Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "How Money Works"
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But the efforts to reduce labour costs is driven by financialisation. And who gets wealthy from that? Shareholders and the banks. And who owns most of the stock market? Already wealthy asset owners. And who owns most of the debt? Banks and wealthy asset owners? Financialisation came about to finance globalisation. And look how that's worked out. Banks no longer want to finance industry and innovation. They prefer selling mortgages and speculating. That leaves the real economy starved of investment, thus powering a downwards spiral in industry and manufacturing in America. This is forcing firms to reduce costs to stay alive, and AI is supposedly the magic bullet. Less humans to employ, right? But nobody is talking about what are we going to do with these spare humans? How are we going to keep up our margins, when the market is actually shrinking. As very few of those jobs potentially lost to AI, will be replaced with jobs paying the same or more. Most people won't be getting pay increases for a long time, because of how much government debt needs to be serviced. And inflation is here to stay possibly for the next decade, because of spending to allieviate climate change is already creeping up. Right now the corporate sector is fitting on piles of cash, courtesy of the covid bailouts, and they know nobody is really prepared for AI. It's like we're blundering into a future, still believing markets know anything about keeping a society together, and working effectively. They obviously don't. Things will have to change, and when Warren Buffett and his son, start talking about "Degrowth" and tempering profit expectations, guess who will have to pay for that? Anybody but them. Do, unless you can persuade the financial whales to stop killing the golden goose, expect little help from them.
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You understand more than you know. After all, which American history student is going to get far studying their homeland's hist{y of economic imperialism and colonialism? Not when it's going to take you 20 years to pay off your student loan if you do. So most of the ways and means former economic hegemons became powerful gets buried. This is why it was refreshing to hear a Vietnamese citizen remind us in striking terms how the West got rich, and left a lot of people either dead or poor in the process. In brief, the same tools that was used to expropriate wealth abroad have been turned on the folks back home.
Why? Well, almost everywhere that could be screwed over has been already done. So, no more nice things for the assetless poor or the asset-limited workers, like a living wage, affordable Healthcare, a home you own, and education in the West. No, sir! You will own nothing and be happy, is no longer irony. That's the plan, so the Asset Wealthy won't be asked to pay for the mitigations climate change will need. That why rich folks are no longer building on the beach, but kicking the poor folks out of the hills, and moving up there instead. That's why they want you to treat the homeless as invisible and disposable. And that's why they love the fact that poor white folks are happy to pretend they're better than poor black folks, even when they're both sitting on the same dungheap the asset wealthy have allowed them to sit on.
Eventually, one day, enough people will join up the dots, and actually do something about it, but until then, enjoy the show as desperate billionaires deny, deflect, and depose any evidence that they're to blame for this and the future messes coming down the line, which they are. They thought that the postwar bump to American fortunes was invincible and would last for ever. And they did nothing to maintain it at home. And of course, it couldn't last unless they did. And they didn't. So, look after yourselves, because the asset wealthy have no intention of doing that. Good Luck.
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If the question was, "what is the good of accounting", it would be reasonable to grant you some leeway, but, no in the areas you are straying into.
It's time to get real.
Capitalism see Labour as a resource. Full stop. Personal fulfilment and your need for status means very little in the scheme of things. Why? You're only employed to solve their problem really. And as soon as they find a more cheaper, and/or efficient means of solving the problem you're employed you to do, you will lose that job. That's what they call progress. All that stuff about looking after their workers is only to attract the very best candidates from the labour pool. And even they will be discarded at the will of the God of Profit. Thus our economic ideology at the present is almost bad Social Darwinism. It's a meat grinder, as the Pink Floyd album 'The Wall' correctly identified. And the question is will you be inside it or turning the handle? If all the AI hype is to believed your job is on the chopping block. Most white collar jobs will be on the chopping block. Thus, Economic Darwinism suggests that you transition to i) another profession, ii) UBI, or iii) Soylent Green. That's it. The rest - university, school, etc., it's all salad dressing on a system designed to produce economic active workers. When they can no longer be economically active, which AI threatens to do, nobody is willing to commit openly to some form of option iii). But you'll hear Warren Buffet and his son talk about "Degrowth", and they are trying to get the Masses to accept that one way or another the current economic model is on its way out. Thus, human ingenuity is now being directed to unwinding it. The question is how many people do we need?
In that context, what one learns in university is learn how to learn in a limited specialisation, which we might not really need anymore within this, or the next century, due to advances in technology. So we might turn to space to find places to expand into. Or, we might not. Nobody's sure.
But, the lesson to take from this is, don't take your self-esteem from your job. Rather, take it from your ability to adapt and your resilience. Take nothing for granted, and be grateful for what you have. Happy travels.
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Not really. The Economy isn't a machine, but the collective decisions of the people within it, and therefore subject to the whims of human psychology. The bits that are structured, only evolve to be so. For example, the process of money creation evolved into its current form because it was the right idea at the right time. But, because the only constant is change, people's goals, methods, and tools change too because are subject to changing motivations. And Economists may not understand money very well, but financiers understand it very well because their goal is to accumulate more of it. That's not the motivation of Economists in general. Their job is to how to manage scarcity, and even then Economics has some huge missing holes in its framework. Like it doesn't say a lot about distribution of resources, and that's a big hole as we're living through the biggest transfer of wealth in human history, and the gains have been skewed toward increasing asset wealth of a relative minority at the expense of everyone else. And arguably, this time round, there's insufficient institutional strength to prevent serious dangers arising in domestic as well as global markets. And this guy running this channel understands the nuances of the dominant financialised version of capitalism, and it's effects fairly well. He doesn't go into the deep detail, simply because most of those mechanisms are poorly understood by the public, and relies on a sound knowledge of financial and economic history to track. I mean, the best book so far to do that is David McWilliams "Money" published in 2024. It's a great narrative exploration about how money evolved and how it works today. Read that if you really want to begin to understand how money works in a meaningful and informed way. Michael Hudson's books on financial history are worth a read, especially if you're interested in the primacy of debt. And there's more on YT too, but not much is pitched at absolute beginners. Eurodollar University channel helped in explaining why finance is in the driving seat of the global economy, and why American Finance is the way it is now, and how policy is directed by trying to keep a broken system working. But if you are really curious, let your curiosity pull back the curtain and reveal how money works.
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@subutaynoyan5372 To be honest, he says they know thing about financial economy. And he's absolutely right, because finance and economics are two different perspectives, but financiers aren't theorists like economists are. They are about practice, the practical means of how finance works, which in turn has economic, social and political effects. Economists are theorists and financiers are practitioners. That's why economists don't always know how the financial system works, because their perspective deliberately ignores certain things. But that's orthodox, classical economics. The heterodox, modern economics are the guys willing to use the 5 Whys, to dig deeper.
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@11conormcloughlin No; sloppy language reveals gaps in your understanding. The only people who deal with the monetary system are governments. You live in the financial domain where you have to manage your use of money. It is financial markets that are now dominated by speculation rather than productive investment, and that bleeds off money away from things that create jobs and make your quality of life better. But even more importantly, cash is no longer king. Asset wealth is in the driving seat, and accumulating cash, is seen as suboptimal. Why? Because the world runs on credit, not cash. And people don't understand these things. They treat stocks like horse racing. No wonder then they lose. 70% of retail customers lose money. You have to understand the rules of the game before you throw your chips in, or you will get fleeced. There are ways to make money, but there are pros and cons of each method, and "financial gravity" - how much you can invest relative to other participants - matters. So the Stock Market is the Little Casino, and the Options Market is the Big Casino, and the risks and rewards match each market. So, if you want to make money, understand the rules of the game, understand basics like risk and diversification. Unless you understand thoroughly the pros and cons of a financial asset, don't buy it. Read and educate yourself, and take it seriously. Good Luck.
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@andresa6049 Not really. Stoicism is an ancient philosophy built on this these two eternal truths, and that produced the golden age in Roman civilisation. It was the over-optimists that destroyed it. Work to live, not live to work is good advice, because the modern preoccupation with material wealth has led to not only the enshuttification of the economy, but of the planet we rely on to survive, for gains that aren't sustainable. So materially, we're all going to be poorer paying for that damage, and we are enslaved by debt, corporations and devices. So... In a rigged game that you can't control, the pursuit of excellence should be directed toward what sustains you beyond the material. Neglect that, and not only will you have to pay for costly divorces, and family estrangement, simply because you're not around to maintain meaningful relationships with anything but work. And you'll attract people who just like you for your money. Good luck with that.
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