. Are you ready for that?
Problem #3:
The Federal Reserve has artificially suppressed interest rates, because the government cannot afford to borrow money to pay the interest on its debt at real market interest rates. In the meantime, mom and pop who worked all their lives to save $1 million for their retirement have to eat cat food, because they can only earn less than one percent annually on their money ($10,000) because the Fed has suppressed market interest rates.
They could, however, live quite comfortably on historical real market interest rates of six to eight percent annually ($60,000 to $80,000 annually). This is institutionalized theft from the middle class to Wall Street.
These three problems are the tip of the iceberg. There are many others. These problems are so serious that the U.S. government has contingency plans to nationalize the nation's retirement accounts, which hold trillions of dollars in assets.
If you do not believe that a country can get that desperate, Poland just recently nationalized private retirement funds worth about 68 billion Euros -- or more than one-fifth of Poland’s gross domestic product. If you did not hear that news, then you are not in the loop and you should question what else you do not know about the world's economy -- or even just your own country's economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/busine....html?_r=0