Virtual money > actual money. Right?

[mahnmut]

I find it weird that we live in a world where having your debt held by foreign banks is deemed a much better option than actually having your debt held by your own banks, with your own people's money in them. Turns out that relying on non-existing, virtual money that gets typed on some PC screen somewhere, and somehow miraculously pops up on the world "market", is a much better "solution" than having actual money deposited at actual vaults in actual banks, held in actual accounts by actual people/firms/institutions. It's a perverse world that we live in.

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

That's correct. The entire global financial structure is based on FIAT money. The source of that is very visible for all, and it's definitely not South Africa.

Gold standard, nope. But the vaults are full with gold.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Gold isn't worth much either, it's only valuable because we said it was. Polikitty, the economics whiz, has written at great length about that in talk_politics in some of her comments.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I remember. Great insights. Gold costs what we say it costs, and right now we say it costs a lot.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

There's a cool short science video explaining why we picked gold. There were really only about 3 elements that could have been logical choices out of the 104 elements, it's pretty good stuff. I got a geek-on watching it ;)

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Geekgasm!