Youtube comments of Wojtek The Bear (@wojtekthebear4958).
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Dude, do you know anything about history at all? There is no way Germany could've won WW2 from the onset as they had absolutely no way of invading the UK. The UK had the second largest navy in the world and the RAF was able to beat the German Luftwaffe and attain air supremacy. Heck, Germany lost most of their surface fleet just trying to invade Norway. They had absolutely no way of invading the British Home Islands. Moreover, their ventures outside of Europe was a complete disaster, with Germany losing an entire army in North Africa, Italy losing everywhere in Africa, and Japan losing to China and the United States in the Pacific.
Speaking of the United States, the US alone had about half the world's war making capability and the world's largest fleet. They were all but untouchable, as shown by the fact that the continental US was never attacked in all of WW2. Ignoring that though, you're forgetting that the Allies were building nuclear weapons, and were farther along the journey that Germany was. In fact Germany was focusing most of their research onto the V-series of rockets, which ended up being insignificant in the war effort as a whole and a huge drain on German resources since each rocket costed almost as much materials as a bomber.
Really all Germany had was a large army. What were they going to do with it though when they couldn't reach any of the Allied powers? Seriously, fuck off with your ignorant bullshit. It definitely wouldn't have been a picnic for the Western Allies alone to invade continental Europe and the USSR was a huge help in that front, but Germany was incapable of "winning the war" by invading either the UK, US, or any other Allied power not in Europe.
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Jacob Cooley Ha, no. A lot of how they decide such matters is buy your net assets. For instance, if you own a $150,000 house and still owe $100,000 on its mortgage, then you have net assets of $50,000. That means that they'd only be willing to give yo a loan somewhere in that range. With an amazing credit score, they'd give you more leeway on the range, but it'd be nowhere near the money you're asking for. This is because a bank wants to be somewhat confident that they can get most of their loan back if your idea fails. Basically, if the plan failed, they'd try to force you tell to sell your house to pay them back.
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Dude, every USD printed is considered a liability. In order to counteract that somewhat, the Federal Reserve desires to hold a set amount of assets. These assets can be literally anything, houses, tacos, the shit that spews from your mouth, etc, but, as gold is tradionally used as an asset to hold, the central banking authority generally lean on them to use as reserve. In other words, they could use anything, but they don't see a reason to break tradition.
FYI: Most of their assets are held in US Treasury bonds, not gold.
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The war wasn't really close. For instance, the Americas were never really threatened by the war. Japan did not have the plans, nor really the capability, to launch an invasion of Hawaii or Alaska, much less the West Coast of the US. Furthermore, while the German submarine campaign was effective, the US and UK still had the two strongest navies on the planet, so there was no way of Germany invading the UK, much less the US. Really the only thing that could've changed anything is if Germany was successfully able to take Moscow and hold Stalingrad. Even then, not much would have changed. The Soviet military was already moved eastward, and they still were receiving supplies from the US and UK. It would have been a nice symbolic victory for Germany, but eventually they would be overwhelmed by the Soviet military, which is what happened anyway.
There are two reason Germany could never win: the US and UK being virtually untouchable thanks to their much superior navies, and Germany just not having the resources to compete with the resources held by the USSR, British colonial empire, and US, which held most a huge chunk of the world's manufacturing output at the time .
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Jay Blake Maybe you should read an economics textbook before you talk about economics. . As much as you decry people for using the wrong definition of socialism because "it can't be summed up in a paragraph" you create a strawman of what a market is, choosing to completely ignore the actual definition for it in economics.
You're not going to win any points by strawman-ing your opponents position and only that.
For instance you claimed this was that typical pattern of competition in a market: " If everyone started with the same amount of money in a market and then chose to invest it in various ways, there will be winners and losers, the losers will then not have as much money as the winners and eventually be vulnerable to being undercut and kicked out of the market by the previous winners. Eventually, after so many turns of the market game it's going to get very hard to win against the other winners"
Except two of the basic aspects of market competition are that 1. 'There are no barriers to entry into or exit out of the market.' and 2. 'No single firm can influence the market price, or market conditions. The single firm is said to be a price taker, taking its price from the whole industry.' and then there's the beautiful 3rd: government regulation exists to keep the market competitive (in cases of market power usually).
A good example of such competition is retail stores. Previously we had retail chains like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sears, Toys-R-Us, etc. Over the past few decades though, many of these store have been closing down. So your theory would hold up, right? Except they're closing down due to new competition from new entrants like Amazon, Chegg, E-Bay, etc. Entrants are supposed to be able to enter markets.
Is this idealized? Sure, a little bit. There of course will always be some barriers to entry or exit in a market, and externalities will always exist, but it's the government's job to make sure that the markets remain as competitive as possible, and, in 95% of cases that holds. There's only a few select industries which exist market failures, where markets do not run perfectly efficiently due to special factors, and these are the industries which need special attention. These include: infrastructure, utilities, healthcare, education, etc. And even the solution to these market failures isn't a complete nationalization for the industries. For example, when it comes to utilities, local cities tend to auction permission to run in their area to the lowest bidder. This tends to be the most efficient for local areas due to something known as the winner's curse (the 'winning' bid typically ends up overshooting the value of whatever's being bidded on).
Also, once again, this is only a problem in 5% of industries. When you need to fuel up your car, you only really pay attention to which gas station is offering gas at the lowest price. You don't care so much about anything else. That's market competition at work.
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Jay Blake Except Literally everything I said was sound economic theory. Also I did provide examples. Did you completely skip over the fact that I talked about retail stores and gas stations, using them as examples? Apparently. Also you totally made assumption. I took a direct quote from you in my argument where you made plenty of assumptions on how a market works in the long run (and of course it wasn't backed up by anything). I have economic history on my side.
"If everyone started with the same amount of money in a market and then chose to invest it in various ways, there will be winners and losers, the losers will then not have as much money as the winners and eventually be vulnerable to being undercut and kicked out of the market by the previous winners. Eventually, after so many turns of the market game it's going to get very hard to win against the other winners"
You know what all of those claims are called? Assumptions. You know what the claims put together are? A (bad) model on how a market works over time. You didn't use Occam's Razor. Don't act like you fucking did. You just built a model to suit your narratives without looking to see if it holds up to any sort of rigor, which, of course, it doesn't.
You want more examples though? Sure! Look at the economic divide between North and South Korea. Look at the exponential growth seen by more socialist countries after they adopted market reforms (China, India, Eastern Europe, etc). Look at Venezuela.
Now let's look at history for examples of complete economic nationalization working out well. The Great Leap Forward? Wait, no. That led to the deaths of millions of Chinese people and actually shrunk the Chinese economy. Er, the Five Year Plans of the USSR? No, the USSR never built a consumer economy and was always critically lacking in important goods like cars and even jeans. Er, North Korea. Still a shithole.
Huh, weird. It's almost like these economic experts who spent their entire lives studying how economies work know a little more on the subject than you, someone without even the basic knowledge of the subject.
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First you can't just print stock and sell it infinitely. When you want to sell shares, you have to go to a regulatory authority that authorizes the amount. Otherwise, as a shareholder is a part owner of the company, they are entitled to a fraction of the company's profits, but what happens if all the revenue was siphoned away from the company and into the pockets of shareholders? The company closes. Obviously the shareholders don't want that as they want a long term profit, that's the whole reason for investing in the first place, so instead, while entitled to the profits, they let the company keep the revenue to expand. That's why on a balance sheet their revenue in a year is called "Retained Earnings", as it is technically allowed to be retained within the company instead of given to the shareholders.
The shareholders also get a say in this to, as a company is a lot like a representative democracy in a lot of ways. Every year the shareholders hold a vote to decide some core decisions of the company and elect the directors of these companies. These directors are like the electoral college. By that I mean they then hold a vote themselves to determine the officers of the companies. These being the CEO, CFO, COO, etc. They then make the financial decisions of the company.
Also if they truly wanted a cut of a company's profits every year, they can buy preferred stock. Preferred stock is basically a guaranteed dividend payment from the company each year, but you give up your right to vote as a shareholder and your stock doesn't gain or lose value.
I hope that answers your question in a slightly roundabout way.
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OmegaFoxxtrot Not really, the gold standard has serious problems with it besides the fact that it stops countries from going to war. For one, it is very unstable, forcing countries to go through intense periods of inflation and deflation. Deflation, as you may know, is terrible for an economy, and almost always involves in contracting. This is widely blamed for causing the Great Depression, as most of the European countries entered this deflationary environment at the same time, severely hampering the exporting industry of the United States. Sources: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic467999.files/October%2022%20and%2027%20-%20Trade%20Money%20and%20Finance/Eichengreen.pdf
and
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350
Also, as the latter shows, it isn't hard for one entity to control most of the world's gold stock. The United States did so after both World War 1 and World War 2 after all.
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Joe Vasicek Haven't I seen you before? Heck, I'm pretty sure I've debated you on this before. I am talking about short term inflation and deflation; you are talking about long term. As Keynes said: In the long term, we are all dead (something like that anyway).
The average inflation rate under fiat currency has been 2%, which is very good and stable in the short term. In fact, it benefits the economy, not hampers it, as it encourages consumer spending and offers a buffer against deflation.
Let's compare the Great Depression and the Great Recession, shall we? Until the repeal of the gold standard in 1933, the US economy experienced deflation of about 1.5% a year. (http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/greatdepression-deflation.jpg)
During the Great Recession under fiat currency and greater monetary control, the US (and EU) were largely able to escape entering deflation (http://www.gallatinrivercapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Inflation-Rate-Chart-e1410975437193.jpg)
To know more about why deflation is bad besides the link I provided previously, look here (http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-4) and here (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/why-is-deflation-bad/?_r=0).
To see why low amounts of predictable inflation is good, look here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm) and here (http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111414/how-can-inflation-be-good-economy.asp)
Finally, I do want to point out that fiat currency does not necessarily mean inflation. The Fed could target an inflation rate of zero and not really create currency (unless the velocity of money falls), but they instead find the 2% rate to be beneficial as one of the links I provided shows.
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Jay Blake Good job again ignoring the evidence I did bring up so you could again state I didn't provide any. Funny since you then go on to attack my evidence using very horrible claims. Also your use of if in your scenario has no relevance to the assumptions I was referring to. Yes, your whole scenario was based on an if, but the claims you made in your scenario were just assumptions based on nothing. for instance you claimed that "after so many turns of the market game it's going to get very hard to win against the other winners". That's an assumption; plain and simple. You assumed that as markets go on, the winners make it too hard for entrant to enter the market and compete.
So let's take a real world example then: fast food chains. Over the decades, there have been many extremely successful fast food chains like Mcdonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc. So your assumption holds up, right? Except new fast food chains are started all the time to varying degrees of success. The burger chains above are now competing with places like Five Guys, Hardee's, and dozens upon dozens of regional chains. This is the same with sub shops with Penn Station, Jersey Mikes, and many more sub places I don't know about, retail chains with Amazon, Chegg, Chewy, etc, social networking sites with the creation of Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc. I could go on. Your base assumptions were stupid and wrong. You just don't want to admit it. I'll also ignore your Venezuela comment because honestly I can't stop laughing at it. If you honestly think it's a market based economy, then you already proved you're too ignorant to even argue with.
Yeah, the North Korean performed better than South Korea.....when South Korea was under a brutal dictatorship and in no way market based. Thanks for proving my point? You claim that South Korea was propped up by the United States, but you realize that South Korea was extremely isolated from the US. right? On the other hand North Korea had a direct land border with the two largest Socialist countries that both had friendly relations with North Korea, and were more than willing to trade with them for their raw resources (which they had a lot more of than South Korea) and prop up. In fact the only reason North Korea has sense of an economy today is thanks to the propping up of the USSR, and now China. As for South Korea, you couldn't be more wrong. You wanted evidence though, so here's evidence. Straight from the mouths of some of the biggest economic experts
"Many studies attribute South Korea’s structural transformation to policy reforms aimed at opening the country to foreign markets. Indeed, the export-oriented policies of South Korea are one of the most important factors of its success: South Korea is now one of the top 10 exporters in the world, and its exports as a percentage of GDP increased from 25.9 percent in 1995 to 56.3 percent in 2012.3
Two additional factors have contributed to the increase in international trade and industrialization in South Korea:
An improvement in the business environment
Policies incentivizing investment in innovation"
In other words, they opened themselves up to foreign trade, found their niche on the global market, and reinvested their profits. That's how countries develop. North Korea didn't do this, instead focusing most of their investments on their military and only trading with countries like China and the USSR.
As for China, the fact that you call them socialist is hilarious. Let's look at a graph of China's GDP to show how ignorant you are, shall we? Here's a chart of their historical GDP: https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/11530901 Isn't it interesting that their economy only started to really grow in the late 1980's? Weird, since China was communist as early as 1946. Why did it take 40 years for them to actually start growing. Oh, that's right, they started liberalizing their economy and opening themselves up to trade. The 1980's was when China started rescinding it's Maoist policies and joining international markets and organizations like the WTO, World Bank, GATT, and IMF. Wow, I'm starting to notice a pattern here! FYI: The Great Leap Forward, China's big communist attempt to improve its economy and industrialize, happened two decades prior and was a colossal failures.
Today less than 30% of China's businesses are tied to the Chinese government. That is unless you want to say that the American manufacturing plants in China are somehow communist. This also isn't just me saying it either; It's the exact conclusion reached by the IMF: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/issues8/index.htm
Also I love how you brought up Poland like they're a failure. Their GDP grew exponentially since opening themselves up:https://www.henrykkowalczyk.com/texts/ukraine-the-world-is-watching/ Oh the horror! Poland's economy is over five times as large as it was in 1980!
I'll ignore your claims on the USSR because they too are blatantly untrue and I really want to continue on about Poland, because man you have really pissed me off about Poland. Seriously, you are scum for what you said. Also, before you say it, I'm not Polish, nor were any of my ancestors Polish. I took up this moniker simply because it's a cool, lesser known story of WW2.
First: in no way did Poland appease the Nazis and, fucking again, you are a horrible human being for even daring to suggest that. They lost the most people as a percentage of their population out of any country occupied by the Nazis. They fought both Germany and the USSR on two fronts for longer than the French government was involved. Hell, unlike France, they never even surrendered to Germany, instead forming a government in exile.
Second: Even while under occupation they had the largest resistance movement of any country, who fought and died tirelessly to free their country from Nazi rule. One of the most infamous, and horrifying, events came in the Warsaw Uprising, when the Poles in the Warsaw ghetto revolted against their Nazi occupiers to save the city the devastation from a battle with the USSR and its resulting occupation. The Soviet troops at the time were city across the river, able to support the Poles in their uprising, but they did nothing. They sat back and watched the Poles get massacred because, at the end of the day, the Soviets didn't give a rat's ass about the Poles. The Western Allies tried to airlift supplies to Warsaw, but ultimately their aid was too little and the uprising was crushed. The ghettos were then all but exterminated. Over 200,000 civilians were killed or thrown in concentration camps and a further 700,000 were expelled from Warsaw altogether, and you dare say that they appeased the Nazis? Fuck off you piece of shit.
Third: your claim that "a charge from privately owned cavalry was no defense from a charge of publicly owned, fully mechanised cavalry" is both Nazi propaganda and nonsensical. In no way was any part of the Polish army privately owned. Their military was funded the exact same way the German military, and every other military in the world was. Taxes and government spending. That incident also never happened. The Polish cavalry charged a German infantry position and, while mostly successful, were driven off by machine gun fire from other parts. When the Germany war correspondents caught up, they notice German tanks in the area and made up the above legend around that fact even though there is no historical basis for it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/myth-of-polish-cavalry-charge Now that you know the truth, you're of course going to never repeat such bullshit again, right? Sigh, probably not. Honestly I'm surprised you haven't gone into outright antisemitism at this point.
Just because I find you to be the epitome of scum and you're trying to declare one of the worst crimes against humanity as a success, I'll also provide evidence showing you're full of shit on the Great Leap Forward:
"No one is sure exactly how many people perished as a result of the spreading hunger. By comparing the number of deaths that could be expected under normal conditions with the number that occurred during the period of the Great Leap famine, scholars have estimated that somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961, making the Great Leap famine the largest in world history." (http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/960314/china.shtml) Also, before you claim bias. That came from a Chinese man who immigrated to the US and the stories his parents told him. I think he knows more on the subject than a keyboard warrior.
Here's another article on the subject: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/430804
A book on the subject: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=14A1qPQOgQMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA39&dq=great+leap+forward+china&ots=EeQwZ874JZ&sig=V8uJ41CmJyF2NxLJ1dLvMEWpy0o#v=onepage&q=great%20leap%20forward%20china&f=false
Another article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953610003825
A Hong Kong newspaper on the subject: https://www.scmp.com/article/723956/revisiting-calamitous-time
Hell, China's own government acknowledges it as a failure: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1598753/great-leap-forward-commentary-western-hostile-forces-creates
Tell me, if the own government of China and the very party that enacted those reforms can acknowledge that they were a failure, why can't you? Me thinks it's because you're trying to spin a narrative and don't have any actual evidence to prove it. In other words, you really like spitting on the graves of the dead. Fucking scum.
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@ORaddlyispissedoff Yes, this is the definition of money: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/money.asp
Money has to be fungible, portable, durable, recognizable, and stable.
Now obviously gold is durable and recognizable, but that's it. It's not always fungible as gold can change in quality depending on how much of it there is. This was a very real problem when places like the governments of Rome and France would change the percent gold in their coins to make a quick buck without alerting the public, eventually leading to high amounts of inflation and monetary instability.
Gold also isn't very portable for obvious reasons. Finally is it stable? Hell no. In the last five years alone it's gone from a price of just over $1,000 an ounce to a price over $1,500. In the last year alone the price has gone from $1,200 to $1,500. That means it's value grew by 25% in a single year. In the same year the USD has only changed its value by 1.7%
Otherwise, I have know idea what you've been smoking, but gold is rarely used as a means of exchange today. Outside of the US, the USD is used more often in transaction than gold is. Typically if there's no official currency in an area, or the people don't trust that currency (Venezuela), they rely on the USD or some local good that meets the above criteria, like grain. Rare metals is typically not a substitute.
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Fractional reserve banking (otherwise known as fractional lending) is when a bank takes the money someone deposited into a bank and loans a percentage of it out to a borrower. This loan has a interest rate attached to it, meaning the bank can make a profit off of the money people deposit with them. Critics usually complain about this system because it creates money, which can best be seen by a typical example.
John goes to his local bank and deposits $100. Now due to banking regulation, the Bank is required to hold 10% of that in reserves for people wanting to withdraw money from them, so they keep $10 as reserves. The extra $90 is then lent to Fred, who wants to use the money to buy a house of something. So the $90 ends up in Fred's bank account, and his bank does the same process as before. They hold 10% of the $90 as reserves ($9) and loan out the other 90% ($81). So on an initial loan of $100, you have $171 being loaned out, and $19 in reserve. That is the premise behind fractional reserve banking. For more on the subject, check here : https://www.frbatlanta.org/education/classroom-economist/fractional-reserve-banking/economists-perspective-transcript
It's a article by an economist at one of the Federal Reserve Banks, so it's 100% reliable.
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Joe Vasicek Oh, you had more to your argument. Sorry, I'll address those too.
1. Deflation equals market correction.
No, no it doesn't. The economy didn't fully recover until 1941-1942, when the United States entered World War 2. As you can see from this chart though (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ULZmy2UuiOU/UTecwCW40-I/AAAAAAAAC-w/yCgkboCwmUA/s1600/great+depression.jpg), there was no deflationary pressure "correcting" the market at the time. You're treating deflation as a medicine for the economy, when in reality its a symptom of the problem.
2. Something Something Labor Force Participation Rate
The downward effects on the LFPR have little to do with discouraged workers from the economy. Don't believe? Type in "On the Causes of Declines in the Labor Force Participation Rate" into Google and you'll get a pdf from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. I'd love to link it directly to you, but as a pdf I can't directly link it to you. Anyway, they cite three main reasons for the LFPR to have been declining.
a. Disability payments have been rising since 2000, resulting in more people leaving the labor force.
b. The baby boomers, the generation making up the largest segment of the population, are finally reaching the age of retirement, also lowering labor force participation rate.
c. The younger generations require more years of education/training to acquire there specialized job (think college) so they aren't able to enter the workforce as quickly.
Of these, the baby boomers make the greatest impact, but all three put together make up the fast majority of the downward pressure on the LFPR, not discouraged workers.
3. Are you blaming all that on fiat money? I can tell you the gold standard isn't going to stop the business cycle if that is your argument.
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Joe Vasicek Our monetary policy isn't Keynesian. Mainstream economics doesn't follow the Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian schools of economics. Instead it's a mesh of different monetary ideas.
Actually, besides the economic recession, which is a statistical outlier, we are in a great place! Here's the growth of one of our stock market indexes since the 1970's (http://www.bankonyourself.com/wp-content/uploads/Dow-Growth-0173-to-08111.jpg). It grew exponentially Here's our GDP per capita (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita). Also grew by a large margin. Here's our GDP since 1900-ish (http://users.econ.umn.edu/~tkehoe/U.S.GDP.gif). I'm not saying this proves me right, but its interesting to note that the GDP growth actually looks a little steeper after the Great Depression than before. And here is the US inflation rate since 1916 (http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1369736776695/inflation-rate-historical/us-inflation-rate-historical-chart/US_Inflation_Rate_Historical_1916_2012.png). It has stabilized a lot. It also shows you how unstable our monetary system was under the gold standard, though we were more stable under Bretton Woods. What else is there? Unemployment? (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mnJY5hilQEM/UJBQMUrjDNI/AAAAAAAABGY/6t4th1t6WRw/s1600/US+Unemployment.bmp) Still nothing seems to have changed. So, I fail to see how this has been a detriment to our economy.
Inflation does not hurt the poor more, far from it. Inflation hurts savers more as the money they save loses value. As the poor usually spend their money instead of saving it, it doesn't affect them as much.
Example 1: If both me and a saver both earn $100 and I decide to spend it immediately while the saver saves it, who is most effected? Well I get the full value of the $100 and buy it on whatever. The saver deposits it in his bank and waits, I don't know, five years to spend it. Average inflation is 2% a year, so the value of his deposited money is $90. Well actually it's a little more as the 2% isn't always coming off of the full $100, but I'm not doing that much math and the result is still the same. The saver has just lost money.
Here's another reason your argument doesn't work. No matter how many assets I own, inflation is still going to eat the same percentage of it, so inflation isn't eating any more of the assets of the poor as a percentage as the rich.
Example 2: Inflation rate of 2%. I, a poor person, have $100 to my name. Mr. Schmoe, a rich person, has a $100,000. At the end of the year, how much does inflation eat up? Well 98% of $100 is $98, and 98% of $100,000 is $98,000. Which one of us was effected more? Well as a nominal value the rich person actually, but as a percentage of our assets it's the same.
Also do you have a source for your Romance example? It's not that I doubt you; I'd just love to read about the topic myself as it's a question I never really considered.
Actually the USD is an excellent store of value as it's so stable. Don't believe? Why do you think countries like Guatemala have adopted it as their official currency? Or why doing you thin 85% of FX trades are done in it? (http://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx13fx.pdf). This is also shown in our low interest rates on government bonds. If the currency was more unstable, the investors wouldn't buy the bonds unless they were sold at a higher rate.
Ironically many economists would probably argue the exact opposite of your conclusion. You're conclusion seems to be Keynesian economics fails and we should let the free market reign supreme (which it mostly already does) as then the rich won't be so powerful. While European countries, which follow a more socialist route, don't have the issue of the rich and the poor as incomes are much more evenly distributed, the US, which is much more free in its markets, has a more unequal system. Therefore, some would say, the US should move closer to their economic systems.
Note: I do not subscribe to socialism or communism as I don't find the inequality to be much of an issue.
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Joe Vasicek Uh yeah, just about everyone knows about the business cycle. I'm glad you know too?
Uh, no, WW2 definitely ended the Depression and I find it strange that you would say otherwise. I mean just think of all the war materials as ordinary goods and the US government as a business. The draft and enlisting into the army decreased the unemployment rate as men found jobs in the army. Goods were being churned out of factories to fuel the war effort, going to China, Britain, Russia, Norway, etc. This improved the profits of these factories, who paid their workers, who then used the money to buy crap, like food and war bonds. Here's the unemployment rate dropping from 10% to 2%, which is considered well within full employment (http://betweenthenumbers.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/unemployment4.jpg). Note, full employment does not mean 0% unemployment as there will always be frictional unemployment. In 1941 and 1942 the economy grew by 18% and 16% respectively (http://economics-charts.com/images/gdp-1929-2004-semilog.png).
Heck, we head so many things being produced that we needed people in the workforce, which is why women began working in factories during WW2. So yes, the war definitely was a boost to the American economy and ended the Great Depression. Sure, the economy needed to transition from a war economy to a consumer focused economy after 1945, but that was a different issue, namely a new depression in 1946 (http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/clearing-up-some-facts-about-the-depression-of-1946), not a continuation of the Great Depression.
I do agree that on the net wars destroy wealth, not create it, but the wealth was destroyed in Europe, not the United States. Instead, the United States economy (not the government) was able to profit off of the war by selling war supplies, which did generate wealth.
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Joe Vasicek I'm not here to argue the morality of such decisions, only the economic effects they caused. In other words, it's irrelevant to the topic of conversation.
Actually GDP probably wouldn't go up to much of a degree if people got cancer. After all, where's the money to pay for it coming from? If people are paying for medical treatment, they have less money for other activities. It's not like an individual has an unlimited quantity of resources that they can just spend on whatever they need/want.
Similarly, the job to dig holes and fill them up would only boost GDP if the money wasn't being used previously as otherwise the same money would be spent on something else, like cancer research for the giant cancer epidemic that has effected everyone.
Long term GDP is only effected by the supply curve in the long term as the supply curve is completely inelastic. It doesn't matter how much demand there is for goods in the long term, the economy can only produce so much, giving us said inelasticity. This means that to reach a short term goal, like getting out of an economic depression, they might try to bolster aggregate demand, to reach a long term goal they wouldn't.
As already shown with two different academic sources on the topic, the depression was caused by a contraction in the economies of the European nations due to deflationary pressure as they didn't control enough gold stock. This hurt the exporting industry of the United States, which hurt other industries in the United States, which brought on Black Tuesday, the worst day of the American stock markets in history. Black Tuesday was therefore caused by the hysteria over the decreased expectations of the stock market, leading to a decrease in consumer spending and the velocity of money, bringing along with it deflation, banking panics, etc.
Do you know what a business cycle is? The repeated boom and busts brought on by the increasing and decreasing expectations of the economy, and the hysteria that can happen when these expectation fall (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economic-cycle.asp?lgl=bt1tn-baseline-below-textnote).
Let's go over some busts in history shall we?
Panic of 1837- caused by a closing of the National Bank of the United States and leading to a deregulation of the Banking industry. This brought on deflation, huge unemployment (possibly worse than Great Depression), and the bankruptcy of almost half the banks in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837)
Long Depression- caused by the United States leaving the silver standard as a huge portion of the money supply vanished, causing inflation. This lead to the largest economic contraction in history, bankruptcies of even more banks, 18,000 businesses, and a decline in manufacturing by about 10% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression).
Panic of 1907- Caused by a reduction in the availability of money due to banks overleveraging themselves, and a loss of confidence in their depositors. This lead to a near collapse of the stock market, many trusts going belly up, and J.P. Morgan (and others), stepping in to personally insure the deposits at banks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907).
These are just a few of the major economic downturns in American history. None of these were caused by economic regulation by the government, in fact the Panic of 1837 was caused by deregulation. So, as the economic consensus goes, no one entity causes the business cycle, it has existed since forever. We can even go all the way back to the Tulip bubble, one of the first in history, to see that. What causes the booms and busts in the change in expectations of the economy, which can turn into hysteria is expectations change to rapidly.
I decided to ignore your comments on FDR because I'm 90% positive I already talked to you about him before and this would just be going in circles then.
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Tom Sanders Wanting freedom? The south was the side that supported slavery, literally the opposite of freedom.... Besides, there proper diplomatic channels if a state wants to leave the union. Well at least there could be. Just pass an amendment to change the constitution. "But a state can't pass an amendment by itself," you say. Good thing it was the entire south that wanted to secede and not a single state. They also had support from states like Maryland, Kentucky, etc. Furthermore, you're acting like it was the northern states that forced their will on the southern states that wanted to secede when in reality the northern states were looking for a diplomatic solution to the issue even after the secession. The South grew impatient though as the Union soldiers weren't leaving the forts in the south that they occupied though, so they started the war by launching an attack on Forth Sumter, a Union fort in Charleston. So the South started the war, not the North. Please though, continue spewing "facts" about your false narrative.
Oh, and Irish Americans funded terrorism. They no longer are allowed to as the IRA is considered a terrorist organization, meaning they would get arrested today for doing so. It only happened during the time of the Civil War. Similarly Britain was helping the South by building ships for them like the CSS Alabama, which was built in secret (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Alabama). So don't act like Britain has the moral high ground. They gave support to the faction that was trying to defend slavery. France also did this by building the CSS Stonewall for the South (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_the_American_Civil_War).
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@TheObeyWeegee You have too much power to set the price of your products. For instance, if Apple was the only one who made smartphones, and you wanted to buy a smartphone, Apple was be able to dictate what price you buy the smartphone at.
In a competitive market, they don't have nearly as much power. So let's say there's now Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc. You want to buy a smartphone. Now Apple can set a price, say, $1,500, but Samsung sell their's for $1,299 and Microsoft's $1,199. All else being equal, you have no reason to pay the $1500 when you can pay $1,199 for a Microsoft phone.
Not only does this benefit customers, it also encourages innovation in the industry to try and one up your competitors.
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@chillizora You're just spewing more bullshit badhistory.
1. I already went over how the UK didn't want war with Germany. You can ignore it all you want, what you're claiming is still not true.
2. Germany had a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary, nothing more. Their previous agreements did not say Germany would aid Austria-Hungary in an offensive war against Serbia. This agreement was the exact same as the one Italy signed with Austria-Hungary. Funny how Italy wasn't obligated to fight.
3. The blank check came before Russian mobilization. Germany was already planning on militarily supporting Austria-Hungary irrespective of what Russia was doing. The reason Germany waited for Russia to mobilize first before themselves mobilizing is because Germany knew it could mobilize faster (the whole point of the Schlieffen Plan), and because by letting Russia begin mobilization first, Germany hoped they could frame themselves as merely defending an ally, potentially not drawing in the UK and even France into the war. It didn't work because no one was stupid.
4. The railroad network was only a threat because it let Russia mobilize faster. Funny how you don't give to shits about France's railroad network or that of Belgium, the Netherlands, etc.
5.I never said we should ignore any mobilizing. The mobilizations tell a story. Include them in the narrative all you want. Context is key.
6. There is no potential gains for Germany? Fucking what? Germany was at the crest of becoming the preeminent power in Europe and they had huge ambitions to becoming a colonial power. They tried to do as such during the First Moroccan Crisis, which they instigated, but their attempts failed. They did get some colonial concessions during the second crisis though. The only thing stopping Germany from being the strongest power in Europe was the alliance between Germany's main rivals, France and Russia, and the colonial empires of France and the UK. Had nothing to gain my ass.
7. I have no idea why you're bringing Franz Ferdinand into this. He was a martyr more than anything, and definitely did not believe in a German-Austrian empire, especially since he actually supported the independence movements of the Serbians and was very much disliked by the Austro-Hungarian nobility.
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@pipsantos6278 You're so wrong it's not even funny. Roosevelt's EO was an emergency measure during the Great Depression due to people hoarding gold adversely affecting the gold standard. This EO was later repealed, and the US continued to use the gold standard until the 1970's. Also this didn't stop the use of gold in market transactions. Individuals were still allowed to hold gold up to a certain amount, and they could still use it in transactions.
"But how does me hoarding gold adversely affect the economy?" Because the amount of gold floating in the economy is directly tie the money supply in USD (the gold standard). By hoarding gold, you are putting a lower constraint on the money supply. So when banks start failing, causing a huge deflationary period and proving ruinous to the economy, the Federal Reserve was unable to add money back into the supply (countering the deflation) due to the constraint. Hence what FDR did.
I have no idea why you act like it's still active though since it was repealed within a year.
"But Ron Paul would've used gold as money then!" It's like you ignored everything I said. In order for gold to be used as money, both parties of a transaction has to accept payment in gold. Walmart isn't going to accept payment in gold just because Ron Paul says he wants to.
But if Ron Paul wants to buy a product from, say, Microsoft with something like Bitcoin, he is perfectly able to: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/13942/microsoft-account-how-to-use-bitcoin-to-add-money-to-your-account
Gold just doesn't make good money since it's not portable (gold luck carrying a brick of gold in your pocket), not easily divisble, not easily measured (unless you expect every retailer to take the time to weigh it and check for impurities and non-gold metals possibly hidden within the gold, etc
There's a reason gold is rarely used in transactions in more chaotic areas outside of the US (like Venezuela, where the black markets most often use USD). It's because gold just sucks as a currency compared to paper.
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@crankpatate3303 Yes, the period of 1940-1941 was pretty optimistic for Germany. They were even celebrating their relatively easy victory over the Frenc. But it's important to note a total victory was never really a thing they could achieve due to the UK.
The US was also a special case in WW2 (and a VERY special case in WW1). They started helping the UK financially and a little bit militarily as soon as 1940. Many airman even took part in the Battle of Britain. This is mainly because, while the populous was anti-war, Roosevelt saw a friend in Churchill and recognized Hitler as a true threat to democracy, so he did everything in his power to help Churchill in his struggle.
Also no matter what the US would've been drawn into the war eventually. They were already taking very -un-neutral acts. Like when the UK had to take its fleets away from patrolling the Antlanic for German submarines, the US started performing liberty patrols, which were meant to protect all shipping in the Atlantic (focused on UK shipping of course). After Denmark fell, the UK was worried that Greenland and Iceland, which were Danish, would be used as naval bases for German submarines, so the UK occupied the islands. When the forces were needed elsewhere though, the US took up the occupation of the islands. By the end of 1941, Hitler was getting very pissed with US actions, one of the reasons he was so willing to declare war on the US following the US declaration of war on Japan.
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player276 Yeah, no we didn't. The first income tax we had was during the War of 1812, and the first peacetime one we had was in 1894 through the Wilson Gorman tariff. Our railroad infrastructure was still being built then, and we didn't even have much of a road system because cars weren't around yet. Highways and such didn't start being built until WW1, during the times of the income taxes. Similarly electricity was declared a public goods in the 1930's, so the governments started regulating electric companies, usually by subsidizing them in order for them to provide more electricity than they otherwise would have. As for our water infrastructure, I can't find any accurate information on its history. Basically my point is if you want to keep our power grid subsidized, and our highways working, you need to give the government some taxes to pay for it.
I'm sorry, I could've sworn that welfare programs were controlled by the government. Silly me, I guess they're controlled by Santa instead. Game Theory says that most people would've help the poor because it doesn't benefit their own interests, but we can't just have them dying on the street because few people want to help, so the government has to step in to fix the problem. I hate governments influencing an economy just as much as the next person, but even economics says that there are certain cases where government influence is necessary to reach a more efficient outcome.
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William Braganza Hanna Sigh, no. This is starting to get old. The roads are public sector. They are paid for through the public sector, are maintained through the public sector, and are public property. It's more like the private sector allowed to use public property if they serve the interest of the public by paying a tax to keep said public property running. I fail to see a problem with this. Just because you're so radically libertarian that you think EVERY tax is bad for some stupid reason, doesn't mean that society should suffer for it. We as a society like our streets, pathways, and transportation. Else we wouldn't be paying to drive cars and use buses. Mr. Joe Schmoe can not pay the tax all he wants and live a perfectly happy life biking to work or whatever, but in order to use government paid for and maintained roads, he needs to pay into the government fund that keeps them running.
By the way, there are two alternative to this. Either no one pays for the roads and they become unusable, or private entities form monopolies on the road and force tolls down your throat so they themselves can maintain the roads. Of course, being companies, they are going to try to maximize profits, so the tolls are going to be a lot more expensive than the tax you currently pay.
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@chillizora Yeah, so you were bombed more than the UK was. The bombing was the exact same though. Both employed strategic bombing tactics over large cities. Bombing wasn't advanced enough to do much else when targeting industry.
Berlin also wasn't bombed first. During one of the German bombing raids in the UK, a German bomber accidentally missed its target and bombed the outskirts of London. Berlin was then bombed in retaliation. And before you get even more high and mighty about it, let me remind you that the UK wasn't the first nation to getting strategically bombed by German. Somehow you forgot all about Poland and Warsaw. Imagine my surprise that the person skirting into neo-Nazi beliefs doesn't care about Poland.
The UK also didn't want war with Germany. You're an idiot if you think so, especially since the UK wasn't even ready for a war. Germany was the one to start the whole rearmament process back in the 1920's, though not starting publicly until 1935. The British then developed a rearmament plan in late 1935, not enacted until 1936. This was mainly for the fear that the German Luftwaffe could beat the British RAF.
As for WW1, it depends on how direct you're looking. Austria-Hungary was the one to declare war on Serbia, so they were the direct cause of the war, but Germany had a huge amount of influence over Austria-Hungary's foreign policy, being by far the biggest partner in their alliance, and had been pursuing a hawkish policy in the Balkans since the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, they were the ones to write the infamous blank check, promising full German support if Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia. Finally, they were the ones to turn it into a world war. Without German action, the war would've been a European one between Russia, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France. There would have been some fighting in their colonies in Africa, but not much. It was Germany that decided to commit a war crime by illegally invading Belgium (a violation of the Hague Conference), bringing in the UK. It was also Germany that committed yet another war crime by illegally sinking neutral (and even non-neutral) merchant ships, yet another violation of the Hague conference. This act brought in the US and many more previously neutral nations. If it wasn't for the war crimes committed by Germany, the world war wouldn't have been a world war.
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Honestly this is one of the dumbest myths of the whole war. Hitler didn't "let" anyone escape from Dunkirk and saying so is spitting the face in all those that died getting those men out of there. Did Hitler "let" them escape when German Stukas bombed and strafed at the ships ferrying troops back to England? Did he "let" them escape when the British RAF tirelessly fought off those bombers? Did he "let" them escape when many French soldiers acted as a rearguard, protecting the perimeter of the city from encroaching German units to buy the British and other French units time to escape? Yeah, no, you're just spewing crap.
Hitler did issue a halt order for his military during a short timespan, but it was more arrogance and pragmatism that led to the order. Specifically the German armored spearhead drove too fast and ended up stretching their supply lines with little support from following infantry divisions. This allowed the British and French to strike at their supply lines, nearly cutting them off (though defensive actions by Rommel barely held them off). This caused a panic among the German military leadership and they demanded Hitler halt the tanks to give the infantry time to catch up. This is when Goering, the head of the German Luftwaffe came in and said, "No worries, my planes can keep the British and French trapped in Dunkirk while you prepare." They couldn't; plain and simple.
Still 20,000 soldiers, 90 transports, and over 150 aircraft were destroyed in the evacuation of Dunkirk.
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@jasontaylor2251 This is wrong in several points.
1. A Nazi invasion of the UK was never feasible because the Nazis never had the resources to actually win such a campaign. Not only did the UK have just as many soldiers in Southern England as Germany had planned for the invasion, but Southern England was much easier to defend than, say, Northern France due to the smaller coast. Besides that, Germany had no experience with naval invasions (which, if the Pacific Theater showed anything, was 100% needed for naval invasions) and mediocre supply ships meant for the invasion.
2. Germany never even tried to contest the English Channel outside of a few skirmishes with the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe knew they had to take out the RAF before they could even engage the Royal Navy.
3. German ships didn't fight much in the Battle of the Atlantic outside of German U-boats, and they were not even close to being weakened. In fact the US entry into WW2 would start the second 'Happy Period' in German U-boat history. Their threat would only being to wane in 1944 when naval and aerial technology began to catch up.
4. The Luftwaffe wasn't sufficiently weakened during the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe squadrons used in the Battle of Britain were only a fraction of the total squadrons during the war. Most of the Luftwaffe was being reserved for the coming invasion of the Soviet Union, or were reserved due to a lack of oil. This is why Germany's Luftwaffe was still a huge threat when the UK and US would launch their own air campaigns into continental Europe.
5. Stalingrad didn't happen until after US troops came to Europe. Heck, US troops were fighting in North Africa during the Battle of Stalingrad.
Let's also not forget that 'the hard part' was retaking all the German occupied territory because, you know, they got to pick the battles, set up defenses, etc.
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Backing up an assertion with another assertion does not somehow support the original assertion. Also your supporter is an Austrian economist, one of the most heterodox schools of economics that is in no way supported by economic theory. I mean he's calling the gold standard sound money when, in fact, it's been proven several times over by economists like Milton Friedman, Irwin, and Eichengreen that the gold standard lead to the Great Depression. Sources include Friedman's Free to Choose documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc), Eichengreen's paper on the matter (http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic467999.files/October%2022%20and%2027%20-%20Trade%20Money%20and%20Finance/Eichengreen.pdf), Irwin's paper on a subject relating to the Great Depression (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350), Bernanke's paper on the matter (https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm), and the freaking GDP per capita data collected during the Depression (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg). Hell, of the 50 or so economists polled here (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard), 100% of them said that our currency would be no more stable nor our employment better, if we switched over to a gold standard. FYI: This is a beautiful quote from an economics professor at MIT after answering he survey, "All insights from the past and current crises go against a gold standard.".
But no, a gold standard would TOTALLY work. What do economists know, right? They've only been studying this, eh, most of their life?
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garrett boyaci I feel like your trying to twist my words. No, I am saying that the government is more efficient at creating and maintaining public goods than the private sector due to many factors.
Think about it this way, if someone gave you a service for free and then asked for a small payment, though not paying it wouldn't affect your use of the service at all, would you pay for it? Of course not. This is what's known as the free rider problem. No one is willing to pay for a free service, and, if the roads aren't exclusive to paying customers only, a defining trait of a public good, then whoever runs said goods won't profit from it and then there would be no incentive for said road network. The government gets around this by taxing gasoline as a way to pay for the roads.
What if private companies made a whole road network based on toll roads, getting rid of their use as a public good? Well, as creating a road costs a crap ton and, similar to railroads, the government can't have fifty billion of them going everywhere, monopolies will naturally form. Obviously as monopolies are the lack of competition and the demand for roads is incredibly inelastic, the monopolies can charge outrageous tolls and little can be done. They also have little reason to make sure the roads are fully maintained as there's no one competing with them. If you don't think this will help, look at just about every utility company ever. Isn't it strange how most regions only have one electric company, one garbage company, and one water company? Also isn't it strange that 99% of governments decide to create the road network themselves instead of using private companies if this was a more efficient system?
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garrett boyaci I already answered this. Because it benefits society, which, in turn, benefits you. I've also already given specific examples of this, and have more to spare.
While I understand your position through those quotes, they in no way made it any more credible, especially since its just the same person being quoted each time. I was tempted to say this when you cited Mises but decided not to, so I'll say it here. Perhaps you should diversify your readings when it comes to economics. I (mostly) don't have a problem with Austrian economics, but it is a fringe school of economics at best. It would be best if you at least got the core ideas from the other schools of economics before you solely devote yourself to that one school, even if you end up disliking all the others anyway. That way you understand the argument in favor of, say, allowing the government to fund projects through taxation, even if you don't agree with them.
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Ha, what? The Ottomans only joined the war later. How was Austria-Hungary invading Serbia, causing Russia to mobilize, causing Germany to mobilize, causing France to mobilize, causing Britain to mobilize, involve the Ottoman Empire at all when they joined months after the war started? Especially since they attacked Russia first, not the other way around. If it truly was about resources in the Middle East, wouldn't Russia have, you know, invaded the Middle East before anything?
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+Nvrmnd YNWA That's the problem; it doesn't really mean anything. The best way to define it is really just someone that accepts the mainstream school of economics, but the beliefs of the mainstream school can change whenever, so there's no set ideology attached to it. If the video said anything else, they wouldn't be accurate, especially since, as I said before, it's rarely used other than a derogatory term. If
Kurzgesagt wanted to cover it though, they would have to go into economics, and based on this video, they're not too great at getting economic concepts across. These is beating a dead horse, but they did a banking video trying to explain what it is without explaining the practice of fractional reserve banking, a fundamental concept within banking.
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Antilli
Does the Treasury participate in fractional reserve banking? No.
Isn't money lent out with interest and has to be paid back? Yes, but that has little to do with anything. Money doesn't just disappear when it's used up. My dollar isn't burned by the government when I pay taxes or buy something from the store. Instead it is then used by the store owner/government and may eventually end up back in my hands. This means that it is possible to pay back all of the debt owed to banks as the circulation of money will eventually bring it back to you.
Think about it this way. there are currently 1.2 trillion US dollars circulating, and yet the US GDP is approaching $18 trillion. How can the US sell so much worth of goods with such little currency? Because the currency continues to flow after a single transaction and isn't just burned up.
Moving on to inflation. Inflation is the increase in prices due to the increased liquidity of currency. Basically, as money is used more, demand for products rises, meaning that firms raise prices to keep their goods at their equilibrium point. This increase in price is called inflation. Inflation isn't only caused by an increase in the money supply though, but also the velocity of money, or how quickly it circulates throughout an economy. It is talked more in depth relative to inflation here (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp?lgl=no-infinite).
As another example, why did we experience very little inflation even after the quantitative easing imposed? The Fed injected the economy with over a trillion dollar worth of debt forgiveness and bond purchases (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/08/quantitative-easing-the-feds-balance-sheet-and-central-bank-insolvency), and yet inflation barely rose above 2%, the target rate. It's because after the initial injection, banks did very little with the money, and consumer spending already fell, so the speed and which the dollar was circulating fell drastically. This lead to the liquidity injection bringing very little inflation along with it.
Taxation is definitely a service you can cancel. Just leave. Otherwise, the government performs several key functions to the people that require money to maintain. If you don't like it, show that through your vote. Ironically as we live in a democracy, it is literally something you agreed to. It's even written into the US constitution that Congress will control all taxing and spending. Last I checked it was ratified by every single state.
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Only people who don't understand the tax system try to stay below brackets. After all, when one enters a higher bracket, only the income in that bracket is taxed at that level. That's why there's a difference between one's tax rate in a tax bracket and their marginal tax rate (total tax rate). So if I earn $15,000 a year, and the first bracket is 5% from 0-$10,000 and 10% >$15,000 I am taxed at 5% for my first $10,000, which is $500, and 10% for the extra $5,000, which is $500, meaning I paid $1,000 on an income of $15,000, giving me a marginal tax of 6.66%. Just to prove I'm not making this up, here's a source for my claim (https://www.fool.com/taxes/2014/09/07/how-tax-brackets-really-work-and-how-to-make-them.aspx).
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I'm sorry but your idea still wouldn't work. Economics is more complicated than you're making it out to be. To prove my point, let's go back to the Eurozone and Greece. The Greek debt crisis had nothing to do with competing currencies like the Russian ruble or American dollar, it had to do with investors thinking that, as Greece was adopting the same currency being used by economic powerhouses like Germany and France, they were somehow protected by default from those two countries too. This makes sense too as an economic collapse of Greece would have severe implications for those two countries, so investors thought that said countries would bail it out if worse came to worse. Greece similarly grew super enthusiastic over the lower interest rate bonds being offered to it, and started running huge budget deficits, figuring that, since their economy would be growing too, they could be it off. Then the 2008 recession hit, and most every economy took a huge hit, including Greece. In fact they were hit so badly that they didn't have enough money when their bonds came due. Like investors thought, Germany, the ECB (European Central Bank, similar to the Federal Reserve here), and IMF (International Monetary Fund), all stepped in to bail them out. Blah, blah, stuff happens and it gets even worse.
Basically The Greek debt crisis had absolutely nothing to do with competing currencies, and was caused by overenthusiastic investing thanks to the newly formed monetary union. The only way to prevent it would have been either to not let Greece in to the union, which would go against your idea, or create a fiscal union, meaning a single authority also controls individual government's taxing and spending, so a country like Greece can't dip so heavily into government deficits. This would violate just about every country's sovereignty though, and next to no one would agree to it.
As for "just print money and give it to countries in need". That's synonymous with saying "just print money and give it to the poor." or "Just print dollars and give them to countries in need". Such a move would lead to extreme levels of inflation, most likely hyperinflation territory, and would severely destabilize both the world economy and the money itself. Just look at hyperinflation in the Weimer Republic (Post WW1 Germany) (http://www.businessinsider.com/weimar-germany-hyperinflation-explained-2013-9) or Zimbabwe a few years ago (https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/dpa6.pdf). Trust me, I would love it if we could just do that, but economics shows that it just won't work.
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waldosan You have some fundamental misunderstandings of our financial system here. First, your savings account interest rate is almost never supposed to be over inflation. Banks wouldn't make money that way. You have to remember that the same inflation that eats into your interest also eats into the bank's interest on a loan. The interest in your savings account is just an incentive for you to store your money there, not a way to make money. Anyway, our inflation rate is not nearly as large as you think it is. As +mkvenner2 said, it's targeted at 2% a year, and over the past couple of years has been less. In 2015 it was .12% (http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/currentinflation.asp). Yes, it didn't even reach 1%, much less 2. Even if it was 2% inflation though, it would take 50 years for the value of the dollar to be halved, which is still within reasonable grounds for it's use. Sure, we might get rid of the penny, but considering we still use that and other such coins, the dollar has a long ways to go before it's value deteriorates too much.
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player276 I never made a specification on government. Your state and local governments still need tax money just like the federal government does, and if you want them taking over more jobs (like repairing interstate highways as that is currently handed at the national level thanks to the power of regulating interstate commerce falling to Congress), you would need to pay them more money.
I also didn't contradict myself, though I should've explained myself better. I meant on an individual level compared to a societal level. Individually, a middle class or upper class person sees little reason to give money as it doesn't benefit them in any way. Compound this with asymmetric information as the donators don't know which non-profit is good/efficient and which ones aren't, and you're left with many people not donating. On a societal level, we can't morally have our poor starving to death though, so the government decides to intervene. I can bring up a good government initiative too! Here is the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC (https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-income-tax-credit/eitc-earned-income-tax-credit-questions-and-answers). Basically if you earned an income, but it's below a certain threshold, the government will actually subsidize your income instead of taxing you. It's a negative income tax. Not only is this highly supported by economists, but it incentives the poor to try and find work, and increases their percentage saving by giving the money to them as a lump some instead of throughout the year. Of course, as a welfare program on its own, it'd need some changes, but it has shown a lot of promise (http://www.nber.org/digest/aug06/w11729.html).
Also, the poor are mostly poor due to inefficiencies in the market, bad investments, and a slowly transitioning economy due to free trade. While the government could do a better job alleviating these issues, it was not a direct cause of them.
I'm a little curious though, where do you think the government's influence is too great? I'm not trying to be facetious; I honestly don't know the specifics of what markets the government is operating in.
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William Braganza Hanna Uh, there was an economic system in place between feudalism and capitalism. It's called mercantilism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism). Anyway, yes, the infrastructure was funded through taxes once again. The bulk of our interstate highway system was built in the 1950's thanks to Eisenhower's Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Notice how it says Federal Aid. Basically the federal government would pay 90% of the construction costs for the highways as long as the state forked over the extra 10% Where did this money come from? This is taken directly from the Department of Transportation's website: "the Revenue Act increased some of the existing user taxes, established new ones, and provided that most of the revenues from these taxes should be credited to the HTF (Highway Trust Fund)" (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/fifahiwy/fifahi05.htm). So taxes. It was funded by new taxes, specifically on gas and cars.
You also just used random words that sounded good. How is a financial system fascist? I didn't know my finances were extremely nationalistic and protectionist. Sure, they can be controlled partially by the government (socialism), but that's different from fascism.
Also, do you know why something like the interstate highway bill was needed? Economics dictates that there are four areas where government intervention can be necessary. Those are: natural monopolies, private versus public benefits (carbon tax), asymmetric information, and public goods. The highways are considered a public good. The reason being that as public goods aren't excludable. Technically highways are a common good, but the same theory applies in this case. Because no one can be excluded from using the highway and it is non-rival to a point, no one will volunteer to pay for it (why would they when someone else could and they'd still benefit?) so no one in the society pays for it. This leads to a decaying infrastructure system. The government knows this, so they force anyone who many use the highway system, mainly people who drives cars (car tax) and use gas (gas tax) to pay a small fee that will go into the Highway Trust Fund to maintain the infrastructure. That is, unless you want to privatize our infrastructure. That would most likely lead to tolls everywhere, making our road network excludable), and create a natural monopoly in most all areas thanks to the fixed costs of setting up shop. Then the government would have to step in to regulate the monopoly just like they do for our water and electricity.
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If a company needs money but doesn't want to take out a loan, they can sell part of their ownership of their company away, called stock. Once someone buys a share of stock, they are legally considered a owner of the company, if an extremely insignificant one. To put this in perspective, HP has 1.7 billion shares of stock outstanding, so a single share really doesn't mean much.
The price of these shares of stock are decided by the total assets of the company and investor expectations for the future. If a company is expected to grow a lot, their stock will be worth more than usual. Likewise if they are expected to decline, their stock price will be worth less than usual.
So if you buy a share of stock in a company and they do well, you can then sell the share later on and earn a profit. As said before, they can also do worse than expected and you'd be out some money.
Was that any better? It can get more complicated than that, but that was the basic gist of it. Feel free to ask any questions if that still doesn't make sense.
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In terms of the net change, fractional reserve banking doesn't mess anything up. You have to remember the large scale this is being done at. Due to the Law of Large Numbers, fractional reserve banking becomes a lot safer at such a large scale. That's because there's (normally) not huge fluctuations in things like deposits or withdrawals, so banks know how much money to keep on hand to meet the withdrawal requirements for their depositors while still having money to lend out at a profit. If this was a smaller scale, the fluctuations would be much larger, making the banks have a hard time meeting the withdrawal requirements safely. I hope that made sense. If you have any question about this, I'll try to explain it better.
You are right that this system does break down, but it is rare to happen and there are safeguards put in place by the central banks. First instance, the FDIC here in the USA personally guarantees up to $250,000 of any deposit at a bank. So if the bank isn't able to pay it back and goes bankrupt, the FDIC will pay it in their stead. Similarly if a bank has loaned out too much money and doesn't have enough to meet the daily withdrawal requirements of their depositors, then they can use the Federal Reserve, our central banking institution, as a lender of last resort, and ask for a loan from them. These loans have a smaller interest attached to them than a normal commercial bank gives, and they allow the bank to meet the daily withdrawals in case of an emergency. So in rare instances the system can take a beating, like the 2008 Financial Crash we were in, but normally the government has some way of alleviating the problem.
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As you know, it is extremely common for people to take out loans in order to buy a house. In the late 1990's, thanks to legislation passed by the government under the Clinton Administration as well as overconfidence from the banking sector, numerous banks decided to allow riskier people to take out a loans that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to take. I don't want to make the government sound evil here, as they had the best intentions with this. As minorities are the vast majority of people that don't own homes, the government thought that giving them credit to buy a home would improve their quality of life and be a huge step in terms of equality. This was further continued by Bush.
So now people who shouldn't be given the credit they are as they're very unlikely to have the means to pay it back are buying houses. This wouldn't be a problem if the banks properly accounted for this increasing risk of defaults (not being able to pay the loan back), which they thought they did, but it ended up not being adequate enough. So these new people buying houses increases the demand for housing, which becomes a boom for the housing sector's value.
In order to make some short term money, the banks that were giving out these loans started packaging them together and selling them to investment banks. This means that if you took out a loan with a bank, your money was really going to the investment bank that bought the loan and not the original bank you got the loan from.
So 2007-2008 comes along and people start getting nervous over what's happening as they're realizing that the loans that were given were a lot riskier than originally planned. And then the first wave of defaults hit, meaning people can no longer pay back their loans, and the banks are out a lot of money. This causes the banking sector to all but collapse and many banks to fail, which causes the housing sector to collapse as banks aren't offering any more loans. Without houses to build, many construction companies, bankers, etc are all out of a job and...well you basically can tell what happened after.
As I said though, this wasn't entirely the faults of the banks either. They thought they were properly accounting for the increasing risk of default by the borrowers, and, in the beginning anyway, were being pressured by the government to offer these loans to the riskier people The government on the other hand saw this as recompense for previous discrimination, which it sort of was, and the people that took out these loans wanted nice things. They all have some sort of blame for the crisis.
TL;DR: The banks made riskier loans to people than they should have. Once these loans started defaulting, they were out of a crap ton of money.
If you still have any questions, feel free to ask, but that's the generally accepted reason for how this all happened.
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@inspiredhalo Stannis is somewhat right. Japan did lose a series of skirmished with the Soviet Union in 1938 during Japan's attempted invasion of Soviet Mongolia, but the loss was more of an embarrassment to the USSR since even in victory the Soviet troops were il-trained and suffered heavier casualties than the Japanese.
In August-September of 1941, many high ranking members of the Japanese military were drawing up plans for another invasion of the USSR. Siberia, while sparsely populated, was a haven for rare metals and other materials that would prove hugely desirable for Japan. The plans were even greenlit by the Japanese Emperor. So what happened?
Well the Embargo Act (and related acts), Growing increasingly wary of Japan's warmongering (and the US not liking how the US controlled Philippines were finally in striking range of Japanese aircraft), the US, British, Dutch, etc, no longer allowed Japan to buy many war making materials, including iron, copper, and, mostly importantly, oil. Japan is a resource poor nation with no access of oil of its own, so the lack of oil completely halted any plans Japan had for Siberia.
They instead chose to focus on the Dutch East Indies, which were rich in oil, and, in doing so, knew they'd probably draw the US into a war. That's when they planned their preemptive strike on the US.
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@jasontaylor2251 You're also wrong about German losing before the US entered the war. Germany made a lot of progress against the USSR in 1941, to the point where the Allies, particularly the Roosevelt Administration in the US, was wondering if it was even worth it to include the USSR in the Lend-Lease agreement considering the potential of those supplies ending up in Germany hands.
By December 1941 (Pearl Harbor and US entry into the war), the German campaign had stalled out due to the winter weather, but they once again continued their campaign of conquest in the Spring of 1942, which is where their territory was at its largest. 1942 was also when the battle of Stalingrad happened.
Also by 1941 the campaign in North Africa was a stalemate, but without reinforcements, the British didn't stand a great chance of beating the German army. It wasn't until Operation Torch in November 1942, where the Allies landed another two Army Groups in West Africa (I think, it could've been more) that the tides turned.
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Jay Blake You're almost definitely a troll, but since your claim here is so easy to disprove, I thought I'd do so anyway. You want proof that traditional economic theories have worked? Here: https://slides.ourworldindata.org/world-poverty/#/declining-world-poverty-1820-2015-step2
Oh, the horror! Poverty, starvation, childhood mortality, etc are on the decline everywhere and education, equality, living standards, and average lifespans are on the rise! How could our modern economic order do this to us?!
Also you realize traditional economics has its roots in Keynesianism, right? Keynes was very much pro-markets and the traditional school of thought is called neo-classical or neo-Keynesian. You're bad at even trolling.
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@joshkar24 For one: banks (referring to commercial banks) were never forced to take on loans in the mortgage market. They were incentived under several presidential administrations to do so, but by then they had already been investing more heavily into the mortgage market due to the collapse of the Savings and Loans market, and later the bursting of the Tech bubble.
The government may have made it slightly worse, but the bubble was forming either way. A lot of the international markets, like Spain, are a good example of this. Their government didn't offer such incentives, yet their housing bubble was just as bad.
And then why the banks bailed out? Because letting them collapse would've utterly destroyed the US economy. The sudden collapse of Lehmann Brothers alone completely froze the US economy and stopped the financial markets from investing and loaning out money. This, in turn, caused a huge liquidity crisis (crisis of cash).
Say, for instance, you have all your money in Treasury bonds. Profit-wise you're doing great, but you still wouldn't have the cash to pay your mortgage/rent, groceries, etc. This was the big problem with banks. A vast majority of them were still profitable, they just had all their money tied up in assets and need a cash loan for withdrawals and such.
I could go on, but you get the point.
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Your opinion is objectively wrong then. First: Hitler encouraged Japanese aggression against the United States. Every day the United States navy was getting more and more hostile in their neutrality patrols across the Atlantic. They engaged German U-boats several times over, and an United States ship was even sunk during one of these conflicts. It was clear to Hitler and many others that the Germany Kreigsmarine (their navy) would eventually come into more direct conflict with the US Navy, The German leadership also knew that the Kreigsmarine couldn't compete with the US Navy, so Hitler encouraged Japan, another naval power, to attack the United States, hoping to equalize the naval power balance. Hitler didn't know about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor specifically, but he was happy when it occurred all the same.
Secondly, the Axis had no way of winning WW2, especially after Operation Barbarossa. In order for the Axis to win, they'd need to take out the UK, and that just wasn't possible since they had no way of actually getting to the UK because, you know, Royal Navy. Otherwise, Germany and its Allies would still get bogged down in Russia during their offensive, and still not be able to finish the USSR off. The Ussr would then eventually overwhelm Germany. This is especially true since the US was already sending Lend Lease support to the USSR by Pearl Harbor, so nothing would've changed in that regard.
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That's just plain wrong. The German military didn't stop their blitzkrieg before Dunkirk because they wanted to save British troops. If anything, a victory at Dunkirk would only help Hitler's position as it would have given him many of prisoners of war to use as a bargaining chip. You have to remember what a blitzkreig is. It's the idea that you can overwhelm an enemy by using your motorized forces to push beyond your infantry, which makes up your main force, to chase the retreating enemy, making sure they can never recover. This stretches an army's supply lines though, and, as their is a gap between the motorized spearhead and following infantry, leaves the supply line very exposed. The German military leadership were already worried that such a maneuver was incredibly risky for the Germans, and the Allies soon realized that too. So while the main contingent of the French military and BEF retreated across Belgium to the French port city of Dunkirk, a gap starting forming between the Germany motorized vehicles and the infantry. A second contingent of French troops then struck at the forming gap from the south, nearly breaking the supply line and dooming the offensive. Thanks to the efforts of leaders like Erwin Rommel, the supply line was just barely able to hold. Still though, this freaked out the German military leaders enough that they halted their whole offensive to give the infantry and artillery time to catch up so they wouldn't be so exposed again.
This is the consensus among historians on what really happened.
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No. Somewhat counter intuitively, when you buy and sell shares on the stock market, the company has no involvement in it. Once the company does an Initial Public Offering, they don't control the shares of stock, and don't benefit from the shares.
Basically what happens when a company goes public is they sell something like 50%of the company to raise money for projects. So if Microsoft was private, they could go public by selling away 30% of the ownership of the company away, then use the funds they get from that to grow the company.
Once the shares are offered though, Microsoft doesn't get anything from them. So Microsoft sells 1 share worth $50 to Jim. Microsoft then uses that to invest in one of their projects. The stock price increases, so Jim decides to sell the stock at $55 to Eric, another investor. As the share is being sold between two investors, Microsoft no longer received any revenue from the transaction since, well, they don't own it.
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@NavaidSyed You realize Dodd-Frank was never meant to regulate the commercial banking sector as it was never the issue, right? Commercial banks are already regulated by the Federal Reserve, similar state institutions, and the FDIC and its ilk.
What was the issue then? Shadowbanking, or institutions that, while acting like a bank, weren't considered banks, and thus weren't regulated nearly as heavily as commercial banks, if they were regulated at all. They name itself comes from the fact that its banking within the shadows, hidden from the law. Lehmann Brothers, the first major bank to fall in the Financial Crisis, was a shadow banking institution.
The goal of Dodd-Frank, or at least the major one, was to finally give shadowbanks some kind of oversight. It set up a board with the ability to determine which non-commercial bank businesses are too big to fail and then setting strict regulations on them. The Fed was also given even more regulatory authority over commercial banks.
Of course more could've been done to fix the US' regulatory system of the financial sector as it's still too much of a hodgepodge, but Dodd-Frank overall wasn't bad.
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No offense to those who replied to you, but their explanation of what a bubble is is wrong. For one, bubbles are never in reference to a single company, but a whole market. Similarly they deal with the valuation of an asset or a market.
A great example of this is the housing bubble in the 1990's and 2000's. Due to the financial industry getting more involved in mortgage loans, a lot more families were buying more houses. This caused housing prices to rise (as demand increased but supply remained the same). Then yet more people purchased homes for the above reason as well as it being a possible investment, causing prices to increase yet again. As long as expectations are meant, this market generally functions. So if I have what would normally be worth $100,000, but currently it's worth $150,000, I won't think much is wrong as long as I expect it to gain in value by 10% in a year and it does so. But then what happens if instead my house's valuation falls by 5% instead? Then I might panic and sell my house, further decreasing the valuation for all the other houses, causing yet more people to panic and sell. This repeats a bit until the housing market at a whole crashes.
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Not regulated, owned. Also the Fed owns bonds due to congressional legislation. If the US government (name the president), ever wants to disband the Fed, they'd have to take on all the cash themselves, which are liabilities. This would hurt the government budget. To get around this, Congress passed a law requiring the Fed to hold an equal value in US bonds as they do in USD so they can be safely disbanded without serious (budgetary) repercussions. It's discussed here: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx
Also you should read your own sources, specifically the conclusion tab, as it discusses just about everything I already have. Just for more evidence here is a direct quote from a similar FAQ on the Federal Reserve System's website:
"Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund." (https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm)
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Your claims are wrong due to two large parts: you misunderstand what fractional reserve banking is, and you don't understand how public debt works (or who it is owed to)
First of all, banks can't create money. That's just a falsehood. The only institution allowed to create money is a nation's central bank (not the kind you're referring to). So, in the case of the US, only the Fed can create money. Money can be created through fractional reserve banking though. That is the process of fractional reserve banking, not the banks themselves. Once again, any institution besides the Fed is not allowed to create money. So how does fractional reserve banking work to create money? Well the name gives it away with a little math.
Ex: John deposits $100 in his bank. That bank, following Federal Reserve regulation, keep 10% in reserve for future withdrawals, loaning out the other 90%. So $90 is loaned out. Jenna decides to borrow the money and puts it in her own bank. That bank does similarly as before, taking 10% of the money as reserve ($9) and loaning out the rest ($81). Doing som quick math, we can see that $19 is sitting in reserve and $171 being loaned out on an initial deposit of $100. The process created money, yet no bank created it. This process is nothing new. It has existed since the first emergence of banks.
Secondly, yes, the US government has a really big amount of debt. Do you know what else it has? A really big economy. Because of this, you shouldn't look t the nominal debt as it doesn't tell you much. Instead look at the debt to GDP Currently the US has a debt to GDP of a little over 100%, still not great, but less scary than the nominal figure first shows. Nations like Japan have debts of 250% of GDP and still operate perfectly fine. This is due in large part to my second point here. Who exactly is this debt owed to? In the US it can be dividied into three groups. About 30% of all US government debt is owed to other governmental institutions. Particularly the Federal Reserve, as it is required by Congress to hold a certain amount of the debt for reasons I won't get into, and the Social Security Fund. Another 40% is owned by private citizens, particularly US citizens. Many everyday Americans own US debt without knowing it. If you have a retirement fund, invest in the stock market, etc, you have more than likely purchased US debt as US debt is considered an amazingly safe asset for investments and is sought after in low risk funds, like retirement funds. Finally, the last 30% is owed to other nations. Of these, Japan (not China!) is the largest holder of US government debt. Wait, isn't Japan hugely indebted itself? Yep, nations regularly borrow and lend money (hugely simplified) based on their budgets. If you look on the net, the US owns almost as much debt from other countries as it is expected to pay.
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Most of these topics already have at least a half dozen other explanatory videos on YouTube. Honestly I'd like the video creators to stay away from those subjects. Not because they aren't important, but because based on their three videos on the subject (this, their stock market one, and UBI). They don't have a strong enough working knowledge of them to be educating anyone on the subject. They say they usually consult experts on their videos, but I can't see any experts having been consulted on those three videos. They were all very bare bones and basic, barely even explaining the topic, if even that.
A good example comes from this video. They tried to explain banking's role in the Financial Crisis, but it was just so wrong that it made me cringe. They claimed it was "Banks like Lehmann Brothers" who gave people bad loans, but Lehmann brothers was an investment bank. They didn't deal in loans whatsoever. All Lehmann Brothers did was overleverage themselves and by bad securities, going bankrupt in the process. They also claim it was bankruptcies like this that caused the housing market crash, but it was just the opposite.
The housing market crashed because many investors saw that people were buying houses in a record rate, and so they tried to build houses to get a chunk of this rising demand. The problem was that the houses being bought were mostly older houses being passed from one owner to another, not someone buying a newly built house. So most of the newly built homes went unsold. When this happened, investors panicked, and the prices of all the houses crashed. This all happened before the banking crisis.
As homes were scene as an investors, the low income homeowners who borrowed money to pay for their homes also panicked. They were promised that their home would increase in value over time, yet their house just dropped in value by as much as 30%. Originally they were planning on paying off the rest of their mortgage when they sold their house in a few years, but now they have no way of paying off the money at all, so they are forced to default. To many defaults and the banks didn't have the cash to meet depositor needs and were too forced to declare emergency measures.
Basically, the fact that the housing market crashed first is core to the Financial Crisis, but this video blatantly gets it wrong and declares that the exact opposite happened.
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Wow, my comment blew up. For all the people saying that this is a short video and shouldn't have to go more in depth, you realize that there are videos that do just that, right? Military History Visualized routinely makes in depth videos on a topic and cites many very credible sources in his videos to back up his arguments. For example, he has several great videos on World War 2 that go into the actual data to paint a clearer picture on what the Battle of Britain was like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUp41mIe-0M His videos were 4 minutes and 8 minutes.
Yes, PolyMatter did cite a book written by Mr. Lankov, but, as the passage he quoted didn't go into specifics, it didn't really show evidence of anything. It laid down a hypothesis and then.....nothing. Sources should be used as evidence for a claim.
Even looking at the specifics of the treaties mentioned shows that there is some information being overlooked. For instance during the 1994 treaty to denuclearize North Korea, it wasn't North Korea alone that broke the treaty. The US had its part to play too. Not only did the US either not fulfill its obligations in their entirety due to a change in which party controlled Congress(https://web.archive.org/web/20090909051426/http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?ots591=0C54E3B3-1E9C-BE1E-2C24-A6A8C7060233&lng=en&ord582=grp2&id=31958), but the US government under the Bush Administration became increasingly hostile to the North Korean government, labelling them as part of an "Axis of Evil".
Of course I'm not saying the US was the direct cause of North Korea breaking the agreement, but it does make me hesitant to agree that this is clear evidence of Mr. Lankov's theory at work.
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The only time Germany offered a peace treaty with the UK under and terms was when a German higher up, Hesse, stole a German plane, flew it to Scotland, and presented peace terms to the British government. He was almost immediately branded a liar by Hitler and disassociated by the Nazi regime.
Moreover, you act like the British had any reason to believe the Germans would honor a agreement. This was the same administration that reneged on the Treaty of Versailles multiple times, reneged on previous agreements (as well as the mentioned treaty) by reoccupying the German Rhineland, committed a war crime by illegally invading Austria, reneging on the Munich Agreement (and agreement Hitler himself made with the British PM) and illegally invading Czechoslovakia, committed a false-flag attack on their own territory to justify their invasion of Poland, and then reneged on their non-aggression pact with the USSR to invade them.
They weren't fucking trustworthy and the British knew this.
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No, not at all. First: The French-Italian border was defended. It might have been pretty light due to the German invasion of France, but it still existed. Second: You realize it wouldn't take long to reinforce the border during an Italian attack, right? France had railroads and modern infrastructure. Third: the invasion of the USSR (not Russia) happened a full year after the Battle of France, In that time not only did Germany have to prepare its troops and stockpiles, but it also fought in other wars against Greece, North Africa, etc. Fourth: Besides its navy in the Mediterranean, Italy didn't have a way of keeping the UK busy, as shown by the war itself. Fifth: Germany and Italy had no ability to invade the UK and never would have. They didn't have naval supremacy, aerial supremacy, or any kind of protection for their landing craft. Beyond that, they were planning on attacking a vary narrow strip of beaches easily reinforceable by the UK. There's a reason Operation Sealion was cancelled early on. It was infeasible.
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Didn't everything you say just contradict that whole 'disinterested shareholders' bit? The reason the business feeds money into the pockets of the shareholders (your words) is because the shareholders are seeking an active interest in the profitability of the company. Also you realize this is the whole point of the Board of Directors, right? Yes, not every shareholder is expected to know everything about a company, but a few of them, especially the ones that own the most stock in it? Yeah, they are. That's why the stockholders vote on who to place on the company's board of directors and the board, in turn, is supposed to act in the interests of the stockholders. It's the principles of a republic used on a business.
Of course short term growth is still incentivized more than long term growth, but that's never not going to be the case. People generally have pretty high discount rates when it comes to awards in the future versus the present. It's just human psychology. Beyond that, CEO's are only beholden to their terms. Anything out of the 10 or so years they operate as head of the company, they have no reason to care about.....mostly. That's an almost impossible problem to fix though without forcing autocrats into the heads of every company as only someone with an extremely long term would pursue such projects.
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Wow, you just completely ignored the African Theater, the Italian Theater (which is how one of the three major Axis powers became an Allied power). the Invasion of Normandy and Southern France, the Battle of the Bulge, and the entire Pacific Theater (how another of the three major Axis powers surrendered). The USSR only fought Japan twice. There was one offensive made by Japan into Mongolia, which was pushed back, and then the USSR invaded Japan literally days before the surrendered.
FYI: Britain was fighting in Africa when they "hid behind the English Strait".
Glad to see your description wasn't biased at all. Yes, the USSR played a huge role, destroying a vast majority of the German army, but discounting the Western Allies as "just showing up to the award ceremony" when a vast majority of trucks and meat used by the USSR came from the US and Britain, The US and China successfully kept the war a one front war for the USSR (Japan never tried to seriously invade Siberia), and the last major German offensive was blunted by the Western Allies.
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Except it still 100% is. First, fractional reserve banking is the only reasons banks are profitable in the first place. If a bank was required to hold 100% of someone's reserve and couldn't reinvest it, they'd make no profit, meaning they have no purpose for even existing (businesses need to at least break even, which a bank can't do without profit). Furthermore, it would heavily restrict our monetary supply as money would effectively disappear from the economy. Sure, eventually the central bank might be able to bring the amount of currency around to a similar level of before, but that instability would have a long term impact on the economy as people would no longer trust the value of the dollar as they had previously. If the price of milk suddenly skyrocketed to $50, even if only for a day, you'd be a little wary of it's price in the resulting weeks. Finally, the underlying problem you laid out of fractional reserve banking, that being a bank run, has mostly been solved. Thanks to the FDIC and similar institutions in other countries, people aren't worried about banks not having enough money to cover their withdrawals as they are insured up to $150,000 (or whatever the amount it) anyway. As people aren't worried, bank runs don't happen.
This is evident in the Financial Crisis when, even though there was huge instability in the economy, and especially the banking sector, there was no news of an actual bank run in the United States.
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Bullshit alert! Yes Freddie and Fannie did participate in the mortgage lending market, but they were actually late to enter the market. By the time of their entry, all the major banks were already participating in the subprime market and a bubble had already formed (per Shiller's model). This was a natural reaction after the bursting of the Savings and Loan bubble, and, later, the Tech bubble.
Moreover, blaming it on "Da Gubernent" ignores all the shady practices going on outside of the commercial banks, like the credit rating agencies not correctly giving the MBS' their correct rating as they had a vested interest in the MBS's having a higher rating, or the investment banks (different from commercial banks) taking out loans each morning they operated to buy more MBS's, only to then sell them that night and pay off their debt with some interest. That practice fucked them over when the market crashed and the investment banks were unable to sell off the MBS's at a profit, were over-leveraged, and crumbled. I'd love to know how the government is at fault for that.
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If you want a book on the financial crises as of late, I'd suggest: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
Ben Bernanke, the head of the US Federal Reserve during the Financial Crisis, wrote a memoir that goes over the whole event, the US policy to get us out of it, the world during it, etc, titled A Courage to Act. It's the best source I can think of without getting too technical.
For banking in general, most any introductory money and banking textbook would do.
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@the_real_economics Dude, please don't bring the accounting equation in this because you clearly don't understand it well enough. You seem to be forgetting one very important part of the accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity. You can't just ignore the equity part of the equation and below is the reason why.
So say I own a business which, to keep things simple, has $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in liabilities. As assets equals liabilities plus equity, I must have zero equity. This intuitively makes sense if you consider liabilities to be something like a loan. Basically I got a loan for $50,000 so I have the liability to pay it off, but also the cash from the loan. As I haven't done anything with the money though, my company hasn't made a profit, so there's no equity.
Then say there was a massive fire and half my money was lost. So now I only have $25,000 in cash but still $50,000 in liabilities. Am I supposed to somehow revalue the remaining $25,000 to equal the $50,000 liability? No. This is why assets don't equal liabilities, and this is where equity would come in. What you're supposed to do is subtract the lost $25,000 from the equity of the business, so the new accounting equation would be $25,000 in assets = $50,000 in liabilities - $25,000 in equity (in this case retained earnings). Everything is now equal, but assets don't magically rise.
Otherwise:
1. Gold isn't a medium of exchange. Try going into your local Walmart or Target and paying for gold. They won't accept it, and neither with 99% of store in the US. If you need quick cash, you have to sell your gold at a pawn shop or the likes, and they won't give you the full value of the gold in cash.
2. Gold can be a unit of account, but not a particularly good one unless you desire to carry gold bars wherever you go. Something tells me paper money is a bit lighter.
3. Gold is a terrible store of value because it's way too volatile. In the past 15 years the price of gold jumped from $600 to $1,800 (300% rise), then tanks down to below $1,200 (33% fall), and then rose to above $1,800 (50% rise). Would you have made a profit? Sure. But you also could've profited off of GME, doesn't mean either are sensible currency. A store of value is supposed to, well, retain it's value over the long run. Gold fluctuates too much to do that. Alternatively the USD has only hit its 2% inflation target a few times in the same time frame.
4. I have no idea why everyone is obsessed with gold's intrinsic value considering it has next to none. Once again, it's volatility is a huge sign of this. Unless you want to claim that the price of gold shot up 300% because industrial demand for it skyrocketed in less than a year. Then it must've also fallen in a year too...... The vast majority of gold's value does not come from it's use in computers (basically its only use). The value of gold mostly comes from a hedge against an economic crash.
So basically if every government in the world collapsed today, whatever gold you hold would be just as useless as any USD. Do you want me to go into why the USD is superior to gold now?
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Someone doesn't know the meaning of conquering apparently. No country was conquered by an Allied power besides the USSR. Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, etc were all given their autonomy as soon as the war ended. West Germany was administered by France, the US, and UK, but that ended not even a decade afterwar. The Western Hemisphere wasn't touched, so nothing was conquered there. Africa was already 99% colonies, so nothing was left to be conquered. All the colonies there returned to their tradition overlords, but the war itself paved the way for the various independence movements that would soon occur.
This just leaves Asia, and, once again, nothing was conquered. In fact Japan was given its independence with US economic and military support, the Korean Peninsula, previously conquered territory of Japan, was liberated and turned into two independent countries, Taiwan was given back to China, and the Chinese Civil War continued with little foreign intervention. You're definition of conquering does not line up with history.
Also when a country causes a holocaust of a subset of its own people, it tends to make them a tad bit more villainous than countries that don't. You know, people tend to frown when it comes to genocide.
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Who buys shares? Investors. Who sells shares? Other investors. A share is a part ownership in a company. So by owning a share of stock in, say, Microsoft, you are officially an owner of the company. Not a big one of course. Microsoft has over 7 billion shares outstanding, so you would only own a percent of a percent of a percent of Microsoft, but you'd be an owner all the same.
Otherwise, it's all based on expectations. If I don't expect Microsoft to do well in the coming months, I might think a share of stock in the company is only worth $50. Conversely, my friend might be more optimistic in the company. Maybe he thinks the new Xbox or Windows operating system will be a smash hit, so he values a share in the company at $100. Knowing my views on the company and that I own a share of stock in it, my friend offers me $70 for my shares of stock. To me this is a deal as its $20 over what I believe the share is worth, and to him it's also a deal since it is $30 below what he believes it is worth. That's all the stock market is. People with varying expectations on a company's performance buying and selling stock based on said expectations.
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@ralfrath-new Oh, you also brought up the Munich Agreement. I didn't notice that. A lot of historical hobbyists like to say that the Munich Agreement (what you call the Czech Crisis) was a huge blunder on the part of the UK and France, and that is a fair observation. But it's also important to know that there was so much more going on than people realize then. For instance, the French government during the crisis was in shambles. The French Treasury was completely out of currency reserves, their military was still out of date, and possibly most importantly, they had absolutely no military plans for an offensive war. The UK on the other hand was facing trouble elsewhere and didn't really have the military capabilities of taking on Germany. They were particularly worried about the German Luftwaffe. The USSR was gearing up for an offensive into Germany, but there's a slight problem. The USSR didn't have any border with Germany. The closest connection was through Poland, and Poland would die before they gave military access to the USSR, who only a couple decades before had tried to invade and annex them. So, while Poland hated Germany, they hated the USSR even more (this is before the German invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia).
So really none of the Allies were really prepared for a war and (many historians believe) were hoping to use that time to better prepare their armed forces, which they did, only for them to get outmaneuvered in France.
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That's an extremely simplistic interpretation, but it's not totally wrong. Really what you're doing is buying ownership of a company. So if you bought 1 share or Walmart stock, you are essentially a part owner of Walmart. Granted, that part is EXTREMELY small, but you own some of it all the same. If the company performs well, the value of the company will increase, and, therefore, you share will too.
Though it should be mentioned that if you're buying a share off the stock market, you are not buying it from the company itself. You are buying the share from another private investor. Stock markets are secondary, not primary.
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What? No, not at all. Even without inflation, the Entente powers during World War 1 were able to pay for their war effort through foreign loans, namely loans from the US. You could say this was some nefarious plot to promote war, but at the same time when you native home is at war, you tend to want to help them however you can. So why are monetary systems almost always handled by a singular entity somehow tied to the government? Because that's the best way to create a stable currency. If private banks were to print their own currency, the currency would no longer be as stable as private banks have perverse incentives. Basically they are for profit. What if their profits don't look good enough? Well they could just print more money. Who really cares that this leads to inflation as long as our financial statements look nice! This also makes banks nearly impossible to regulate. What's the FDIC supposed to do when a bank that uses its own currency collapses? Pay the depositors in the now worthless bank currency? Use a different currency entirely? Not do anything and cause banking panics?
Another thing to note is that central banks, while a part of the government, rarely are influenced directly by it. For instance the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: keep inflation and unemployment low. As long as these objectives are met, they are no obligated to do anything else. They also have little reason to do anything else since, while facing some oversight from Congress, Congress has no direct authority over them. The only thing that can happen is that the Fed chair can be replaced by someone else, but they are only one of nine members on the regulatory committee.
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Thsiscool Blaming only them leaves a lot out of the picture. That's an argument for another day though, so I'll only talk about the Fed. Overall the Federal Reserve has influence over three main things: inflation through the money supply, interest rates through the discount rate, and unemployment through multiple different things. Now inflation has never been a problem as we haven't had an intense period since 1980. That just leaves the problem being with the discount rate or unemployment. They were able to control unemployment well through until an external factor (the financial crisis) happened, so once again they can't be blamed. That just leaves the discount rate, which as I said before controls the interest rates. Now it's a fair criticism that their low interest rate policy created a larger housing bubble, but as Robert Shiller, famous expert economist on bubbles and one that predicted the housing bubble said, while not a good policy, the Fed's low interest rates contributed very little to the growth of the housing bubble (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/pubs/p1089.pdf). There are many reasons for this, but one of the more interesting is that the housing bubble first formed in 1998, three years before the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates. It also grew exponentially in 2004, one year after the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates again. This implies the interest rate wasn't heavily correlated with the growth of the housing bubble.
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oasntet As the video said, the US, along with just about every other nation, got rid of the gold standard during the Great Depression. They would later revive it after WW2 through Bretton Woods, though that wasn't much of a gold standard itself. Anyway, Keynesian economic thinking was starting to become huge in the 1930's, and Keynesian economics didn't work well under the gold standard. Currency's couldn't be devalued, it was harder to run a deficit, and deflation was just as common as inflation. All these factors hampered the recovery during the Great Depression and were all attributed to the gold standard. It was only after most countries got rid of it did they start to notice a better recovery, but that would end with a new recession in 1937 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937%E2%80%9338). By the way, Keynes himself called the gold standard a barbaric relic of the past. I'm not saying he was right, just that it shows how much he hated it.
Finally, many economists today blame the gold standard for the Great Depression as indirectly talked about here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350
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garrett boyaci Innovation has nothing to do with this. The only thing that matters are efficiency and the welfare of society.
Innovation is far from the only thing that creates monopolies. Actually, it is the least likely to create a monopoly. What creates them are the start up costs involved and the potential dividing of the market. Let's look at a typical electric company. What do they need in order to offer their service? They need a huge building to generate electricity, a generator, proper measures installed to handle the pollution, like air scrubbers, and then power lines to run directly to their customers' houses. This only works if they can guarantee a profit from their customer base. Now another electric company also starts thinking about setting up in the area. They too need to pay the costs associated with setting up, and too need to install their own lines. The problem here is that there's no guarantee they will get a significant portion of the market share, meaning they would expect profits. As profits are everything, they just won't compete. It wouldn't be profitable for them to build a power line across an entire street just to satisfy one house after all.
And I think the whole "you have no proof that it will cost you more" is directed towards monopolies, so I'll answer your claim here. Yes, yes, I do. If you have ever taken an into economics course, you will see this chart (http://www.jslon.com/AP_Economics/MicVis/fig11.9.gif). This is the graph of a market involving a monopoly. As you can see, the monopoly price at Pm is much larger than the socially optimal price of Pr. Pr is also the price for perfectly competitive markets as that's where marginal cost equals demand.
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+Extra Credits At 6:30 you made a critical error in describing fractional reserve banking. Namely, it does not let a single bank lend out more money than what was deposited. True money is "created", but it's due to the repeated depositing and lending of the same money through multiple banks.
So as to your example. If someone deposits $100 into a bank, the bank may only be required to hold 10% of it as a reserve in case someone wants to withdraw their money. See? A fraction of the deposit is kept as reserve. Fractional reserve. Anyway, the bank is still able to lend out $90, so they make a loan out to another person. This person isn't going to carry a crap ton of money around with him though, so he too deposits it in another bank. Now this bank is also going to take 10% off of it as for their reserve ($9) and will lend 90% of it ($81). Now if we go back to the start, we can see that out of the $100 deposited, $171 ($90+$81) was loaned out. Money was therefore created. A single bank has no ability to create $1,000 from $100 though as that would require them to literally create money, something they are forbidden from doing.
Sources:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reserveratio.asp
https://www.frbatlanta.org/education/classroom-economist/fractional-reserve-banking/economists-perspective-transcript
The second source is from the Federal Reserve itself.
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Nah, I'm guessing his plan works similar to how ours does now. By the way, this isn't a flat tax, and it's bullcrap that he claims it is. If it were flat, everyone would be paying the same. Since he is giving tax break to the poor, this is still a progressive tax, just a simplified version. Anyway, as it works today, if you earn $54,000, you won't pay any taxes on the first $52,000, and will pay a 17% tax on the $2,000 it takes to go from $52,000 to $54,000, which would be $340. So you bring home $53,660.
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Matis Krawiec By allowing the company to keep their profits, you are allowing them to grow their company. Growing their company leads to a higher value for the stock which you hold, so, if you sell it, you can make a hefty profit off of it.
Let's look at Microsoft, which has something like 7.93 billion shares outstanding according to their income statement here (http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/MSFT/financials). Their net income on the other hand is $16.8 billion dollars. That means, to suck the company completely dry, you would get $2 a share. That's....not much. Especially since your share will then lose all of its value, currently sitting at $64 (http://quotes.wsj.com/MSFT). It's not like you can sell it since no one wants to buy the stock of a dead company anymore. Now if you look at this date last year, you will see that Microsoft stock was worth around $51-ish. That's an increase in about $13 in the span of a year. So investors have gained way more value in their stock by letting Microsoft keep the money than by taking it for themselves.
As for your final question, can you demand to gain the profits. Yes, but this is a democracy, so a majority of the shareholders have to agree for that to happen. Since you don't have that power and it's in their best interests to let the company keep the money, you'd be easily outvoted. That or you would have to vote in sympathetic directors to vote in a sympathetic CFO, which is even harder.
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Matis Krawiec You're really trying to make this sound like a scam, aren't you? Yes, you're right, but once again, the way you want to do it would earn you no money. Let's do some math! One share of Microsoft stock is $64. You're ownership of Microsoft earnings is about $2.10 per share. So if you purchase a share for $64 and then demand your share of the earnings, you get $2.10. Which means you just lost $61.90. Good job?
If you don't like common stock so much though, just buy preferred. This guarantee you a dividend payment each year, so you will get money each year from the company. These don't gain or lose value though, so you won't make a profit from selling them, don't give you voting rights, and are basically a bond in many ways.
Or, you know, just buy a bunch of bonds.
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Matis Krawiec If you owned 1/5 of Microsoft, you would get 1/5 of the voting power within it. That's why a lot of people talk about owning 51% of the shares in a company, because that gives you sole power when it comes to a vote. Otherwise, you have to remember what a corporation is. They are an entity in of themselves. When there is a tax, it is the corporation that is being charged with it, not the owners. Also, as it would be near impossible for a company to be run solely by democratic decisions, 99% of the day to day decisions are handled by the chief officers, like the CEO or the CFO, Chief Financial Officer.
Even then though, how do you think I got the $2.10 per share? I took Microsoft's total revenue, subtracted its expenses, and divided the total by the amount of shares. That's no different from taking their revenue divided by shares and subtracting their expenses divided by shares. Both come out to the same thing.
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burt591 The problem is that a share of stock does have intrinsic value. When I buy a share of stock, I own a part of the company, no matter how infinitesimally small that percentage ownership is. It's not some "you're an honorary member" thing. No, you actually are an owner, with all the rights and honors that come with it. That's why your share of stock goes up when the company's net worth goes up.
What's confusing about your point though is that's the same for every good. The value of the good comes from what people think it's value is and how much they demand of it. You know, supply and demand (http://stephansmithfx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Supply-and-Demand-Graph.png). Even gold, which technically has intrinsic value for its use in computer parts, follows this basic principle. If new gold is suddenly found tomorrow or a substitute metal starts being used to take its place. Heck, if we stop using electronics altogether for whatever reason, it's value will plummet. It's value comes from what people are willing to pay for it, much like stocks on a stock market, and obviously one will only make money off of gold if they sell to someone who values it more than they currently do.
Also you can get dividend payments, which are really nice.
I don't know, I'm used to think about all goods in terms of supply and demand, so I don't treat a share of stock any different from any other good on a market. You're also not being tiresome. I just wish I could explain this better since I feel like I'm failing in that aspect.
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Hans Smirnov No, just no. That is horrible economic thinking. What you said doesn't even make sense. Deflation means your economy is stronger? So if we destroyed every single dollar in the economy but one, our economy would be at its strongest point? No, that's insane. It just means that the dollar is worth our entire productivity.
Now deflation is bad because it incentivizes saving over spending. In a consumer oriented economy likes ours (or every developed nation), consumption is everything. When consumption falls, the entire economy takes a hit. This is why the Fed targets 2% inflation. Because 1: It creates a buffer for deflation, and 2: inflation incentivizes spending, improving the economy in the short term. It doesn't help that deflation usually occurs during an economic downturn, further hurting the economy.
On a related note, do you know what caused the Great Depression? Many countries had so much money in supply that they were no longer supported by gold, the US included, so they all underwent a period of deflation to keep on track with their gold reserves. The problem was that they all did this at nearly the exact same time, creating a huge slump in consumption. This devastated the foreign markets for US industries, causing an economic downturn for us, which spread just about everywhere. This paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research indirectly talks about it here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350
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Billy Anderson Yep, you sound like a very intelligent person with all your grammar and spelling mistakes. I see no reason to not believe you. FYI: The Philadelphia Federal Reserve concluded that the Labor Force Participation Rate is down mainly due to the baby boomers retiring, the young taking longer to enter the labor force due to a need for a higher education, and an increasing amount of people claiming disabilities. The first of these being the most important.
Also, if all the stock brokers thought we were heading towards a recession, they wouldn't be investing in the stock market. Considering the Dow Jones is about to break 20 trillion, it's safe to say that's not the case. After all, the stock market is basically just investor confidence, and these stock brokers seem to be really confident. After all, if a recession happens, the stock market plummets and all the investors lose a crap ton of money, so, if they truly believed a recession was imminent, they would sell their stock before the stock plummeted. Note: I am not saying a recession won't happen in the near future, only that there is no way of telling. That's the whole point of the efficient market hypothesis.
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That REALLY is not how debt works, and I wish people would understand this.
First, China doesn't own a majority of our debt. Not even close. Last I checked they owned something like a third of a third of our debt, and their share is shrinking. In fact Japan owns more of US debt than China, but all foreign owned debt combined isn't greater than 30% of our total debt obligations. Second, our debt is in bonds, which don't work as normal debt. For bonds you only pay interest for however long the bond is issued and then pay back the principle amount of the bond when it matures. They also can't be called up early, so the US can't just go to one of the people they're indebted to, give them a chunk of money, and leave, as that's just not how a bond works. Second, up to 40% of US debt is held within the government. The Federal Reserve owns a huge chunk of it, so does the Social Security fund and other government funds. By the way the last 30% is held by private investors, usually US based, so it's the government owing money to US citizens, who are then taxed by said government.
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Joe Vasicek Yeah, and I already explained the title. The US middle class is shrinking because those that were once middle class are now upper class. There's no way they're getting poorer as the lower class has also decreased by a point. Of the three classes lower, middle, and upper the only one to show an increase in the percentage of the population is the upper class. What does that say about the percentage of Americans who went from middle to upper class? They also increased.
You mean inflation, a measure that calculates the average increase in price of all the goods in an economy, only measures the price of all the goods in an economy? Wow, color me shocked. That means the increase in healthcare and housing are rising in price not due to inflation, but other factors. Like, I don't know, increased problems due to asymmetric information and monopolistic tendencies for healthcare insurers, or an increased demand for housing that outpaced the supply as consumer confidence increased.
FYI: If you want to make a credible argument, don't link to non-reputable sources like Zerohedge. You could've just taken an article from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, both credible sources and the latter right-wing, about the subject, as they both have written on healthcare and housing costs.
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Joe Vasicek 1. That wouldn't break the back of the petrodollar as of the BRIC countries (and Iran) the only oil exporters are Iran and Russia. Their oil exports together equal Saudi Arabia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports), which is only a fraction of the total oil exports of OPEC. So they have a ways to go to compete with OPEC
2. That would go against Saudi Arabia's interests as they're only concerned about selling oil for as much as they can. They wouldn't intentionally cut the price of their largest export unless they thought they could drive away competition, which didn't happen. The US fracking industry contracted during the fall in oil, but has rebounded very well since then. Saudi Arabia has even called for the OPEC nations (and others) to stop producing so much, but, as game theory would tell us, no country wants to be the first to cut production as they'd be at a huge disadvantage against their competitors.
3. This doesn't make sense. The Iraqi government was already being influenced by the US, and already traded oil in the dollar as they are a part of OPEC. Also ISIS more had to do with the oppression of Sunni's under the Shiite Iraqi government after the Shittes were oppressed under a Sunni Iraqi government. ISIS also go its funding from Al Qaida as they were once a sect of them.
4. Restore the dollar where? Iraq? It's already used there. Syria? Already used there. Iran? They're not even close to reaching them. They are also doing a bad job at aiding ISIS considering they are supplying the Kurds, Iraqi government, and Syrian rebels to fight them.
5. That's true.
More like, once the rebels in Aleppo falls, the Syrian opposition basically falls apart. That's why the Aleppo siege is getting so much media attention. Then ISIS is also falling apart under the attacks from all sides. Furthermore the petrodollar wouldn't protect us against a recession. I'm also not sure how any of this has to do with the Bretton Woods system either. Because the global economy collapses, all the nations will be forced to peg their currency to a single nation's currency which is pegged to gold? You realize that failed right? And it was enacted after WW2, a period of growth in the world economy, not a depression.
Notice I never used the term petrodollar. There's a reason for that. The petrodollar just means that the USD in some way gets its value from oil. It is not some currency of its own. Also, if the USD were attached so closely to oil, the value of the USD should fluctuate with the value of oil, but as my statistical test showed, the USD and the price of oil are not correlated. For that reason, I don't think this dollar valued mostly through oil exists.
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+Joe Vasicek
1. First, OPEC is an oligopoly. They are multiple countries colluding together to gain market power. That's an oligopoly. Second, it would be nowhere near enough. In fact the devaluation of oil did more to hurt OPEC as the OPEC countries weren't even following their own quotas and overproducing beyond their limits to try and make more money, leading to an oversupply of oil.
2. Their only political interest in oversupplying the market with oil and collapsing the Russian economy would be affecting Russia's influence in both Iran and Syria, but considering an economic collapse is a huge if and Iran was already opening up to western powers like the US at the time, therefore growing no matter what happened to Russia, it makes very little sense. Then their economic interests go directly against that, so it's not hard to assume what they'd do in that situation, especially since once against they tried to call the oil exporters together to stop the overproduction of oil because they were losing so much money (http://flapship.com/2016/11/iran-pumps-more-crude-as-saudi-minister-calls-for-opec-cuts/)
3. Not so much before the rise of ISIS. They were getting all their military aid from the US and the president himself was coached by Bush on how to be a leader. They had no need to go to Iran for anything. It was only after the rise of ISIS that they needed support from Iran, so it once again doesn't make sense why the US wouldn't want to get rid of them as quick as possible. There's only so much we can do though without deploying frontline troops.
4. No, just no. The First Gulf War was caused because of the humanitarian nightmare that was Iraq invading Kuwait and installing a puppet government from Saddam's own family. Funnily enough the international community doesn't like invasions and annexations of countries. When Saddam realized the shit he got himself into, he even tried to negotiate a treaty with the US, giving us oil at a huge discount if we just let them be, and we didn't (https://www.scribd.com/document/38969813/MIDDLE-EAST-CRISIS-Secret-Offer-Iraq-Sent-Pullout-Deal-to-U-S-ALL-EDITIONS). So the war was not fought because the US was worried about oil as the Iraqis tried to use that as their way of avoiding war and failed.
5. Yeah, I know, but you don’t seem to realize what keeping the dollar means in an economic context. By having oil transactions only through the dollar, they are forces all parties to carry the dollar as you said. These means that every country demands more dollars, increasing the demand for them. This shifts the demand curve to the right, increasing the value of the dollar as shown here (http://mrski-apecon-2008.wikispaces.com/file/view/shift_in_demand_curve/41646057/shift_in_demand_curve). Just change price in that graph for value of the dollar and it’d be perfect. Once again though, my analysis showed that foreign consumers still demanded just as much of the dollar when the price of oil fell by over a half, something that shouldn’t have happened if they were significantly related. Finally, for the petrodollar system, if it existed, to be anything like Bretton Woods, the US would need to control the production of oil so that they can stabilize it to the dollar, but we can’t as we don’t control all the oil in the world. Also, again, 87% of FX trades are done using the dollar, not just oil transactions.
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Joe Vasicek Turkey is fighting with Saudi Arabia over regional hegemony? Huh, I always thought they were a little more buddy buddy than that.
As for Iran, I know that but that isn't making the overproduction of oil any better for the infantile oil industries in other countries, like fracking in the US for instance. Ironically after trying to find anything on an oil production quota for OPEC I came across this article (http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/02/investing/opec-oil-decision-saudi-arabia-iran/index.html). It basically says that in their latest conference (relative to the article), Saudi Arabia was basically the only OPEC nation to call for a quota as all the other nations are using their overproduction as a way to gain market share. It's typical game theory. That was off topic though.
Actually Saudi Arabia isn't cutting production. Nor was their 2012 production any greater than usual. Here's a chart of their oil production since 1972 (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/crude-oil-production). From what I can tell, their production has remained fairly constant, with slight upward growth since 2008. This is for much a prisoner's dilemma type situation though (more game theory). Saudi Arabia won't cut production unless everyone does or else they would lose big time. If they did cut production and no one else did, then they lose out on export revenue and market share while the per barrel price of oil doesn't gain by much. The other countries on the other hand, gain from the market share and the slight uptick in oil prices. This is similar to how, while nuclear disarmament is a great idea (on paper at least), no major power wants to be the first to do it because they'd then be at a huge disadvantage.
Do you have a source for the Kremlin claim? I don't know anything either way on that issue.
Wow, you've lived an interesting life. All I can say is that I'm currently getting a degree in economics at a university. Nothing like what you've said.
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It's fiat actually, and there's an interesting point to mention. If there is little faith in a currency, the currency has little foreign demand, meaning that the valuation of the currency is extremely low. This can actually be good for a country though, especially a country with a developing economy. The low valuation of your currency means that your products are cheaper abroad (as the domestic currency can buy more of your own), giving your exporting industries a boast. As your economy grows, the faith in your currency will then grow, allowing you to become more consumption focused. Because of this, it is probably a better idea for an infant economy to use a lower value fiat currency than one pegged to the gold standard, especially because that would require them to actually buy gold, which can be a drain on the government's resources.
That's one of the reasons China has such a great exporting industry. They have been intentionally devaluing their currency in order to make their exports cheaper abroad. Now that their economy is great though and they have started experiencing a slowdown, they have instead stopped devaluing it so much and are not allowing it to gain some value, similar to the theoretical scenario I gave above.
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Antilli First, no single family owns the Federal Reserve. The chairman and board are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. Second, the Federal Reserve doesn't keep any of their revenue. Instead it's given as remittance to the Treasury. Bottom of page four on their financial statements (https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/combinedfinstmt2015.pdf) show that they had a revenue of about $99 billion before remittance, and then a net loss of $17 billion after the remittance. Yes, they actually lost money. Finally, unless you think taxation is theft, this is nowhere even close to theft, especially since the supply of money isn't the only thing that decides inflation, but the speed of the circulation of money does also. If my dollar ends up in 20 transactions by the end of the day compared to last year where it was only in one, then the inflation rate has increased. So would you then be stealing from yourself? The government has no part in that part of inflation after all. Well, besides stemming it if it gets too bad.
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I don't agree with this tax plan at all, but your criticism of it is unfair, at least if it's similar to how our tax system is already set up. I our tax system, even if you earn over the amount in that tax bracket, you still pay the percentage tax in that bracket up to the upper limit of that tax bracket. So, using this system as reference. If someone earns $75,000 a year, they would pay 0% on the first $52,800 they earn, someone everyone gets, and then 17% on the next $22,200, bringing the total tax paid to $3,774 and the marginal tax rate to 5%. This is also why the system in the video is still a progressive tax, not a flat tax, as not everyone is paying the same marginal tax rate.
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thetom12395 Congratulations! You just came up with what could possibly be the worst economic plan in human history! Man, am I so glad you're not an economic advisor. FYI, Einstein, of the three countries you mentioned, China's the only one that holds a material amount of US debt, and even then it's something like a third of a third of all US debt. I can even source that. Back in 2011, when our debt was about $14.5 trillion, China only owned about a trillion (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/business/foreign-held-us-debt/). That's even less of a portion of the debt than the figure I gave.
Also, as most any economist will tell you, our national debt isn't a huge problem, but let's start WW3 anyway, right?
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That's not true in any way. The share price is directly linked to the performance of the company, the performance of the economy, and the expectations for the company in the future. Don't believe me? Check Samsung's share price after it was found out that there Note 7's were exploding, or Nintendo when the Wii U undersold. Heck, the entire stock market fell during the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, when demand also took a huge fall, and companies were just trying to hand on.
Also they don't have any benefit? Yeah, it's not like they provide funding to businesses, make publically held companies more transparent thanks to the SEC and GAAP, or generally provide a second source of income for everyday Americans, including being a big contribution to a normal American's retirement fund. Nope, totally doesn't help at all.
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Those are some extremely biased statements that ignore a large portion of history. For instance it wasn't Britain who started the naval arms race with Germany, it wasn't Britain who funded the South African tribes against the British, and it wasn't Britain who tried to sabotage Frances influence over Morocco. Of course I'm not saying such imperialism was a good thing morally, but these were definitely ways in which countries grew at the time.
What about WW2 then? Well Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, forcefully annexed Austria, forced Lithuania to give them territory, financially and militarily supported a fascist revolution in Spain, and invaded Poland after fabricating a bullshit reason (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident). Something tells me that when you have to use your own soldiers to fabricate an incident so you have a reason for declaring war, you're a warmonger. But I guess Britain should've just ignored the German invasion on one of its allies, as Britain was allied to Poland at the time, because German totally had their best interests at heart. Just ignore their slaughter of the Warsaw ghettos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising) and the Holocaust of course.
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captainjoshua125 While the quotes you had of Balfour were great, they didn't prove anything. All they showed was that there was one guy in the British government who thought that it was prudent for Britain to declare war on Germany to keep them in line if that was their intended goal. Granted, he was influential, but that doesn't prove that throughout history that was the objective of the British government. That's like saying that since Trump is the American president-elect, all of his positions have been supported by the American government for decades.
Also, as I think your referencing the war that brought down the Spanish Armanda, effectively ruining them as a superpower, it should be noted that that wasn't a war that Britain (England at the time) started, but an attempted invasion of England by Spain as James the Second was getting annoyed with England's subversion of their influence, like by adopting Anglicanism instead of Catholicism and supporting the Dutch independence from Spain. As for France, they just hated each other ever since the 100 Years War.
Everything you said about Germany right before World War 2 sounds more like Germany propaganda at the time than anything. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia because they wanted to break the Treaty of Versailles? What? Because they didn't already do that when they reoccupied the Rhineland and built their military way above the limit set in the treaty? The treaty set a limit of 100,000 men for the German army (http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa4.html). In 1935 Hitler quadrupled this limit and had a standing army of around 450,000 (http://spartacus-educational.com/2WWgermanA.htm). Apparently that didn't break the treaty though? What about how he stopped paying war reparation payments set by the treaty also in the mid-1930's? That was another violation of the treaty. So don't tell me that he invaded Czechoslovakia just because he wanted to reverse the Versailles treaty when he already violated it numerous times before then.
As for Austria, once again no. You failed to mention that the Chancellor of Austria was calling for a referendum after some ethnic German towns in the country started to riot. Of course referendums are basically one of the most democratic things a government could do, so why would Hitler oppose this and instead demand that the government install a fascist candidate he supported, using all the methods he could including invading them to get his way, something that is extremely undemocratic?
As journalist Edgar Mowrer said, "There is no one in all France who does not believe that Hitler invaded Austria not to hold a genuine plebiscite, but to prevent the plebiscite planned by Schusschnigg from demonstrating to the entire world just how little hold National Socialism really had on that tiny country."
Huh, maybe he had a point.
All Hitler wanted was Danzig? Just like all he wanted was territory from Lithuania previously? Or all he wanted was the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia? Or how all he wanted was the territory controlled by ethnic Germans in Austria? Or how all he wanted was the industry in the Rhineland? Heck, I seem to remember Chamberlain giving the peace in our time speech after Germany annexed the Sudetenland. Apparently Germany didn't get the memo as they were still demanding territory afterwards.
I also can't help but find you to be a bit of a scumbag considering you just excused the German invasion of Poland because "Germany only wanted Danzig." Really? Huh, so is that why they dressed their soldiers up as Polish soldiers and fabricated a military incident to justify a war with them? Because, once again, that's what a warmonger does, not someone that should be trusted.
Probably because Britain didn't have the resources to fight the USSR? Just like Britain and France were extremely unwilling to go to war with Germany in the first place and instead adopted the policy of appeasement, they were extremely unwilling to go to war with the USSR, especially since they were then already at war with Germany. That's like saying why didn't the United States intervene when France was attempting to take over Mexico during the American Civil War. Perhaps because they had bigger concerns. Or why did the United States focus their attention on Germany during World War 2 and not Japan, the nation that attacked them? Because, just like Britain and France, they felt that Hitler was the bigger threat to their national security.
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I'd say you're more wrong than right. First, we didn't supply everyone fighting. In WW1 we supplied the Germans a teeny bit in the beginning as the British blockade wasn't fully up yet and there are a lot of German Americans in the United States, but during WW2 we gave absolutely no support to the Axis powers.
Furthermore, the downfall of the US is only a downfall relative to the rest of the world. After World War 2 the only other developed area in the world was left completely devastated and several huge economic powers were now in shambles. Because of this and the boost in production from the US becoming the "Arsenal of Democracy" they rose to have about 40% of the total world GDP in 1945.
Of course the ruined nations wouldn't be ruined forever and, with some help from the US through the Marshall Plan, quickly got their economic infrastructure back in shape. Of course as their economies improved, the US' share of World GDP shrunk. It's a similar story for other nations like Japan and South Korea. Both nations were hurt by WW2 and both nations still had a ways to go in economic development after WW2. During the post war period, both nations saw huge exponential growth. Then there's the sleeping giant nations like China which have started developing too.
All the while the US economy has been growing at a steady pace though (http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/RealGDPperCapita.png). If I were to sum everything I just said up, I'd say it all has to do with the basic concept of the catch-up effect. Undeveloped and developing nations experience a lot more growth in GDP than developed nations as, well, developed nations can't develop much further, so the US was bound to lose its huge share of world GDP no matter what it did.
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Wow, normally I llke your videos, but this was just a hitpiece on neoliberalism, where you basically treated it like anarcho-capitalism. Good job at creating a scapegoat? A good chunk of your argument didn't even make historical sense. For instance, you claimed that it was Engels who brought "humanity before economics" and denounced Malthus, except Malthus' theory was already rejected by the economy community. Just look at Ricardo's writings on the matter if you don't believe me. I'm not even sure how you could claim it was "humanity over economics", as, if Malthus was right, most of us would have starved due to inefficient planning. Yay for humanity?
So today I learned wanting free trade, open immigration, a simpler tax code, the EITC, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and other such neoliberal policies are bad. Those are some of the core tenants of it after all.
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So we'll start with the basics first off. The Chairman of the Fed and the Board of Governors are all appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. This is because of the Banking Act of 1935 (http://www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/26). Then the Chairman must submit a monetary policy report to Congress twice a year as per legislation (http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/yellen20160210a.htm). Beyond that, the chairman holds quarterly meetings with both Congress and the media.
That not enough for you? Well what about how the Federal Reserve has to go to a government bureau to print federal reserve notes? This is taken directly from the Treasury's website: "Federal Reserve Banks obtain the notes from our Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP). It pays the BEP for the cost of producing the notes" (https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx). Well they can still ask for however much to be printed, right? Well, no. Here is another excerpt from the above source: "Congress has specified that a Federal Reserve Bank must hold collateral equal in value to the Federal Reserve notes that the Bank receives. This collateral is chiefly gold certificates and United States securities" so the FRB needs to have enough collateral to even ask for money to be printed. The site says it's because Congress wants to make sure they can disband the Fed whenever they want without taken a ton of liabilities, but I'm not going to give you one huge quote.
What about transparency then, you ask? They're still extremely secretive. Again, no. Not only do they have the published Congressional hearings and reports along with their meetings with the media, but they also publish all their financial records. For instance, here's their balance sheet (http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm), here's their annual report (http://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/annual-report/2015-contents.htm), and here's their financial statement (http://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/annual-report/2015-contents.htm). You'll notice that on the first couple pages it gives the Audited report from KPMG. Yeah, that's not unusual. Here's 2014's report where they were audited by Deloitte (http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/BSTcombinedfinstmt2014.pdf). Also here you can find the individual audited financial records of each regional Federal Reserve bank (http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_fedfinancials.htm). That still not enough for you, well don't worry about them colluding with accounting firms. As per SEC regulation, they have to follow GAAP, which means that they aren't allowed to use any other services of an accounting firm that's auditing them. They are then audited by the Office of the Inspector General (in the above link) and the Government Accountability Office (http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_audit.htm).
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You seem to misunderstand how stock works. A share of stock is a good like anything else. Specifically, it is a part ownership in a company. So once a company sells a share of stock, they aren't really affected by what happens to it, since they already got their money from selling it. It's similar to any other good in that. When Samsung sells a hone or Microsoft an operating system, they only make money off of the initial transaction. After that they don't really care much for what happens unless it could possibly affect their future transactions. Similarly, when a company sells stock, they don't care so much as to what the investors do with it as long as they don't cause the price of the stock to fall, as if that happens, the company will not be able to get as much money the next time they try to sell more stock in a public offering.
Basically, when investors buy and sell stock, they are doing it between each other. A company only buys its stock back during a buyback, which isn't terribly common.
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Remember, think of this like any other good. If you've ever taken a course in economics, you know that the price for all goods is governed by supply and demand. This means that the price of the UPS or other stock isn't arbitrarily set at that number, but it got it's value because that's the price that the stock reaches equilibrium (as many people are buying as are selling). If more people are selling than buying, the price falls, if more people are buying than selling, the price rises. So, if the price of the share you are selling is high, there should be someone willing to buy it at that price as they expect it to continue to grow. If not, the share will most likely fall a few cents in value and you'll sell it at that value. Someone will be willing to buy it around that price though, or else it wouldn't be that highly valued in the first place.
That being said, this is where stocks get confusing. The demand for the stock is usually decided by investor expectations. Investors usually have some sort of expectations for a company. During the winter season UPS should bring in so and so amount of revenue and have this many deliveries being made. Because of this, the seasons rarely effect the stock price. The only thing that really matters is if the company performed above or bellows the expectations of their performance. If they do better, more people are willing to buy it as it shows potential for growth, if it fails to meet said expectations, people are more likely to sell the stock. That's why investing isn't for the faint of heart, and 99% of economists tell people just to invest in index funds, which trying to match the growth of the entire economy instead of one single company.
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You are so very very wrong and I won’t let this kind of misinformation spread, so I’ll answer you point for point.
1.Yes, banks can only lend out what people put in, and yes this can “create” money. This is the essence of fractional reserve banking, and my main gripe with the video as it never addressed this.
Ex. Jim deposits $100 in the bank. The Fed mandates that the bank holds 10% of that ($10) in reserve. They then loan out the rest. Jill comes accepts the $90 loan and too deposits it in her own bank for later. That bank has no way of knowing that this money was already loaned out, so they do the same process of before, taking 10% ($9) and loaning out the rest, $81. So on an original deposit of $100 we have $19 sitting in reserves, and $171 being loaned out. Money was thus created.
For more information on fractional reserve banking, look here: https://www.frbatlanta.org/education/classroom-economist/fractional-reserve-banking/economists-perspective-transcript
2.Our government does not give private bankers the ability to print money. That was stopped in the early 1930’s. I think you’re talking about the Federal Reserve though, which makes this even more hilarious because they’re not private, and are heavily overseen by the government. Also they’re not even bankers. For example, the chairman of the Federal Reserve is personally appointed by the president of the US and approved by the Senate, the other members of the FOMC, those that make monetary policy decisions for the country, are appointed by the president. They then have to go in front of Congress at least once a year to be grilled on their monetary policy decisions. Finally their make-up is made of a majority of economists, not bankers (http://www.evergreengavekal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/fed-voter-background.png). This also covers the topic pretty well (http://famguardian.org/Subjects/MoneyBanking/FederalReserve/FRconspire/private.htm).
3.Your third point is just ignorant fearmongering. Banks want us to succeed, not screw us over. Why would they? If we succeed, they make more money. To prove my point, let’s look at the financial statements of a successful company like Microsoft. Last year they reported holding debt equal to about $11 billion (https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar15/index.html#balance-sheets). Now I wonder who gave them that money. Here’s also a list of hundreds of banks that have failed since the Great Recession (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_United_States_(2008%E2%80%93present)). Yeah, turns out they took just as big of a hit as we did, if not more so.
4.You’re fourth point is more blatant fearmongering and calls for revolution, without giving one specific way that the evil bankers control us all that I haven’t already gone over, so skip!
5.Ha, what? Have you even looked at our economic data recently? They match the stock market. Just recently the BLS released their new jobs report, where the data pointed to better than expected job growth (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/white-house-claims-credit-for-better-than-expected-job-growth/article/2613852). Wages have actually been growing really well in real terms in the recent two years (http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/06/news/economy/best-wage-growth-in-years/index.html). And that unemployment data? You know there are six different measures of unemployment right? What you’re referring to is the U6 unemployment rate, which includes underemployed workers, or those working less than 40 hours a week that wish to work more, and discouraged workers, or those that have been out of work for a long time, and that number is sitting at a little above 9%, and has been on the decline for a while now (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm). That link also gives the U3 unemployment rate, the one you normally see, which is at 4.8%. That’s considered to be at full employment for an economy.
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On the very basic level he has the right idea. Our tax system is too complicated and should be simplified. Beyond that everything he says he stupid though. A flat tax would in no way pay for even half the expenditures of the government, meaning many things like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP (food stamps), funding for roads, funding for research, educational subsidies would all have to go. And you might hate programs like Social Security, but I can tell you that many poor families require Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC to meet even their most basic needs.
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PKrunner Wow, you can tell from one comment that I would avoid a draft? You must be a mind reader! Actually I wouldn't avoid it and I would fight for my country if I was called up, but that doesn't mean I have to approve of blind nationalism like you want. Let's remember the causes of World War 1 and World War 2, okay? Blind nationalism. So sure, you can make sweeping generalizations about an entire generation of people and call us all wimps or whatever for not having another World War, the only conflict that would require a draft to test your theory, but a World War would also lead to the deaths of just about everyone, so.....
Oh, and you apparently didn't learn your history because during WW2 the US was EXTREMELY isolationist, even more so than we are now. I mean even after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, US citizens still didn't feel like going to war with Germany is they felt it was Europe's war and not their own. It was only due to the declaration of war by Germany that we were even involved there (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germany-declares-war-on-the-united-states). I guess we'll just ignore that though as it doesn't suit your narrative.
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William Braganza Hanna I gave you two different sources saying the state did, including the name of the bill and an account by the Department of Transportation. I also gave you the fund the money is in. Heck, here's their balance sheet (https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/51300-2016-03-HighwayTrustFund.pdf). Yet somehow you're right without providing any sources?
Nazi Germany, a fascist country, was very protectionist during the Great Depression and extremely nationalistic. Usually when we have the leader of a country telling his supporters that they are a superior race than people from the countries around them, blame everything on another group (the Jews), and demand lost territory to the point of declaring war (http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=162), we label them as nationalistic. Let's look at socialist countries like Vietnam and China, shall we? Both countries are participating in the global market. Vietnam is a part of the TPP, a free trade agreement and very much something a protectionist country wouldn't join, and we have yet to see a war from them to reclaim lost territory.
Now onto made up terms. There's no such thing as fascist economics. Hitler, a fascist, and Mussolini, also a fascist, practiced Keynesian economics (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/08/lew-rockwell/hitler-was-a-keynesian/). Its evident by them increasing government spending during the depression through building a highway network of their own, increasing their military, and other general public works policies. That's a uniquely Keynesian ideology. Do you know what other countries started practicing Keynesianism at the time? Britain, the United States, France, and just about every other developed country. It was just that Germany was the first country to adopt it, and they took it to a level that the other developed nations never did.
Also, where was my straw man? If there actually was one, then I'm sorry and that wasn't my intentions, but I'm pretty confident that I didn't make one.
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William Braganza Hanna Regulation and state ownership are two completely different things. Utility companies are regulated to keep their costs down due to their monopoly over an area, but they are not directly controlled by the government. Also, regulation has been with us since, oh, our inception. Look up Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge. In 1785, two years after we gained our independence, the Charles River Bridge was given a charter by the state of Massachusetts to construct a bridge over, well, the Charles River. So if government regulation existed before the term fascism existed, and we've been a mixed economy since then (as well as literally ever other nation on Earth), are we still fascist?
Anyway, besides having their companies be forced to provide annual financial statements to get rid of asymmetric information, NYSE isn't regulated. Do you know why that regulation exists? Well, you see. There was this little company called Enron. They used to be very regulated by the government until they pleaded with them to be set free, and the government complied. Then there stock price shot up magnificently and they were voted the most innovative company in 2000. Great, right? Well then they went bankrupt without warning and everyone lost money. It turns out they were misrepresenting their financial records by using all but falsified statements. The accounting firm that audited them was also in financial trouble and was given some side payments and 'special services' to keep them afloat, so they made sure everything was reported to be squeaky clean. And that's how we got the Sarbanes–Oxley Act and the accompanying regulation. Turns out private enterprises aren't always the most trustworthy people.
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SgtLion I really don't give a crap if you're advocating for communism or not, but I do give a shit that your plan would fail horribly. Communal farms (and anything really) don't work because of the Tragedy of the Commons. Basically, as there's no incentive to do otherwise, people will over-farm, graze, hunt, fish, etc the land until it becomes useless as it's in their individual self interest. That's why farmland was privatized in the first place, it ended up being horribly inefficient after feudal times. Private property exists not to keep the rich in power or whatever, but because it's been found to be extremely beneficial to our economy.
There was actually a few tribes of Native American fur traders that were amazing at what they did because, unlike their fellow Natives Americans, they actually had a rudimentary system of private property set up. This stopped things like over-farming and over-hunting. Here's a good article on the subject:https://fee.org/articles/native-americans-loved-private-property/
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I'd have to disagree with you there. Banks do lend money you deposit to generate profits. That is the whole idea of fractional reserve banking. Here is an economist even talking about it here (https://www.frbatlanta.org/education/classroom-economist/fractional-reserve-banking/economists-perspective-transcript). As the article mentions, repeatedly lending money that's deposited does end up creating money on its own as a derivative of sorts of the money already deposited.
As for why we have inflation, that is far from the only reason, if it is a reason at all (I'm not an expert on the issue, so I can't say the role interest play here). Inflation is also caused by the velocity of money, or the speed at which it changes hands, policies by the Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking as it makes money more liquid, etc. The velocity of money specifically is the reason that so much Quantitative Easing had little effect on inflation. While we printed a lot of money, effectively increasing the money supply, dollars overall weren't changing hands nearly as fast as they were, making them more illiquid and lowering inflation.
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+Joe You don't even know what a war is, do you? Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria aren't wars as we aren't fighting any government or officially recognized political entity. In Iraq and Afghanistan we are helping both governments maintain stability, and in Syria we are supporting a conflict separate from the civil war going on. Using your logic, are we also at war in the Philippines for supporting Filipino troops against terrorists in their southern islands? There's a reason there is a distinction between a war and a conflict and it's not an arbitrary one.
Also, while the Patriot Act has expanded the president's power, it does not give them the power to declare war. As stated by the Constitution Article 1 Section 8 says: The Congress shall have Power To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water," That is a power given to Congress, not the president, and all declarations of war must go through said Congress.
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I know you were talking about millennials, but I'm saying your statement was stupid as the baby boomers still run the government. We aren't at war now; we weren't for most of the 1990's, we weren't at were for all of the 1980's, and we weren't at war for half the 1970's,, and most of the 1950's. For causing perpetual war, we have a lot of off time.
So let's go over some wars going on today and see if we were the cause. Syrian civil war. No, people just got pissed at their government. Somali Civil War. Don't see how that had anything to do with us. Darfur War. Another African conflict the US has no part in. Yeah, don't see how your point has any grounds to stand on. Are we also the cause of the political suppression of the Tibetans and natives of Hong Kong by China? Why not just blame the US for Pearl Harbor while you're at it, because that makes sense.
Your point on definitions might work if the definition of a war has changed in recent years. It hasn't. The definition has remained static for hundreds of years. So if I commit an act that doesn't fit the definition of murder, it isn't murder. Big shock, I know.
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You're completely right! Well, they also want a portion of dividend payments if the company pays them, but mostly they just plan on selling it later. Think about it like an investment. Instead of holding my money in a bank, where I can expect next to no interest on it, I can instead put it in stock in a stock market, where, as our economy tends to grow by around 2% a year, the stock prices also tend to grow, and at a higher rate than I could get at a bank. This makes it a worthwhile investment for my money, especially if I am extremely rich and hold more money than can be insured by a bank through the FDIC.
In other words, think of it like gold, since gold is also just bought to be sold later on (mostly).
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*****
Sorry, I didn't realize that economists were all politicians who worked in the government. And here I thought they held many jobs like working for banks, the Federal Reserve, private businesses, regulatory agencies, consulting firms, and even professorships at colleges. Shows what I know.
Let's look at some basic facts though, shall we? This is a graph on the income per capita for countries during the Great Depression (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Graph_charting_income_per_capita_throughout_the_Great_Depression.svg). As you'll see, the income per capita of almost every nation increased as soon as they left the gold standard, especially the United States. Furthermore, here are two professors who criticize the system here and blame it for causing the Great Depression (http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic467999.files/October%2022%20and%2027%20-%20Trade%20Money%20and%20Finance/Eichengreen.pdf). Last I checked neither were government employees. Here is another academic paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on a similar topic except only in relation to France (http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350). Still not government employed of course. Here is famous free-market economist Milton Friedman criticizing the system here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc). Of course he also wasn't employed by the government.
Finally, here is an IGM poll of 40 economics professors from prestigious universities all across the control including Yale, MIT, and Chicago, which is the number one university for such a major (http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard). When the professors were asked if replacing our current system with a gold standard would benefit the average American, 100% of them said no, with over half of them disagreeing strongly with the claim. Once again, none of the 40 professors were primarily employed by the government. So what was this about our fiat monetary system only being in place because it benefits the government?
As for your other claims, well a claim without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. In other words, first you have to prove our currency is based on oil or that our money is worthless. Good luck with that considering next to no economist believes either claim.
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***** It's not a straw man when that's the only argument you provided. When I said fiat money is considered better by economists than the gold standard, your refutation was government interests. Okay, then you're implying that said economists are part of the government to be affected by their interests.
Milton definitely was complaining about the gold standard. The title of the video is even called "Milton Friedman on the Gold Standard." If that's not enough for you, here's a quote from the video, "Worse still, America's depression would become worldwide because what lies behind these doors". Of course the video then shows a bunch of gold. Huh, I wonder what he was trying to say there.
You also ignored all my other evidence proving your part wrong. Did you just not have an argument against them? That's usually when one is supposed to find their claim indefensible.
Keynesianism? What does that have to do with anything? It died in the 70's and has been subsequently followed by new schools of economics, like Monetarism, the Chicago school, Austrian economics, Smith-ian economics and Neo-Keynesian economics. These have all been meshed together to form neoclassical, or mainstream economics. Even if it was still the main ideology today, you have yet to show how Keynesianism somehow means the gold standard was the true monetary system after all. That's like me saying your argument is stupid because you're just a gold bug. I didn't actually address your claim.
Finally, even though I already know what it is, I decided to search the Petrodollar anyway. Do you know what I found? A bunch of conspiracy sites with horrible economics and no reputable sources. Far from trustworthy outlets themselves. Hell, one was called EconomicCollapseBlog. Yeah, that sounds like a good source of information with no agenda of their own.
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***** Actually a made several points with the private colleges only being one of the minor ones. So because the government funds the research for the physics department of NYU in their search for a habitable planet or whatever, that means that everyone working in the economics department must have views that completely agree with the government? That's laughable at best. FYI: NYU has one of the biggest Austrian economic programs in the country, which is very much anti-government.
Workers' wages have not decreased over time. At worst they remained stagnant, and data seems to point that they have actually increased, if only by a small margin. For instance in 2015 average real wages went up by about 2% (https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/AWI.html). The numbers for the chart show differently, but that's because they haven't been adjusted to inflation. Once you adjust them, you'll get that 2% figure. Back to your main argument though, the percentage increase in sales and profits increase to a similar extent for both small businesses and huge corporations. After all, no matter what their customer bases are, the bases will increase their demand by the same extent. Do you know how I know this? Because that's what inflation is.
Inflation isn't some evil concept. It's just the increased liquidity of money pushing the equilibrium price of a good above its current price, causing the store to increase the price of the good. In other words, this (http://wizznotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/image010.jpg)
Depends on what you mean by politically independent. Obviously every economist has a political ideology as they all have economic measures they prefer over others. If one of them likes the EITC, they'd be considered liberal. If they like lowering corporate taxes, they'd be considered conservative. FYI: Most economists support both measures, but that's getting off topic.
What about Daron Acemoglu though? He was the professor from MIT in the IGM poll. As far as I can tell he's a purely academic economist with little influence from the government besides his research grants, which are unrelated to his view on the gold standard.
Alberto Alesina also showed up on the poll and is the professor from Harvard. He too is mostly an academic economist and I can already name one view he has that the government doesn't support: he finds austerity measures to be good. That goes strictly against the Federal Reserve's stance on the issue, as they have criticized the ECB for their austerity measures during the Eurozone Debt Crisis (http://www.cnbc.com/id/44441678).
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***** Yes, I obviously disagree on both accounts. Inflation hurts savers because, as you would expect, the value of the money being saved decreases. So any money the company doesn't spend is also losing its money. Don't forget that big businesses are controlled by many people with a lot of money too. As this money is also being saved, high inflation just eats through that. Also, as I already stated, as inflation works in percentages, it effects everyone equally. A rich person just like a poor person will suffer the same percentage loss of the money they have saved up, and customers for small businesses and big businesses alike benefit from the same increase in demand as money was made equally more liquid for the both sets of customers.
You know what? I'm done here. This is just getting tedious with me just repeating the same points over and over. Why do I constantly have to prove myself to you when you can't even do the same? You have not made one specific claim, much less give any evidence for your claim.
You make a claim like, I don't know, the petrodollar is a thing, and then I provide multiple sources, many of them primary data, showing that it's not, even though you never once provided a source showing it does exist, much less a verifiable one. And then your next message will still say the petrodollar is a thing without providing one reason for why I'm wrong. It's complete bull crap and you're just acting irrational and stubborn.
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***** Actually your goal was to prove that the gold standard is more stable, reliable, or beneficial in some other capacity than a fiat based monetary system. That's how this whole argument started after all. Inflation was only a minor sub argument.
As for inflation though, you fail to see that the rich tend to save a higher portion of their income than the poor. This is known as the propensity to save. Ironically I'm going to use the same source you did to cite that (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginal-propensity-save.asp). Because of this, the upper class tend to be more savers than the middle and lower class, meaning they are more affected negatively by inflation than the poor and middle class too. So, while the business as an entity will do better from small amounts of predicted inflation, the financial stakeholders will be negatively affected. Because of this, it is in the interests of the owners to not seek such a high inflation. Keep in mind also that the inflation has to be both small and predicted for a business to see profit. Anything else and the stability of the currency will come into questions, people will panic, and, well, something similar to the 1929 stock market crash might occur.
Also, Investopedia's definition of a Petrodollar is very different from the definition you or I have used. You'll notice that if you read the article. Especially since they are only crediting the oil deal with Saudi Arabia with elevating the USD to global reserve currency status, which, technically, isn't even true as the USD was already the global reserve currency under Bretton Woods (http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ355/choi/bre.htm) and (http://www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/28). Take this quote from the Federal Reserve for instance: "Countries settled international balances in dollars, and US dollars were convertible to gold at a fixed exchange rate of $35 an ounce. " Sounds like the USD was already the global reserve currency. Even then though, the article never once mentions that the USD gets its actual value from the trading of oil by OPEC. Heck, the article itself mentions that today 87% of foreign exchange trades involve the dollars and uses a similar source I did, once again showing how far beyond the oil market the dollar reaches.
Congrats though. You were able to successfully incorporate an economic theory, that being that inflation incentivizes people to spend, and linked to a credible source.
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Tom Sanders Your argument doesn't help your case. The ships built by the British and French were private ventures...okay? So what? You know what was also a private venture? Irish Americans supporting revolutionary movements in Ireland. You can't get all pissy about one without the other. That was my sole point.
Your comment about rifles has nothing to do with anything either so I'll just skip it.
Because no amendment was proposed? Like I said, the South never even bothered to try. If you've ever read the US constitution then you'd know that there are two paths to create an amendment, so don't act like what I'm talking about is impossible. In fact, slavery is illegal because of the 13th amendment, passed during the Civil War.
Because the United States still considered it to be their territory? Obviously the United States couldn't move all its troops out within a single day and, as I said before, negotiations were going on to try and settle the secession issue, so the US didn't want to give up any political ground, especially if that meant giving up military supplies to the South. You don't think they would have been able to take all their military equipment with them after all, do you?
What do you know, a private venture that supposedly supports the IRA, even though they themselves don't claim to. While I don't care if they do or don't as that's not the point, I have to ask what this has to do with the USA. The USA has condemned them and our government has called them a front for the IRA. Beyond that there's very little the US can do. You really seem to hold a double standard when it comes to private ventures. It's okay for the British to have private ventures to subvert other governments, but it's wrong for the Americans? How about you just say its wrong for both sides and stop acting like you have some moral high ground.
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Tom Sanders The North was open to options. I guess you completely ignored the part that the North didn't start the war, the South did. South Carolina seceded on December 20th, 1860 (http://www.ushistory.org/us/32e.asp), Fort Sumter didn't happen until April 12th, 1861 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Sumter). That gave the Union four months to raise an army to take back the South, which, as my first source shows, was much weaker before For Sumter as Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina had yet to secede. Keep in mind that the first major battle of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run, happened in July that same year, three months after the battle of Fort Sumter, so the North could've invaded the South before Fort Sumter and yet they didn't. I wonder why. Oh, because they were negotiating with the seceding states to keep them within the union. In other words, they were open to options.
Sumter was also not an excuse for war and its deplorable that you'd even say such a thing. Are you saying we shouldn't treat people firing on our troops and taking them prisoner as an act of war, because 99.99% of countries would. With that logic the British were just using the battle of Lexington and Concord as an excuse for war with the Thirteen Colonies. I mean, who cares if we were firing on our troops? We were just having some good fun, right?
Or, you know, they didn't like their troops being fired upon by troops from a nation they didn't recognize....like Britain. They also didn't want to subvert the freedoms of the people within the states. You seem to forget, once again, that a majority of the people in the slave states couldn't vote. For instance, at the time only 1 in 5 people in South Carolina were white. Of those half were women and hadn't yet received the right to vote. Want don't they get a say in the affairs of the state before they are forced to go to war for a cause they didn't even get a say in?
I never said anything about arms. You're the one that brought up arms. They also have nothing to do with my anything we've discussed. You mentioned Americans supporting the IRA and how our government was horrible for it. I argued that the British didn't have the moral high ground on the issue as they built boats for the Confederacy. Whether the British supplied both sides with rifles does not matter and I don't care.
....This still has nothing to do with anything. Stick to the actual argument.
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+stardude692001 You're not even listening to what I'm saying anymore. Communism is a worse system than capitalism. That's obviously true. But more economists would be needed in a centrally planned society than a capitalist society. That's all I was trying to say.
As for your part about the bottleneck, no, that's not what I was saying at all. In fact, the bottleneck to produce goods is land, labor, and capital. You know, the three factors of production. A lot of our GDP growth is attributed to our population growth, the rest capital usually.
I also don't think loaning money solves the problem at all. My argument was that fractional reserve banking isn't a bad thing, thereby I was also arguing that loans aren't a bad thing and have numerous benefits. That doesn't mean they'll solve all the world's problems though.
You're second to last paragraph makes me question if you know what fractional reserve banking is. The only revenue a bank is through the interest they make on their loans. The call it fractional reserve because when someone makes a deposit in a bank, the bank only must keep a certain amount of it in their reserve. The rest they can loan out at an interest for profit. That’s all fractional reserve banking is. Your reserve is then guaranteed by the FDIC and through liquidity loans given by the Federal Reserve to banks if they run low on reserves.
Finally, while your NPR podcast was right, that wasn’t the only reason the Fed keeps a low inflation target. Low inflation also gives an incentive for consumers instead of savers, helping the economy in the short term, and giving them another anti-economic downturn mechanism. This Economist talks more about it here (http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/09/economist-explains-7)
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+stardude692001 So I'm going to skip over the communism part because I feel like we're going to go around in circles and it really doesn't have anything to do with the financial sector.
I was pressed for time in my explanation of fractional reserve banking, but now I can show you how it "creates" money and why people think it's bad. So back to the previous scenario. Guy A earned $100 and puts it into his bank account. The Federal Reserve then tell the bank that they are required to hold 10% of his money in reserve in case he or someone else wants to withdraw their money. That's why banks always have cash for people to withdraw from. Now the bank is still able to loan out 90% of the original deposit, so they give a loan of $90 to Guy B. He plans on using the money at the end of the month though, so he takes the $90 that was given to him as a loan and deposits it into his own bank. That bank then does the same procedure as the first. They take 10% ($9) off of the deposit to hold as reserve and then loan out the remaining 90% ($81). So there is a total of $171 ($90+$81) being loaned out on a deposit worth only $100. That's why people say money is created. You can also see that they call this fractional reserve banking because the bank is required to a hold a fraction of all deposits as reserves. For more information, look here (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebanking.asp). I hope my explanation was good enough though.
There's an equation to go along with it to find out exactly how much money is being created, but I forgot it. Eh, it's been a while since I learned about it.
Huh, if we got rid of the financial sector? That's a new one. Can't say I've heard that before. Now once again I'm no expert, but I'll try to answer it to the best of my abilities.
First let me address your point about making money. On a macro level rarely do economists care about making more money. Well there is an exception to that, but it would involve more of what you consider economics word salad, so I’ll just skip it. What economists really care about is our GDP, which is the value of all goods produced in this country. Basically, our productivity. In the long term, this only changes due to investment and changes in technology as discussed here (https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2015/june/what-drives-long-run-economic-growth).
This brings us to the financial sector. True, they don’t produce crap, but they do invest in businesses. Many startups raise their funding through their initial public offerings (selling their stock for the first time) and even the biggest companies like Walmart and Microsoft still regularly sell their stock on the stock market to raise capital. This allows them to expand their operations, invest in more machines, and become more automatized, greatly increasing their productivity. As an example, look at the manufacturing sector (https://rejblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/mfg1.jpg). Their output is rising even while those hired are falling. While sad, it’s what you wanted, a higher productivity.
Thinking about it you might have just been talking about banks… Whoops. Usually when people mention the financial sector they are talking about the stock market. Same principle still applies though. Loans help people get educated, businesses make investments, etc.
Now if we were to throw these investors in some goods making sector and told them to get a job, well what would happen? The manufacturing and related sectors are already highly competitive the way they are (look back at the decreasing employment), so you wouldn’t be making the country any more productive, just adding wood to the fire that is the growing discontent of the workers in the manufacturing sector.
It should also be noted that the financial sector is added to GDP, which is how economists measure productivity. GDP is consumption + investment + government spending + net exports, so they are considered to be a part of investment for the most part with some of their activities probably falling under consumption. Finally, the three factors of production are once again land, labor, and capital. The financial sector provides one of these (capital)
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Your logic makes no sense. The business cycle has always existed since before fractional reserve banking was a thing, so you tying to it isn't sound logic. The business cycle is also caused by a shock to the economy causing a period of euphoria, and then a bursting of the forming bubble. For instance, the saving and loans crisis and the tech bubble led to banks trying to find safer investments, so many turned to the housing sector as housing prices were mostly stable. This thought of stability led to euphoria, which led to a bubble, which burst once people realized how overleveraged the investment firms were. This had absolutely nothing to do with fractional reserve banking, and with the formation of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, fractional reserve banking hasn't been related to any economic downturn since the Great Depression.
I'm also not sure how you can consider this fraud when no individual bank is creating money. It is only the repeated lending and depositing of money that leads to its creation. Joe deposits $100 in a bank. The bank takes 10% as required reserves by the Fed. They then loan out the extra $90. What fraud was committed? It's not like they loaned out more money than they had with them,, and it's not like the depositor didn't know what the bank was going to do with the money. As economists always say "There's no such thing as a free lunch".
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Joseph Stephens Good job completely ignoring my argument! Libya was not an intervention led by the US, but by Britain and France. We didn't even join it until they asked for our help. If it was really about keeping the petrodollar, we would've led it.
Sadam Hussein was a brutal dictator and our intelligence said that he had WMD's. Is it really a shock that we decided to stop a brutal dictator from using these WMD's, especially when he already tried before to invade other countries (Kuwait).By the way, we did find WMD's in the form of chemical weapons, so..... (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html) and (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/03/world/middleeast/chemical-weapons-iraq-pentagon-secrets.html) and (http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/us/iraq-chemical-weapons/index.html). Three sources all saying chemical weapons, a form of WMD's, were found in Iraq. Well there goes your whole conspiracy there then.
As for Syria, is it really that strange that we want to oust an ally of Russia? Big surprise! We still don't get along with the people we were just pointing nukes at two decades ago.
Finally, I guess you didn't hear that Iran's the one with the aggressive posture, not the US (http://navaltoday.com/2016/09/07/iranian-boats-harass-us-navy-in-the-persian-gulf-again/) and (http://abcnews.go.com/International/missile-fired-us-navy-ship-off-yemen/story?id=42758399). But no, somehow the US is the aggressor in Iranian boats buzzing US ships and Iranian supplied missiles being fired at them. I'm not saying that we should go to war with that. That's stupid. But you somehow blaming these provocations on the US is equally so.
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Then I don't know what you want from me. I just listed six publications generally considered to be reputable that have said that same thing, including one publication from the UK, which isn't the US obviously. As I just found one from the BBC, that makes two publications from the UK. I would look for more foreign publication, but I don't speak anything but English, so I don't know what you expect me to do there.
This information was supplied by terrorists? Actually it was information coming directly from the Pentagon, who got it from American soldiers during the initial invasion, but whatever. Even if that were true, which once again is a big if, that still doesn't make the fact that Iraq had chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, in Iraq. So my claim holds true and yours falls apart. Just to make things plain the claim of yours I'm referencing is this, "wmds were a lie it's literally been leaked what the hell are you on about". Oh, and good job providing a source on that if it's been literally leaked.
And now you'll respond with "But the US gave them the chemical weapons!" First, if you read any of the articles I mentioned, you'd know that's not true. Those chemical weapons were home grown in the 70's and 80's. I know, I'm getting my information from the BBC, which is pro-American. I mean they're currently attacking Trump, but they're somehow pro-American. Because that makes sense. Second, once again, even if that were true, I don't give a rat's ass. My claim still holds true, yours still holds false. Deal with it and come up with stop sounding like such a whiner.
Oh, and if you can't provide even a single source to anything you claim after this, I see no point in continuing this as you obviously don't care about what the facts say. I mean you couldn't even provide me websites that you consider to be unbiased.
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I can answer this. As of right now the government has taken steps to reduce their yearly deficit, slowing the growth of the debt. That being said, as our debt stands right now (something like 100% of GDP, though the estimates vary), it isn't as huge of a problem as you may believe, and definitely not anywhere close to crisis level. This is mainly due to the fact that investors still have the upmost confidence in US Treasury bonds, what makes up our debt, as it's nearly impossible for a country that prints its own currency to default on its loans as it can, well, print its own currency. Of course this has problems of its own, but it does make our debt issue a lot better. That along with the fact that the government itself still owns most of our debt means its not a major issue.
As a real life example of it not being an issue. Look at Japan, which has debt 250%% over their GDP and they're still operating fine. They are also in a similar situation where the government owns most of their debt.
The US economy is also on the up and up. Unemployment is at its lowest point in a while, 4.5%, which is considered full employment by economic standards (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000). The Fed has begun to slowly increase interest rates again (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/business/economy/fed-interest-rates-yellen.html?_r=0), and both GDP and inflation are expected to grow (https://www.thebalance.com/us-economic-outlook-3305669), both indicators of increased economic activity. By most accounts, the effects of the Financial Crisis are starting to dissipate.
PS: If you were wondering, the country that now owns the most US debt is Japan, not China (https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-overtakes-china-as-largest-u-s-bondholder-1429129765)
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OnlyMyPOV Your argument sucks. All you did was make vague (and incorrect) notions about Keynesian economics, without addressing what is even wrong with it in the first place. This is the similar argument I can expect from a Marxist when they just attribute all the evils of the world to capitalism and claim that their ideology is somehow superior because of it. Basically you're strawmaning Keynesian economics. You want to know how I know this? Because you just compared Keynesian economics to the finances of a company and running a business, something that would only be covered in microeconomics, while Keynesian economics is a macroeconomic theory. It talks about aggregate supply and demand for the whole economy and what the government should do during recessions, not how to reliably run a company. So saying you can somehow use it to make personal finance decisions is laughably off point and ignorant.
You are right in saying that Neo-Keynesian theory vs. Austrian theory (and all other schools of thought) is important to know and should be taught in universities.....good thing it is, right? It's like you've never heard that history of economic thought is a subject taught in nearly all universities. Universities also usually prescribe to a certain school of economics too. For instance, if you want to learn about Austrian economics, go to George Mason University or NYU, while the University of California Berkley, Yale, and Princeton, all teach more towards a Keynesian viewpoint. So I fail to see how your argument holds any ground whatsoever.
FYI: While this isn't an argument, it should be noted that your lack of grammar alone hurts your credibility.
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Jules, Podcasts. I forgot about those! Econtalk is a great podcast with a very free market slant. I'm pretty sure the host is also a big fan of Mises, so that should be right up your alley. Economics Detective Radio is another good one as that host is also more Austrian-leaning and has brought on a few Austrian-leaning guests. MacroMusings is also great and, to me anyway, is pretty unbiased. They also did an episode about he economics in both Star Wars and Star Trek which was funny. Freakonomics is a good introductory podcast that focuses on economics and empirical research in general. As their topics change, they are pretty slant-less. Economist Radio is also great for getting the latest economic news, but fair warning, they don't exactly likely Trump. Otherwise they are good at keeping their biases in check though. And then of course the lectures I mentioned that are on YouTube. The London School of Economics, one of the best schools for economics in the world, also has some public lectures, but personally I find them hit or miss (http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/Home.aspx)
Finally (I swear!) While I know you probably won't listen to much of the anti-Austrian/pro-Keynesian stuff, it's always a good idea to listen to their arguments every once in a while to make sure you stay informed and can accurately debate them. Otherwise you'll end up demonizing the other side just like you see both political parties doing in the US.
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OnlyMYPOV, the only thing I said that wasn't a response to someone else was that videos like this do not equate to a university education as they don't teach you the fundamental theories or math behind the theories. For instance, can you take the derivative of a revenue equation to get the marginal revenue of a company? You'd learn that in a calculus or math econ class in a university, and that has absolutely nothing to do with Keynesian economics.
Also, definition of a troll: to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll). Nothing I have posted here has been inflammatory or offensive. If you don't believe me than report me for it and see what happens as both are against Youtube's terms of service.
Lastly, I in no way tried to "indoctrinate" him into my beliefs. I gave him educational tools and told them where they'd most likely fall on the spectrum. I even pointed him to more right wing and free market sources like Econtalk, and the Cato Institute which definitely don't espouse to Keynesian principles. Cato's own site even says they support libertarian ideals, including limited government, free market capitalism, etc. Otherwise, if you don't think someone like Bernanke shouldn't be listened to on his field of expertise, which has little to do with his economic school of thought, then I honestly couldn't care less what you think. You're obviously too entrenched in your own beliefs to even talk to someone on the other side about something unrelated to the beliefs you two care about. For instance, in many of Bernanke's speeches, he himself criticized the policy of the Federal Reserve during the Great Depression as worsening it (https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm). Are you saying you disagree with his assessment? Because then your rejecting a claim many Austrian economists themselves make. If you don't reject his assessment, then why is it such a bad idea to listen to him on that one subject? Get your head out of your ass.
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OnlyMyPOV, Maybe you should point to a specific part of this video where this guy destroys Keynesian economics then, because I didn't see it. I mean he tried to talk about how central banks somehow collude with governments to set the interest rate at a near zero level so the government can get "free" debt, but that's not how debt works. Governments fund their debt through the selling of treasury bonds. So, in the US for instance, the government will make up its deficit by selling bonds from the treasury to whoever is willing to buy them. Did you make note of that? People have to be willing to buy them. If people expect a higher interest rate, they won't accept a Treasury bonds at 0%, because they can get better returns on their risk (coefficient of variation in finance) (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/coefficientofvariation.asp) elsewhere. This means no one buys the bonds, the government doesn't make it's required funds, and shit hits the fan, so the government would be forced to raise the interest offered on these bonds to 2% (or whatever percent brings enough buyers to purchase the amount of bonds they want to sell) just like any other goods market. If Joe Schmoe walks into a Pizza shop and offers to buy a pizza for $1, he's obviously not going to get it as the shop expects a payment of at least $5. The same holds true for bonds. This, once again, isn't even Keynesian theory (he never mentioned this in any of his books) but a theory that's been around for over a hundred years in economics. I mean why the heck would I want to buy a treasury bond at 0% interest if I can get a similarly risky bond for 4% elsewhere?
A good source on this topic would be here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Hummelinterestrates.html. This article is from the same people that make econtalk and are therefore very libertarian in their views. Here they discuss how the Fed doesn't have nearly as much control over interest rates as one would believe. Here's a quote for those unwilling to read: "Central banks remain important enough players in the loan market that they can push short-term rates up or down a little. But in the final analysis, the market, not central banks, determines real interest rates."
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That is just plain wrong. Just look at the Great Depression, the largest economic downturn in world history. That was started by an economic contraction, yes, but not one started by the banks. Back in the 1920's the developed world still followed the gold standard, so banks had absolutely no control over the value of currency, nor how much was flowing through the economy. That was set by the amount of gold stock the government owned. In many European countries like Britain and Germany, their gold stock was inadequate for the volume of currency they used, so they were forced to burn some of it off (deflation). Basic economics states that deflation leads to less consumer demand as people are encouraged to save as the value of the currency increases. The US on the other hand was actually expanding its monetary base as both the US and France were the biggest buyers of gold. So why was the US affected? It doesn't make sense given what you said. Sources for my claims: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16350 and http://www.nber.org/papers/w6060
NBER is also probably the most acclaimed place for academic economic research by the way.
Simply put, foreign demand for US goods plummeted, meaning the stock market valuation of companies plummeted, and many went out of business. This caused the stock market to crash, which caused people to go broke overnight. Banks who previously were investing in the stock market faced similar problems, and, depositors, knowing that the banks didn't have everyone's money on hand, flocked to the banks to be the first to withdraw their money, causing a bank run. So you're just plain wrong. Banks neither caused the deflation (and it was impossible for them to have), nor did a country have to experience deflation to enter a depression.
FYI: Regulation has since been put in place to prevent such events. Now we don't follow the gold standard, commercial banks are not allowed to invest in the stock market (though they can be extremely safe bonds like US Treasury bonds), and the FDIC all but prevents any future bank runs. Even during the Great Recession there wasn't a bank run. Oh, and the US was also in a period of inflation leading up to the 2008 Recession.
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This comment is really, really ignorant.
First: The Western Allies gave a huge shit about Europe, to the point that, even though the US entered the war due to a Japanese attack, they focused most of their resources fighting in Europe (as part of the Europe First strategy). It was only the US Navy and some marine contingents that dealt with the Japanese for most of the war.
Second: The USSR (NOT JUST RUSSIA) only occupied half of Europe. Basically the countries between Germany and the USSR.
Four: Claiming the USSR and UK (UK especially) were winners is asinine. The USSR took by far the most casualties of the war, losing 30 million soldiers and civilians (compared to about half a million from the UK). Sure, they gained a lot of land, but they were still economically devastated from the war. The UK was in a similar boat. They were in the war the longest by far, and the war was taking its toll on their economy. The British government racked up massive debt to pay for the war and they had to make many concessions to the US to keep their war effort going. Most devastating, they had to give up the special trade privileges they gave their colonies, the first death knell to the British empire.
Fifth: The US didn't take over the USSR because they couldn't. The US developed the capabilities to build an atomic bomb, sure, but they only built two of them by 1945. Both were used against Japan. Production of them wasn't exactly fast, and they were extremely expensive to build. Not only that, but they had to be transported from the US to Europe. In other words, there were a lot of bottlenecks in the process.
Furthermore, the US government and public were feeling the harsh effects of the war (even the arsenal of democracy had its limits) and were looking for an end to conflict, not the start of a new one. This is only more true for the UK. Finally, by April 1945, the USSR had a much larger military presence in Europe compared to the Western Allies. A few atomic bombs wasn't going to stop the complete domination of the USSR in continental Europe. In fact the early plans of the Western Allies before NATO in the case of a Soviet invasion called for an evacuation of continental Europe because they knew they couldn't stop a Soviet offensive. Instead, they'd fortify the British Isles, something the USSR couldn't take easily, and use their atomic bombs on strategic locations, trying to beat the USSR in a war of attrition. Then the USSR developed its own atomic bomb......
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@αλήθεια-σ4κ Actually regulations are tighter (or were before Trump). Just look up Dodd-Frank. The issue with the Financial Crisis wasn't the commercial banks, which operated mostly as intended, but the investment banks and credit reporting agencies, which, as they were unregulated, did a lot of shady crap that set off the Financial Crisis.
As for bailouts, it's important to know what they were. For one, the bailouts were never free money. They were typically either a loan or an asset purchase by the government. This is because the banks generally were still financially well off, they just didn't have enough cash on hands to meet their needs. Like how if you put all your money in the stock market. Technically you'd be making money, but you can't pay any of your bills. This loans have already been paid back in full, and, with the selling of the previous bought assets, have netted the government a nifty 10% profit.
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I'd love to see a source for any of this because I know for a fact this isn't true. For one, the BEF never engaged the French military. Secondly, Petain did try and suggest France had no other choice to surrender, which is somewhat true, but it's also true the French leadership afterwards, including Petain, were more than willing to commit atrocities under the Nazi name even though they didn't have to. They did this due to anti-Semitism, not because they were forced to. As for the British and French navies, what you said ignored literally all context. The only advantage the UK had over Germany in 1940 was that Germany couldn't actually reach the UK since the UK had a far superior navy. With the surrender of France, the French navy, which was somewhat comparable to the Royal Navy, would've joined the Kreigsmarne, potentially giving Germany naval superiority, so a British fleet was set to stop this from happening. It's also important to note that the British gave the French several options, including sailing to into a British port, sailing to the French East Indies and continuing the fight (what the Polish navy did), and traveling to a neutral, third-party port to be decommissioned (particularly the US). Both options were rejected by the French Admiral.
Was what the Royal Navy did a good thing? Of course not, but it's far from the British just killing any Frenchman they see because they hated the French so much. Also Germany would later launch a failed attempt to seize the remants of the French navy later that year, so it's not like British fears weren't justified.
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I’ll break your comment down sentence by sentence to make things easier. First sentence: The US does not print money to fuel corruption in the outside world. Our monetary policy (determining how much money to print) is handled by the Federal Reserve for which their objectives are only to keep inflation and unemployment low. They don’t care, or really influence, the fiscal policy of the US government. Moreover, I’m going to take ‘Fueling corruption in the Middle East’ to mean military spending on actions in said area. Military spending is only a fraction of total US governmental spending, and not too far above the recommended amount for NATO countries (something like 4% of GDP when NATO recommends 2%). Finally, the money doesn’t find its way back through immigration? I have no idea what you’re talking about here. The dollar is used internationally, being used in over 90% of foreign exchange trades). Other nations like Guatemala even have the USD as their official currency. Immigration has next to no influence on the international supply and demand for USD, which is the only thing that matters in determining its value. Likewise, your second sentence is absolute gibberish. Other developed countries are hurt when the USD flows through them? Uh, you realize they all have their own currency, right? The EU uses the euro, the UK the pound-sterling, etc. Their domestic markets rely on these currencies, not the USD, and the only thing that would change if more USD was printed was that there valuation would rise compared to the USD, but that doesn’t effect the price of goods in the currency. If a barrel of bananas once cost 1 euro and 1 USD, but then increased to 1 euro and 2 USD, the European countries still only have to pay 1 euro. So your claim here doesn’t make sense.
Your fourth sentence actually makes some sense. Yes, printing money to pay off a country’s debt leads to inflation. Good thing the US doesn’t do that. I already went over the printing of money, so I shouldn’t need to cover it here, but its safe to say that the US doesn’t print money to pay off its debt. Your statement about the $20 trillion dollar coin is stupid as it completely ignores what government debt is. Government debt isn’t just a lumpsum, it’s the accumulation of bonds that a government’s Treasury has to pay. These bonds are due at different times. The US has to pay off some of these bonds next month, next year, two years from now, etc. These are also owned by varying entities. Other US governmental institutions own about a 3rd of this debt. Other nations around another 3rd. And the final third are private investors. In other words, this just doesn’t work.
Military turbulence? How, only a third of all US debt is to foreign governments, and the biggest holders of said debt are their greatest allies? Japan is the largest holder of US debt and also one of the US’ best Allies since World War 2. Their military also is only a defensive forced as laid out in their constitution. Finally, capital means an investable asset, like cash. People are a type of capital, but they aren’t capital itself. Money is not people. Money is a unit used to measure the wealth of objects in a consistent incremental unit. A candy bar is $1.50 while a slab of chicken is $6.00. Therefore a candy bar is ¼ a slab of chicken.
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@TheJacklikesvideos But let's go further into this, shall we? OP is claiming Black Rock is a monopoly because they A: Have a lot of assets and B: can dictate the terms of ESG. They also claim ESG is opaque and no one understands why Tesla has a worse score than an oil company.
1. Having a lot of assets is not a monopoly. A monopoly is owning an overwhelming majority of a market. This is why Apple isn't a monopoly. Despite being the biggest company in the world, every market they are in, like cell phones, there is still competition. You don't have to have an iPhone.
And this is important because the only reason a monopoly is bad is due to the lack of competition giving a company too much pricing power and therefore making markets not efficient. This is the reason monopolies are bad. Not because big company bad.
2. ESG is not a metric decided by Black Rock or any asset manager. In fact there are several different versions of ESG created by different third party entities, one of them being a non-profit. I fail to see how Black Rock integrating a third party service into their market intelligence is a monopoly.
3. Everyone ignores that ESG is way more than just the environment. The reason Tesla is rated lower than oil stocks like Exxon is by just how terriblyanaged Tesla has been. Between with the federal investigations into racism at several Tesla factories, their poor handling of the federal cases going on in court from a few homicides caused by their autonomous vehicles, and what is considered exploitative practices in the first place, Tesla isn't considered to be government well or socially conscious, the SG in ESG
Note: I think ESG is dumb and don't base my investing decisions on it, but I'd never reject more information when making an investment and I see nothing nefarious with it
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Yep, it was so obvious that the socialists were killed or interned in labor camps. Wait what? Oh Yeah, you see right after taking power Hitler initiating the Night of Long Knives, where every socialist in the party and government with any power were extrajudicially killed. Those that remained were among the first prisoners in Hitler's first concentration camp, Dachau. Maybe they should've told Hitler that he was a socialist. Beyond that, Hitler also dissolved all the labor unions except one, suppressed worker wages, brutally put down worker strikes like the February Strike, etc. Because being anti-worker is definitely the motto of socialists everywhere!
Ignoring all that though, he literally called socialism a 'Judeo-Bolshevik' conspiracy, and claimed that the USSR was being controlled by a puppet Jewish government, one of the reasons he hated the USSR so much. That doesn't sound very socialist of him.....
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@archstanton5311 Oh my god, do you spend all day solely listening to alt-right demagogues? Not a single thought from you so far has been your own, and that's sad.
Facts are on the side of the experts who spent their entire lives studying them. The doctorates of history, economics, psychology, who know what they're talking about and say you're full of shit. Facts are on the side of the data, which supports my point, and which I've already shown, not yours. Facts are on the side which opposes the idea of some grand Marxist, Jewish, Globalist conspiracy, which is the same conspiracy Hitler espoused in the 1930's and 1940's. I wouldn't be surprised to find that you have the same solution as him too.
Seriously, I can't wait for the ideology of the alt-right to burn in hell, and I have no problems calling it what it is, Nazism.
"You're just making a false equivalency!"
Except I'm not. Taken directly from Hitler's justification for a war with the USSR to the German Reichstag in 1941: "For more than two decades the Jewish Bolshevik regime in Moscow had tried to set fire not merely to Germany but to all of Europe ... The Jewish Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations and that is not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power ... Now the time has come to confront the plot of the Anglo-Saxon Jewish war-mongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik centre in Moscow!"
Just replace Bolshevik with Marxist, which was what Hitler was referring to anyway, and we get exactly what you were just claiming. So yeah, you're ideology is trash and anyone who practices it is scum.
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@dereka4816 Uh, sort of? Not really. Saying Japan brought the US into the war misses a lot of what actually happened.
1. The US and Germany were already edging EXTREMELY close to war before December 1941. Not only was the US openly supplying the UK and USSR, taking up British occupations around the western hemisphere (and even Europe with the inclusion of Iceland), but they were also protecting "all trade in the Atlantic". Of course that basically just meant Allied trade since no one could trade with Germany or Italy due to blockades.
Before you say that wasn't much. These incidents led to the deaths of over a hundred American sailors when a US destroyer was damaged and the USS Reuben James sunk on Halloween of 1941 with the loss of most of her crew. Similarly the US had attacked U-boats trying to attack British convoys, though none are known to have been sunk.
By the time of December 1941, the Kreigsmarine were demanding war with the United States, but Hitler was hesitant. Not only was he getting bogged down in the USSR, but his navy couldn't take on the Royal Navy, much less them and the American navies, the two largest in the world.
2. Hitler was actually ecstatic over the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor for several reasons. One, it gave the Axis powers a major victory in a time when they were only experiencing set backs. Two, it meant that the US Navy would be drawn away to the Pacific, giving Hitler some breathing room (this was a mostly incorrect assessment on his part). Such a move would also hopefully foster closer cooperation between Japan and Germany.
After all, by that point of the war, the war in Asia and the war in Europe were two separate conflicts. While Germany was openly engaging the USSR and UK, Japan was not in an armed conflict with either. Japan tried to attack the USSR in 1937-1938, but it was a huge failure, resulting in the two sides signing a nonaggression pact and all but ignoring the other. With the Japanese attack on the United States, finally both wars had a connection through a common enemy (and also Japanese would almost immediately attack the UK and Dutch after Pearl Harbor).
The rest was mostly due to delusion. Hitler saw Japan as an unconquerable enemy that hadn't lost a war in over 3,000 years, so there was no way they'd lose a war to the militarily incompetent US. After all, while Hitler had great respect for the US industry, he had absolutely none when it came to their mixed-races and their military.
3. And the last point. The US never declared war on Germany. It was Germany that declared war on the US. After Pearl Harbor, it was a bit of a toss up over if the US would join the war in Europe. After all, it was Japan that attacked the US, not Germany. While the public wanted war with Japan, they didn't quite want war with Germany. That was taken out of their hands though when Hitler sent a formal declaration of war on December 11th. He also made a speech in front of the German Reichstag justifying the declaration. If you ever have time, look it up. It's a fascinating read. Though just remember that most the words that come out of his mouth were full of shit.
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1. Yes, I know of fractional reserve banking, but, while simplified, it doesn't go against the logic stated in this video, especially on an individual level. While the often cited article by the Bank of England argues the process is reversed, the consensus from most central banking authorities, including the Federal Reserve, is that a deposit comes before a loan in the fractional reserve banking process. So the amount of money a bank can lend is totally dependent on the amount of money people deposit into it, especially when taking into account the aforementioned required reserve ratio. Also a credit card is a loan, just with a different name. Every time you use a credit card you agree to a contract that you will pay back the amount being charged, and every credit card has a maximum limit that can be charged as determined by the bank. It's a short term loan, much like many businesses can also get from a bank on a regular basis.
Put this all together and we get the traditional model of fractional reserve banking: Joe deposits $100 into Bank A. Bank A hold 10% of that as reserves due to regulation and lends the other 90%. Lisa uses her credit card to buy groceries for $90. The $90 from Joe's deposit is then credited to the grocery store's account at a different bank. That bank then does similarly as before, taking 10% ($9) as reserves and loaning out the other $81. Now we have $190 floating around on an initial deposit of $100. Take this to the nth degree and we find the maximum amount of money that can be floating around on a $100 deposit is $1,000 (1/10% * $100).
So, while I would have loved for them to have actually covered banking more in depth, especially the fractional reserve system and the merits of it as every sees it as some evil conspiracy, I wouldn't say this video is spreading disinformation or wrong in the information it provides. Well, with the caveat of their history of the Financial Crisis. There's so many interweaving threads that went into it that it's a little unfair to blame just one group
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@Khalid-br8oi Actually US dollars are printed by the US Treasury. Specifically the Bureau of Engraving and Printing within the US Treasury. So that's strike one.
Strike two: This money isn't printed at an interest. That's just flat out wrong. The only interest collected by the Federal Reserve is on loans it makes to other private banks and government bonds it is forced to hold due to legislation added to the Federal Reserve Act by Congress. Strike two.
When there's $100,000 in the economy and $100,001 in loans outstanding, it works exactly as I already said. Some of the money used to pay off the loan will end up back in the hands of the people who originally paid some of it off. Do you think the bank just burns your money when it gets a repayment? No, it pays its own bills and makes its own investments, which causes the money to continue flowing through the economy. Strike three.
Henry Ford never made that quote. There is no credible source for him making that quote. At best there's a paraphrased version attributed to him during a House debate in the 1930's, and even that's spotty. Also Ford isn't exactly the best source considering his is an infamous raging anti-Semite. This also says nothing about anything being a mathematical fraud, just that Ford didn't like the finance sector (and, once again, he never even made that quote to begin with).
Your 2008 conspiracy is even dumber. The problem was caused by a housing bubble which burst, meaning people weren't able to profit off of their supposed investments in housing, causing them to miss loan payments to banks. Funny how you forget that it was the investment banks that were in the most trouble even though those banks have nothing to do with what we consider banking (loaning money out). Lehmann Brothers, the most infamous example of a banking collapse during the recession, was an investment bank, not a commercial bank.
Read a money and banking textbook. It'll do you wonders.
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There is so much stupid and wrong about your comment.
1. I can find nothing on Hitler being the product of incest. The Catholic Church even validated the marriage of Hitler parents, something they wouldn't have done if they believed it to be incestuous.
2. Nazi Germany didn't take over most of the world. The Americas were completely untouched and so was the majority of Africa, Asia, and even Oceania.
3. The children who are the product of incest can understand history just fine. They are more prone to deformities, sure, but these deformities aren't always mental. They can be just as smart, or smarter, than you.
4. You bringing Stalin into this in no way excuses Hitler's actions. Furthermore, Hitler killed more than 18 million people himself and many of the deaths attributed to Stalin were at least accidental.
5. I honestly don't get your "at least Hitler was nationalist." statement as if it was a good thing. First, nationalism is bad. Straight up, no politics involved. Nationalism is always bad for a country as it only ends up isolating that country from its neighbors and the world, hurting it economically. It also typically leads to increased military spending and military expeditions that only lead to disaster. You also realize that Stalin was nationalistic too, right? Why do you think Russia is still feuding with Japan over the state of some islands they occupied in WW2, or why the USSR never let go of so much territory they occupied in Europe after WW2?
Seriously, just stay in school. Learn something.
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@gandalfstormcloud7514 Oh, wow, he didn't respond in an hour! He must have been struck speechless. Nah, he just has a life.
First: I'm not socialist. Never said I was. It's possible to have a nuanced opinion in the world. Weird, I know.
The Nazis weren't socialist. Only idiots think so. Even the left wing of the Nazis, which was as socialist as they ever came, declared they weren't socialist. Strasser, the leader of said wing, and Hitler's main rival, said:
"We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!"
Because every socialist rejects egalitarianism, one of the fundamentals of socialism, right?
You'll also never guess what happened to Strasser. He and all of his supporters in both the Nazi party and German government were extrajudicially killed by Hitler for being too far left. Night of Long Knives; look it up. By the time Hitler started his administration, there were no socialists left in the German government or Nazi party. Any that survived the event above were some of the first prisoners in Hitler concentration camps. Dachau; look that up too.
Other antisocialist policies of Hitler include: The Nuremberg Laws, cracking down on workers' strikes, freezing workers' wages, generally siding with companies against the unions, and idolizing industrialists like Ford (who he even tried to give a medal).
Also you do realize that Nazism is a fascist ideology, right? Fascism vehemently rejects the fundamentals of socialism as shown in Mussolini's The Doctrine of Socialism. Taken directly from it:
"Having thus struck a blow at socialism in the two main points of its doctrine, all that remains of it is the sentimental aspiration, old as humanity itself-toward social relations in which the sufferings and sorrows of the humbler folk will be alleviated. But here again Fascism rejects the economic interpretation...…"
Gotta admit, that sounds a bit critical of socialism. Funny that.
But Nazi equals National Socialist, right? NATIONAL SOCIALIST! Yeah, and North Korea is official the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Are you going to tell me they are democratic, a republic, or for the people?
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@yopeepthestyle8308 I too have a lot to say here as I also don’t agree with much of what you said. First, I do read from a wide range of sources and I think you are overstating how little American sources mention the USSR.
1. Yes, the Eastern Front was by far the most important theater of the war in Europe. Potentially the whole war even if you don’t put much weight on the Japanese invasions in mainland Asia. That being said, I know of no source that claims Hitler wrote about the USSR before he died. Instead the source I know claims he told Ribbentrop before he died that the war was lost due to three mistakes Losing the air war (referring to the Battle of Britain), underestimating the Soviet tenacity to keep on fighting, and underestimating the strength of American industry.
2. While the Normandy Landings (and the landings in Southern France) weren’t as important in terms of the war itself, it was EXTREMELY important in the post war landscape and that cannot be understated. Furthermore, they at least had some importance on the war in Europe considering Hitler was willing to devote the last of Germany’s oil reserves as well as any spare men into an offensive to push the Western Allies back to the English Channel (Battle of the Bulge).
3. It’s odd how you mention the Japanese conditional surrender as, in all honesty, it has little to do with anything. Did Japan try to surrender conditionally before August? Yeah, they tried to surrender on the condition that the Japanese imperial family would stay in power. By that point though, the decision was out of the US government’s hands. The Allies already made a join declaration at the Potsdam Conference demanding unconditional surrender, nothing less. It’s be foolish for the US to break from the rest of the Allies on that.
4. The atomic bombs didn’t kill half a million people. They killed under 300,000.
5. Your claim on why the US dropped the bombs doesn’t even make sense. They already tested the bombs at that point, most famously in the Mojave Desert, and were able to get all the readings they’d need to find out how powerful it was. They didn’t need live subjects to measure the power of an atom bomb. FYI: It was about 20 megatons of TNT
6. You also claim the US dropped them to intimidate the USSR. Did you forgot that the US Soviet relations were actually somewhat warm at the time? Roosevelt was friendly towards Stalin and even got Stalin to agree to start sending Soviet troops eastward to help against Japan. It was this agreement that even brought the USSR in the war against Japan in the first place. Churchill was the staunch anti-communist in the Allies. Similarly, the main worry of the USSR for most of the 1940’s would be stopping a resurgent Germany (particularly Western Germany).
7. Back to the conditional surrender bit. You claim that it was because of the USSR’s invasion of Japanese holdings in continental Asia that they wanted to surrender. This is flat out wrong. A basic chronology of events should’ve told you that. The Japanese offer to conditionally surrender came in May, 1945. The USSR didn’t invade August. Both sides were still honoring the non-aggression pact they signed when Japan offered to surrender conditionally
So let’s see what options the US had in August 1945. Say fuck you to the rest of the Allies and accept the conditional surrender of Japan even though they agreed to not do that. This could also potentially lead to a resurgence in Japanese nationalism like what happened to Germany following WW1 (the whole point in demanding unconditional surrender in the first place). Invading Japan outright and taking over a million projected casualties and destroying the entirety of Japan. Continue the strategic firebombing campaign, which killed WAY more Japanese and would have prolonged the war (while people starved from the blockade). Or drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities and hope their overwhelming power forces Japan’s hand. Yeah, not the best options. Hell, the Japanese government was still divided when the Emperor was trying to surrender, resulted in a failed coup attempt to keep the country fighting.
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That's because what you're spouting is bullshit. There was no such pogrom by the Poles against Germans. A pogrom did happen after war was declared, but that was after the fact, and when Germany found out, their military created an even larger anti-Polish one. Surprise, surprise. Nazis are bad.
Want to know how I know you're full of shit? Because Hitler had to literally create a propaganda program in order to get a justification for invading Poland. It's know as Operation Himmler. One of it's most atrocious elements included having Germans dress up in Polish uniforms, attack a German radio station along their border, kill a bunch of prisoners in a nearby concentration camp, and they lay those bodies out around said radio station. There were multiple confessions to this incident during the Nuremberg Trials from people not even on trial.
Furthermore, you realize Germany during this time had a fucking central bank of its own, right? Somehow conspiracy theorists always miss that fact. They also miss how it was the Allies who eventually dismantled the German central bank, not Hitler.
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It more has to do with what the leaders would've done if their goals were achieved. What would've happened if Hitler's goals were achieved? Well there would've been a massive genocide against all Jewish people, which was already going on, and all non-"Aryan" people would be forced not to reproduce so that the "uber-men" could thrive. Oh, and blond haired, blue eyed women would be treated like breeding stock, which happened a lot in German occupied territory.
Stalin on the other hand achieved most of his goals, and, while atrocious, they weren't as bad as Hitler's plans. Also I find the fact that you just said that it was the US, the most anti-communist country in existence, which created the propaganda to defend the communist dictator. Because that makes sense.
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@MrPhilk77 No it doesn't. Did you even read this? All it says is:
"This bill requires the Department of the Treasury to define the dollar in terms of a fixed weight of gold, based on that day's closing market price of gold. The Federal Reserve Banks shall make Federal Reserve notes exchangeable with gold at the statutory gold definition of the dollar."
In layman's terms. Bring back the gold standard.
I also love how you bring up economics because your conspiracy theory on how money is created has been widely debunked by mainstream economics. Money is created by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, part of the US Treasury, by order of the Federal Reserve. Nowhere in there is interest or debt mentioned, because nowhere in there is interest or debt a thing.
Moreover, you act like the above bill is some smoking gun to prove that the USD isn't backed by anything. Was that ever in question though? It's not some horrifying concept since the USD hasn't been backed on anything effectively since the 1930's during the Great Depression. Economic thought has evolved since then and standard economic thinking sees no problem with fiat currency.
"But economists" Yeah, I call bullshit on your expert economists claim. The Chicago School of Business regularly asks the nation's top 50 or so economists questions like these and they overwhelmingly disagree with you. Like here's a bill where 89% of those polls felt negatively about a Congressional bill to throw more oversight on the Fed: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/congress-and-monetary-policy
No one was in favor of it by the way.
Here is another damning poll where 100% of the respondents thought that going back to a gold standard was a terrible idea: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard
I especially love this quote from a University of Chicago Economics Professor: "A gold standard regime would be a disaster for any large advanced economy. Love of the G.S. implies macroeconomic illiteracy."
Extremely famous economist Richard Thaler, who helped create the entire field of Behavioral Economics, on why the gold standard is dumb: "Why tie to gold? why not 1982 Bordeaux?" If you don't get it, he's saying choosing gold as the asset to tie money to is completely arbitrary.
And Acemoglu, who wrote the hilariously famous book Why Nations Fail and has taught at both the London School of Economics and MIT, both schools in the top five best universities to study economics: " Gold is intrinsically close to useless, so its price is determined as a 'bubble'."
And here is an entire academic paper written by another famous economist on why the gold standard is bad: https://www.nber.org/chapters/c11454.pdf
But please, tell me more about how economics agrees with you. Right now it looks like most every economist would laugh at you and call you, macro-economically illiterate (as one already has).
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No, just no. This ignores the whole ideology of the Japanese military. They were obsessed with the idea of a single decisive battle to decide the fate of the war. The aim was that the battle would be so large and decisive that it would force the US and Allied forces to negotiate a settlement. This is exactly what happened in the Russo-Japanese War at the Battle of Tsushima.
At the time, the full capabilities of the naval carrier were not yet understood (for somewhat good reasons), so most countries still saw the battleship as the crown jewel of a fleet. It just so happened that all US carrier in the Pacific Ocean were stationed at one single harbor, known as its Battleship Row. Pearl Harbor. The objective of Japan was to decisively destroy the vast majority of the US Pacific fleet, specifically their capital ships, and force the US to negotiate. If that didn't work, they hoped that the damage done to the US fleet would be so catastrophic that it would take years for them to recovery, and, in the meantime, Japan would be able to secure most of the Pacific and build a ring of defensive islands to protect the Japanese territory from a US incursions.
The ignored the fuel and smaller vessels because they weren't capital ships.
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Vladimir Lenin I find it odd how you want other people to read Marx considering Marx's theories were wrong. And I'm not even talking about his socialist ideals either.
1. This was before the Marginalist Revolution in economics. Marx, and most economic philosophers of the time, believed in the labor theory of value. In other words, a products value comes solely from the amount of labor put into it. A product that takes more time to make would automatically have to be more expensive.
Today we know that such a theory is false. A goods value is determined from the intersection between supply and demand. Recent oil prices and toilet paper shortages are an excellent example of this. Oil prices didn't drop because a lot less labor was randomly used to refine it, but because there was an oversupply of oil in the market. The labor theory of value featured prominently in Marx's argument for socialism.
2. Marx also believed that capitalist economies would crash on their own. To be fair to him, this was based on economic theory which, while sound on paper, didn't work at as such in practice. Basically economic theory holds that in a perfectly competitive market, no business is making a profit in the long term, as all businesses would be selling their products at the cost it took to make them. Gas stations are a good example of this. The gas station makes next to no profit on the gas they sell, their profits come from goods bought from their stores.
Because of this, Marx reasoned that businesses would have to pay increased costs for automation to keep their products competitively prices (this is in the mid 1800's, mind you), while receiving no actual profits since all their competitors are doing the same thing. With increased debt and no profits, the businesses would eventually go under. This is what Marx believed would happen on a macro scale and cause the downfall of the market economies.
Considering he wrote that over 150 years ago about automation which doesn't even compare to the level of automation and investments businesses have reached today, I think it's say that his theory was wrong.
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@bryanepie Wall Street doesn't have a problem with this. What most people don't realize is that, while the move to buy Gamestop and such stock was started by a grassroots movement. Within 48 a huge chunk of the shares being purchased were by the latest stock market funds like Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.
Otherwise it's already been explained why Robinhood had to stop purchases of Gamestop and AMC stock. Robinhood purchases their stock from a market maker, which is a firm which, well, makes markets between buyers and sellers on the stock market.
The market maker typically makes money by increasing the price of the stock a bit (usually a fraction of a cent) and taking that as profit. So they might buy a share of GME stock at $2.50 and sell it to Robinhood at $2.51
This only works when there is low volatility in a stock's price though. If GME generally fluctuates between $2.50 and $2.55, it's easy for the market maker to run an analysis to determine how much they can take as profit.
Well the shares are constantly fluctuating between $150 and $400 though? It's too volatile for market makers to make a consistent profit, so they stop trading in the stock.
And so what's Robinhood to do when it's supplier of shares of stock stops trading in said stock?
Not everything is a conspiracy by the rich, and I'd love to see what you have to say in a month when Gamestop's stock price inevitability plummets since, as everyone knows, it's a bubble.
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@caidenbond1988 Fucking what? Talk about worst takes imaginable.
1. Imperialism and colonialism both predate capitalism. Unless you're going to claim that early 16th century Spain was somehow capitalism when they still practiced manorialism/mercantilism. Actually, the major European powers had colonies before the Americas. By the 16th century, Portugal already had colonies in Africa.
2. It shouldn't even need to be said, but slavery existed way before capitalism. In fact many historians believe that one of Europe's main exports during most of the Middle Ages were slaves. There was a huge slave trade going on around the Mediterranean too due to the Ottoman Empire. How you're blaming that on capitalism is beyond me.
3. Fascism is a rejection of both capitalism and socialism. Mussolini even argued so himself when he wrote the Doctrine of Fascism. Fascists believed in working to better the state, but they also held up tradition to be the upmost importance. Granted, many business owners in Germany supposed fascism as they saw it as the best counter to socialism, but that has nothing to do with capitalism itself.
4. You realize historical economic data exists, right? Take this lovely collection of data, showing all the statistics the world has greatly improved on, including poverty, literacy, education rate, child mortality rates, etc: https://slides.ourworldindata.org/teaching_notes/ch1/poverty#/2
For instance global extreme poverty dropped from around 40% in 1980 to less than 10% today. How do you think that happened? Globalization and freer trade. With this, life satisfaction ratings have also shot up.
"But the US!" you say.
The US has had some problems, but we don't need to completely dismantle our economic system to fix them. Obamacare was already doing a pretty good job of fixing many of the problems in the US healthcare system, and Biden seems to be going along a similar route, so that's good.
Wealth inequality is a problem, but there are many easy fixes for that, usually involving raising the tax burden on the upper class.
Tada! The two biggest problems in the US are fixed and we didn't have to seize any means of production! Hurray!
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Yes it is. Many scholars at the time, like John Maynard Keynes, thought Germany would be destroyed by the Treaty of Versailles based on the final document, which to be fair it would've been, but the peace treaty was very much a propaganda peace and not nearly as bad in effect. For example, the reparation payments made by Germany were lowered several times in the 1920's thanks to many plans like the Dawes and Young plans. They were also given cash injections by the United States, allowed to rebuild a good chunk of their military beyond what was stated in the treaty before even 1930, etc. Most academics today agree that Germany was much better off than people like Keynes implied (though to be fair Keyne's famous book on the topic was written in 1919, so he wouldn't have known about the leniency the Allies would give on the subject).
Famous academics like German historian Irving Fischer, French economist Etienne Mantoux, who gave his life fighting for the Free French in World War 2, and historians Sally Marks and Stephen Shuker all support the anti-Keynesian historical theory (obviously different from his economic theory). It's also pretty clear based on the data that over the 1920's, France was a lot more worse off and divided than Germany, leading to a lot of their inaction during the period of appeasement.
The Great Depression had a more direct impact on the rise of the Nazi party than did the Treaty of Versailles, though Nazi propaganda did use it as a scapegoat for their own ends.
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@Mysteres78979 Except no highschool student is going to listen to over an hour and a half lecture on a topic they don't care about.
To that end, you can simplify WW2. To understand the conflict, you really don't need to understand the military exploits of Rommel, Manstein, Patton, or Zhukov. All you need to know are the ideological conflicts at play (fascism versus liberalism versus communism), invasion of Poland, why the Battle of France was so decisive, other territory occupied by Germany (Norway, Denmark, Belgium, etc), the Holocaust, Operation Barbarossa, Battle of Stalingrad, D-Day and Operation Bagration, and that's about it for the European Theater. Maybe the Battle of the Atlantic.
Of course a lot would be left out, and the stuff would be important to know if you're pursing the subject to any further degree, but for a high school student with seven other classes on any given day? Fat chance they're going to remember even half of what's above. As long as they know why the war started, Germany's initial success, why Nazi Germany is seen as deplorable, and how Germany eventually lost, we're good.
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I forgot college. College is more expensive in the US for several reasons. 1: Going to college is heavily ingrained in American culture. Not necessarily graduating, but, as a percentage of population Americans are more likely to at least attend one year of college than people in other countries. I think degree holding rates are about the same though. Either way, this obviously drives up demand for college slots, which increases the price to attend a college. To cater to the desires of their students, college in the US also usually provide a lot of amenities (gyms, dorms, cafeterias) as, just like attending college is so engrained in American culture, attending a college not in your immediate area is too. So many students require on-campus dorms to go to college, which isn't the case for students in Europe or Australia, where said culture doesn't exist as much. In Australia for example, as most of the population lives in only the five biggest cities, students tend to go to a college in their city, mean they can commute instead of paying for a gym, dorm, and cafeteria. Finally, colleges offer a crap ton of scholarships in order to attract the best of the best so they can gain more prestige and government funding. The scholarship money has to come from somewhere though, so tuition rates generally are increased.
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Except that's not true. Fractional-Reserve banking refers to the repeated loaning out of the same funds, so $1000 might be loaned out on an initial deposit of $100. That being said, THIS IS DONE BY A GROUP OF BANKS! A single bank can do it by itself.
Bob deposits $100 in Bank A. Bank A, under regulation by the Federal Reserve, has to hold 10% of the $100 as reserve, so they loan out the other $90. That's where the term fraction reserve comes from, because the loan is a fraction of the total reserve. So Bank A loans $90 to Jill, who deposits the money into her bank, Bank B. Bank B then does similarly as Bank A, taking 10% of the 90 ($9) and loaning out the rest ($81). You'll notice that never in this scenario has a bank lent out more than it was given as deposits. If you add up all the money outstanding though ($19 in reserve and $171 loaned out) you can see more money has been loaned out than was originally deposited. Taking to the maximum possible degree, you can get bout $1000 loaned out and in reserve on an initial deposit of $100 (100 deposit divided by 10% required reserve).
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@waggerdagger2831 You just said I was out of touch and then went on to explain the exact thing already said. Good job?
This does not mean they can learn out more than they have because, as you yourself said, they can only lend out a fraction of a deposit. So if Joe goes to Bank A and deposits $100, Bank A would only be allowed to loan out $90 of that.
Now does the bank have backing for said money? Yes, that's the whole point of the FDIC and related institutions. They guarantee any money someone points in the bank up to $150,000 or so. The bank could collapse tomorrow and you'd still get your money.
This is also, again, the point of the RR ratio. Banks have to hold enough cash to cover their everyday deposits.
I'm not even sure what your point is considering fractional reserve banking has been the system in place since the Renaissance, yet I don't remember the economy ever collapsing. This also has an upper limit of 1/RR, so this isn't something a bank can do forever unless they get more deposits. Even banks lending to other banks face the above issue. Because, ya know, the lending bank's funds come from their own deposits, effecting their on RR.
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Your explanation is so wrong its not even funny. Banks are not able to create money "out of thin air" that's both not what fiat money is and not what fractional reserve banking is. Fractional reserve banking, as the name implies, is when a bank only keep a fraction of its deposited funds as reserves, choosing to invest/loan the rest. Here's an example:
Joe deposits $100 in Bank A. Bank A, a member of the Federal Reserve System, keeps 10% of it as reserves and loans out the rest. So they loan $90 to Jerry, who deposits it in his own bank, Bank B. Bank B does similarly as before, holding 10% of it ($9) as reserve and loaning out the rest ($81). Based on this, we have $19 sitting in reserve and $81 being loaned out, yet no bank actually created money. That's fractional reserve banking.
On the other hand fiat money just means money that is backed up only by belief in it. People use the US dollar not because its backed by gold, but because it is guaranteed by the US government and required to pay US taxes. Since the government itself is stable, the supply of USD is stable (only growing at around 2% a year with little fluctuations) and USD is required to pay US taxes, it is a well sought after currency.
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Dude, what? The industrial revolution started in Britain in the late 18th century and didn't spread to rest of the world until around the beginning of the 19th century. Similarly the steam engine wasn't reliably viable for ships until 1807, and those were nowhere near the size of warships. Of course the engine would need perfecting until it could handle a warship. The ironclad, that being shapes made entirely from iron, began construction in 1856 originally by the British. Keep in mind the first warship to use a steam engine wasn't built until 1850 by the British, so the steam engine was barely up for such a task. This is also evidenced in the first battle between ironclads in history during the American Civil War where the Union Monitor was mostly under the water and it's main gun turret was only just over the waterline. They were also both incredibly slow.
Finally, most navies aren't modern? Over 140 ships are powered through nuclear energy, the UK has 74 active ships, France has 86 ships including four ballistic missile submarines (one of the most advanced ships to exist, behind aircraft carriers and nuclear submerines), China has an aircraft carrier, is building another, and is pumping out cruisers like nobody's business, India also has a crapload of ships including a nuclear powered submarine, a ballistic missile sub, an aircraft carrier, etc. Then there's Japan, which has 154 ships and over 300 aircraft dedicated to its navy, not airforce. See, this is why making sweeping generalizations is often stupid, because you come off as an ignorant idiot when you're proven wrong. Sure, countries like Egypt might not have the most advanced ships ever, but they're also not a fully developed country, nor do they have the stability to really support one when their problems are at land.
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So I watched a few of your videos and thought they were pretty good. This one though is just ignorant. Well to be slightly more fair it's not exactly ignorant, but moralizing to an incredible degree.
1. You claim that the US government enforcing DEI standards in every corporation because.....you can sue for discrimination in the workplace? Fucking what? How is this state enforced DEI? I company is still allowed to do as many unsustainable or antifeminist practices as they want so long as they aren't creating a hostile workplace, which would be a constitutional violation.
2. You then claim that this is evil because Blackrock..... let's people see these scores and creates etfs and mutual funds people can invest in because of these scores? Who cares? If you don't care about the ESG scores, don't look at them. If you don't want to invest in ESG funds, invest how you normally would. Not like ESG scores prevent you from investing in businesses. They're just for people who like the scores. You know, so these companies can attract customers to their platforms.
3. You also claim that Blackrock is basically an arm of the government because......they take contracts from the government? Even though most of their money comes from business not dealing with the government? Or how about how they're still a completely public company anyone can buy ownership in and still run for a profit, unlike every government institution, including the Fed, which you also hate for whatever reason. Is Blackrock not supposed to maximize profits and take government contracts? I'm so confused by your logic here. Though you also claim the Fed is bad, so I guess it's more that your logic is insane.
So to sum it up, for profit private institutions (Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackrock) were asked by consumers of their products to provide ESG grades so that consumers would have more knowledge on what they invest in, whether you think this knowledge is worthwhile or not. Two of the most common being developed by non-profit organizations. And Vanguard, Fidelity, and Blackrock went along with it to attract customers. Yet you somehow think this is a bad thing because the government is doing.....something.
I'm glad I never fell down the Austrian economics rabbit hole.
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@keemstarkreamstar7069 Your point falls apart in your first sentence.
You do realize companies can and have discriminated based on gender, right? This isn't a far off concept. It's pretty easy to tell given that statistics (mainly the Law of Large Numbers) shows that the larger a sample size, the more it should reflect a population as a whole. So if you were hiring, say, 10,000 employees based on merit, your demographics should at least relatively reflect the general population distribution (of the industry). If it doesn't, that's a strong sign of your hiring practices not being nearly as meritocratic as you claim.
After all, there is not scientific evidence of differences in IQ solely based on race or gender. They are socioeconomic differences, but if you give 100 Asians, Caucasians, and Blacks the same opportunities to learn, they will test at the same level. If you disagree with this, I'd love to see some research based evidence to prove me wrong.
So if your industry is 20% Asians, 15% Blacks, and 65% Whites, it's reasonable to expect the employees of your company to have a similar race reflection if the hiring practices are based on merit.
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First, making a false analogy doesn't make your claim any more sound. Second, fractional reserve isn't a practice just like no one ever practices supply and demand. They're just laws of economic nature that happen when given criteria are met. Finally, banking still don't 'create' crap. Example time!
Jim got a job and so decides to deposit his first paycheck of $500 into a new bank account. The bank, being a profit-seeking entity, decides to take most of the money and lend it out themselves, keep a smaller amount in reserve in case someone else wants to withdraw their money. In this case lets say that the Federal Reserve requires a reserve ratio of 10%. So 10% of the money ($50) is kept on reserve, and the rest ($450) is loaned out. Doing some quick math, we find that $50 + $450 obviously gives us $500, so no money has been created.
Now Bob comes along and takes out a $450 loan in order to pay for groceries or something. The grocery store then takes the $450 and deposits it into their own bank account. That bank does similarly as before, taking 10% off of the $450 ($45) and loaning out the remaining $405. Doing some quick math again we see that there are no $95 in reserve and $855 being loaned out on a deposit of $500. Yet no bank actually created money. No manager looked at their financial statement and said, "add more dollars to our account".
Likewise there is an upper limit to this based on the required ratio set by the Federal Reserve, which is 1/RR, so in this case 1/.1 which is ten times the amount originally deposited. It is mathematically impossible for the process of FRB to create more than $5,000 on an initial deposit of $500
So, as this example showed banks can't create an infinitesimal amount of lows as there is an upper limit on how much cash can be created through FRB from an initial deposit. The Federal Reserve fully knows about this and even regulates banks to control the process of FRB, letting them get a good grasp on the monetary supply (it doesn't fluctuate nearly as much as you insinuate), and no bank (besides central banks) create money.
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@OrkarIsberEstar Oh, holy shit. I read through your coment again and you're an anti-Semite yourself. No wonder you're trying to defend the Nazis through Whataboutism. You do realize that modern antisemitism has its roots in medieval antisemitism, right? Apparently not.
You see, most European Christians did not hold a positive view of Jews. This is due to two main reasons. First, they are blamed for the Crucifixion of Jesus, and, possibly more importantly, they chose not to convert to Christianity. Christian thinking at the time saw themselves as the 'enlightened', that if only other people saw how their religion worked and their religious teachings, they would immediately try to convert. As Jews lived in Christian majority countries of Europe and weren't willing to convert to the majority religion, many Christian leaders got annoyed as this spit in the face of their preconceptions as the 'enlightened' faith. So most Jews were forced to live in communities with very restricted access elsewhere.
There's a slight problem though. See monarchs have wars to fight. These wars cost money though, money they don't have. So how was a monarch supposed to acquire such funds? Why not borrow money? Great idea! Except Christians weren't allowed to loan money at an interest. Well shit. What about the Jews though? They were perfectly able to loan money as long as it wasn't to a fellow Jew. Perfect!
So the Jews would be forced to lend money to the monarchs and lords of the realm. And I do mean forced. They were restricted from holding other jobs by the very same lords and monarchs. Many monarchs would even have a court Jew to handle such borrowing.
Huh, I wonder why a group having a history of being stuck in the field of finance would continue to be prevalent in the field of finance today. Doesn't really take a rocket scientist to find the connection here....
Of course I have sources to back what I said up too!
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Uh, no, you're description is a little too simplistic. In order to get investors through a stock market, a company first has to create shares of stock relative to the price of the company. For instance, if I had a company valued at $100 and had 1,000 shares, each share would be worth 10 cents. If we went the other way around and I had a company worth $1,000 with 100 shares of stock, each share would be worth $10. I am then able to sell these shares to investors to acquire more. Let's say a sold 49 of my 100 shares of stock in my company worth $1,000. I have effectively just acquired $490 for 49% of my company. By holding a majority of the shares in my company though (51%), I am still have majority ownership in the company and therefore make all the decisions still.
So you might ask: isn't the other investors now entitled to a percentage of a company's profits. Yes, but the whole reason they invested in the first place is because they want to make money. 99% of investors are therefore willing to let the revenue stay within the company to increase the company's value so they can sell the share of stock later than just keep taking some of the revenue. Would you rather repeatedly take $5 a year for 10 years, or watch you share of stock worth $10 grow to be worth $100 in that same timespan? The $100 is worth more. The real process is slightly more complicated than this, but this is considered the thought process behind it.
Also, if you ever look at a company's financial reports, specifically their balance sheet, you'll notice a column called retained earnings. It's named as such because this is the revenue that stockholders "let" stay within the company instead of taking it for themselves.
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As long as you have a majority stake in the company, all earnings would be retained. Retaining earnings is an all or nothing thing. If a majority of shareholders want to take their earnings, they do so through a shareholders vote, where, as the name implies, the shareholders decide to vote on key issues of the company. Also, the point is this is an investment. Sure, I could take out a loan to get the necessary capital for my business, but what if I'm not sure about the business' prospects? Or I don't want too worry about paying it back in the future? Then I can just sell a stake in my company. If my company is worth $1000 and I sell a little under half of it away, then use the money to raise my business' valuation to $10,000, everyone wins. If it fails and closes down, I don't owe anyone anything.
Basically there's less risk when selling stock if you're the owner.
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@chrisprilloisebola Except it didn't. First the interest rates were lowered well before then, and the interest rates didn't play a major role in the Financial Crisis. How do I know this? Because the Financial Crisis didn't just kick off in the US. They also effected countries like Spain, Iceland, and the UK, all with higher interest rates in the US, while missing countries like Germany, which had similar rates to the US.
The US government did have a role in the Financial Crisis, but only insofar as how poorly they regulated the banking industry, particularly shadow banking, which, as the name implies, were completely unregulated by the US government since they didn't operate as a normal commercial bank.
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@timbozza1678 No, I'm not saying that at all. Continue putting words into my mouth though! The Democrats (and government more generally) did nothing to affect credit standards. Those standards were decided by the credit reporting agencies, which had an incentive to falsely raise the credit worthiness of certain assets they had an interest in, like MBS'.
Encouraging lower income families to buy homes also wasn't a horrible idea in and of itself. Homes are an amazing transgenerational investment as I already said. The reason the crash happened was because people assumed more houses needed to be built when they didn't need to be and people who absolutely shouldn't have been offered a mortgage, encouragement or no, were being offered one since the banks offering the mortgages would immediately sell them off to another bank, nullifying any risk of the mortgage. Once again, the banks generally affected by the crisis were not the banks to issue the mortgages.
Finally, you realize that the banks didn't hit the bottom of the barrel in terms of mortgages until the 2000's, right? Huh, I wonder which administration was in charge for that length of time. Oh yeah, Republicans. Of course I'm not ignorant enough to call the issue a Republican one.
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No, the British and Americans had the two largest navies in the world at the time. Japan was the third largest, but their was a gap between the first two largest navies and Japan's. As the US navy was divided between the Pacific and Atlantic though, the Japanese had the largest navy in their region.
As for the claim that Japan didn't stand a chance. Even the Japanese Admiral in charge of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said: "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
This is because, while the Japanese navy was large, its industry, especially its heavy industry, was not as capable as the industries from Britain and the US. So Britain and the US could much more easily repair and damage suffered during a battle as well as build new ships for their fleet while Japan had to be much more picky with the resources they had. In fact, the reason the Yamato class of battleships was built in the first place was because the Japanese navy wanted a ship so overwhelmingly powerful that they wouldn't have to waste resources giving it a large escort or repairing it after a fight. This ended up being a failure as the Japanese weren't able to predict the rise of the aircraft carrier compared to the battleship.
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@hhussy Yeah, Hitler is known for saying things that he didn't agree with solely to attract more voters. That's the whole reason the party is called national socialists to begin with. If you look at his policies and beliefs though, he clearly wasn't a socialist. For instance, he also said:
"We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!"
That's a direct contradiction to the basic tenets of socialism (and other things he himself said).
What about his policies? Well he killed or imprisoned all socialists in his party and government (throwing many of them in the first concentration camps), froze the wages of workers, abolished nearly every labor union, cracked down on workers' strikes, and created the Nuremberg Laws, which declared so races more desirable than others, granted some people privileges over others based on their race, and calling others 'life undeserving of life"
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@fredrnfa Dude, your comments are just getting more and more economically illiterate.
First: You know who else has the power to cause hyperinflation and deflation? You and I. Are we in on this conspiracy too? Every definition of inflation includes the velocity of money, which is how you and I cause inflation.
For instance, do you know why inflation was so low during the Financial Crisis? It wasn't because the monetary base suddenly shrank; it was because consumer spending fell, meaning the USD wasn't changing hands as fast (its velocity). If doesn't matter if the Federal Reserve prints a billion notes if only $100 of them are being used to buy goods and services.
Speaking of, it's an often made misconception that the Federal Reserve prints money. They don't. The job of printing money is given to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (it's kind of in their name), part of the US Treasury. The Federal Reserve can order more money printed, but it's the Bureau that does it, and, yes, the Fed has to pay for all newly printed notes.
So who benefits during hyperinflation and deflation? Well no one really. Technically if there are small amounts of stable inflation, spenders win and savers lose (so banks are actually losing most of the time here. During deflationary periods savers technically win since the money they're acquiring from loans and such is worth more purchasing power wise than the money they lent. This isn't even true anymore though since deflation in developed economies only happen during economic crises 99% of the time, which worsen the crises and harm banks. This is evident during the Great Depression when the huge amounts of deflation absolutely crushed the already hurting banks.
As for your last claim: this doesn't happen under a gold standard. There's no way to twist that into being true. The most infamous example of hyperinflation, The Weimer Republic around 1924, was under the international gold standard. Same with the most infamous example of deflation in economic history, deflation during the Great Depression, happened under the gold standard. You really don't know how a standard operates if you think inflation and deflation don't happen under them.
You know, I take back the Weimer Republic comment a bit. That's the most infamous example in modern history. A more infamous example in European History is the hyperinflation in Spain caused by them bringing back so much gold from the Americas. Originally it was a boon for the Spanish economy, but eventually it would leave their economy devastated.
Finally, ignoring how small amounts of stable inflation is a good thing, you realize it was Congress which mandated the Federal Reserve to have constant inflation, right? This is part of their dual mandate an amendment made to the Federal Reserve Act in 1977 (along with Congressional oversight measures).
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Oh, I forgot one last thing. The quote 'victors write the history' proves itself wrong. The quote is most often attributed to Hermann Goring, a famed Nazi in the German government, yet it's one of the predominant quotes when it comes to history. In other words, we have Goring, a loser in WW2, writing the history. Funny that.
Other examples of history contradicting this statement include the lost cause myth following the American Civil War, a German belief in a betrayal following WW1, and, of course, the idea that the Treaty of Versailles was unduly harsh on Germany following WW1.
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@challenjour7907 You have alluded several times already to the often cited quote of victors writing the history, which itself comes from a high ranking Nazi official. Beyond that, it's very telling that you don't want to label the country they literally committed a genocide against its own people and the people of occupied territory, forced even more into slavery, and created the world's largest eugenics program in the name of "racial superiority" the bad guys. What else would they be? Misunderstood?
Let's compare occupations, shall we? During WW2 Iceland was occupied by both the US and UK. During this time their economy had a boom due to all the Allied soldiers spending money and Allied desire for Icelandic imports. They were also given their autonomy in all matters not related to defense, and even declared their full independence from Denmark. In the 1930's they were one of the weaker Nordic countries by GDP per capita. In 1945 they were one of the strongest.
Compare that you Poland, which had much of its people thrown in ghettos and slaughtered, or France, which was part of the Holocaust as well. Czechoslovakia? Holocaust. Austria? They were never allowed to have a free vote and also were part of the Holocaust.
But sure, there was no true bad guy......
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@TheRepty818 You said: "here were many things that led to WW2, but the biggest of them all, the thing that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany was WW1."
In other words, the biggest thing that led to WW2, and which also led to Nazism, was WW1. That's flagrantly false. This myth is a part of the much larger myth that WW2 is a continuation of WW1.
Otherwise, my whole problem with your argument is you don't seem to realize that Japan's conflict was much larger than a minor stint. Their war with China would be where half the casualties of WW2 would come from. Did a lot of Africans die in the European theater? Yes, was this all because of a "few pissed off Europeans?" Not even close.
Also: "A lot of Africa and Asia had nothing to win or gain in these world wars" except protecting their sovereignty like China, the Philippines (who were set to gain independence from the US and would get it soon after the war), the US, Mongolia, the USSR, etc, and deciding the post war economic order. The UN, WTO, IMF, etc, all organizations that have benefited developing countries, came from the Allies following WW2. This order is what led to the relatively peaceful independence movements which gave India and much of Africa their independence with little to no bloodshed.
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@hhussy You claim I'm mind reading when you were the first person to make suggestions of what Foch meant based on a quote from his. Okay, totally makes sense. To prove my point though, here's another quote from his showing exactly as I described:
"Henceforward the Rhine ought to be the Western military frontier of the German countries. Henceforward Germany ought to be deprived of all entrance and assembling ground, that is, of all territorial sovereignty on the left bank of the river, that is, of all facilities for invading quickly, as in 1914, Belgium, Luxembourg, for reaching the coast of the North Sea and threatening the United Kingdom, for outflanking the natural defences of France, the Rhine, Meuse, conquering the Northern Provinces and entering the Parisian area.["
You are right in that economists in 1919 thought the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh though. Specifically John Maynard Keynes wrote a book on the subject in 1919. What wasn't included in the book was everything that happened after 1919 though. For instance the reparations Germany owed to the Allies were negotiated downward twice in the 1920's from the US Young and Dawes plans. The reparations were always meant to be negotiated downward in the first place (as Keynes' book even mentions)
Germany also fully had the means to pay the reparations. They were economically better off than even France was at this time, because, while they owed reparations, their land and capital weren't completely devastated from the war as France and Belgium's were. This left this in an economically dominant position in Europe. Beyond that, it's odd how a country that didn't have the ability to pay off its reparations founds the money to rearm its military beyond the limits of the Treaty of Versailles.
After all, they did make a secret treaty with the USSR to skirt the treaty where they would produce war materials in the USSR, away from western observers. This is also where they did much of their aircraft research.
Also no modern historian agrees with your argument. The consensus from historians nowadays is that the cause of WW2 had more directly to do with the Great Depression and the supposed "betrayal" Germans felt after WW1 from conservatives and Jews. This, the historians say, is because the war propaganda from the German government kept insisting the war was going well, but then suddenly agreed to an armistice on Allied terms. Because the war never reached Germany itself, few Germans realized how outmatched Germany really was and so instead believed they were betrayed, leading to undue resentment.
In fact, a good take down of Keynes' was written during WW2, titled 'The Carthaginian Peace: the Consequences of Mr. Keynes '
Pick an mainstream academic history book on the subject and you'll come across similar claims as the ones I've made.
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No, no, no, a thousand times no! Don't spread misinformation. Hitler and Mussolini were very much not socialist. Authoritarian? Sure? But if the only similarity between fascism and socialism is that they're both authoritarian, then monarchies are all socialist.
Mussolini himself even wrote a book on the principles of fascism, titled the Doctrine of Fascism, in which he laid out that fascism rejects socialism on the most fundamental of levels. Fascists rejected the history of the class struggle (instead finding a more racial or cultural struggle), they rejected the materialism they found in socialism (their words), and they rejected the egalitarian nature of socialism, finding that people are inherently unequal and therefore should be viewed unequally.
Here's a direct quote from it: "Having denied historic materialism, which sees in men mere puppets on the surface of history, appearing and disappearing on the crest of the waves while in the depths the real directing forces move and work, Fascism also denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of this economic conception of history; above all it denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations. Having thus struck a blow at socialism in the two main points of its doctrine, all that remains of it is the sentimental aspiration...." It goes on to criticize socialism more.
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@snakey934Snakeybakey Admittedly I do think you're cherrypicking your quotes. For instance in point 13 of the constitutional principles, the party clearly stated associated. There was a subject whose industries were being mentioned which you made no note of. It's not unusual to nationalize a specific economic sector. This is usually because the sector wouldn't run efficiently otherwise due to market failures. Management of a country's infrastructure or (typically) utility companies are another one, though there are other solutions to the market failures as well.
14. That's just an income tax. Not really a socialist idea.
15. Also not really socialist. Welfare has existed before Marx's infamous book and it has little to do with the ideology (that being the worker/government owned control of the means of production. Mainstream economics also has supported a form of welfare since at least the 1920's.
16. Also specifically mentions the firms being private, something no socialist country has.
Hitler also never made the "we are socialist" quote. That was made by Gregor Strasser in his pamphlet 'Thoughts and Tasks for the Future". Strasser also went on to say: "We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!"
Strasser was the head of the left wing of the NSDAP (and the more socialist side) and constantly feuded with Hitler over the fact, Unsurprisingly, Hitler killed him, all his supporters, and any socialist in both the NSDAP and German government in the Night of Long Knives.
Economically, the Nazi government was a lot more like Trump's economic policies today (while trying to avoid the whole 'Trump's a fascist' argument). The Nazis were extremely protectionist, believing in an autarchic system. Foreign firms in Germany should support Germans, be led by Germans, etc. If not, the German government would take them over. Germany should buy as little foreign goods as possible and produce them themselves. This is why Hitler was so gung ho about taking over Eastern Europe and Ukraine. That land was very fertile and considered the breadbasket of Europe. Since Germany demanded so heavily on imports of grain and other foodstuffs, Hitler wanted the territory to make Germany truly autarkic.
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Good old Russian propaganda, so full of inaccuracies. Starting first chronologically, Poland invaded the USSR to gain historically Polish territory. In the 19th century Poland lost its sovereignty after being invaded and annexed by three European powers: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Poland was given back most of its lands from Prussia and Austria after WW1, but the lands Russia took were still kept within the USSR, so Poland wanted to reclaim them. Next: the USSR didn't annex territory from Poland because they were generous, the peace treaty was the way it was because the USSR started suffering major defeats and the tide of the war was turning. That's like saying Germany "generously" didn't annex its territory held in France after WW1.
and most importantly Hitler and Stalin DID agree on invading Poland. Ever heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Here's an excerpt from it: "2. In the event of territorial-political reorganization of the districts making up the Polish Republic, the border of the spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR will run approximately along the Pisa, Narew, Vistula, and San rivers.
"
Huh, 'in the events of territorial political reorganization'. I wonder what they could be referring to. Could it be the German invasion of Poland a week after the signing of the pact? Fuck off with your revisionist bullshit.
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@tonilourdes I love how you have to twist my words in order to win an argument. No, just because an empire once held a territory, it doesn't make the terrtiroy historically theirs. What does though is when the people of the territory belong to the cultural group of the reclaiming country and not the legal owner. I'm not sure why you keeping talking about Lithuania as Lithuania wasn't involved in the war. The only conflict they would get involved with was the invasion of the Soviet Union and occupation of their country in WW2. The people of Lithuania are Lithuanian. The people of Poland are Polish. That's why the empire was called the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. They considered themselves to be distinct culturally.
Your second paragraph is nonsensical as not only is it pretty incoherent, it has nothing to do with what I said or the document I cited.
Yes, Germany and Poland had a nonaggression pact. No, not all nonaggression pacts are similar. Don't be a fucking idiot (or paid troll). The Polish-German pact was just a nonaggression pact, stating that the two countries would try to engage each other diplomatically with any problems. This pact was rescinded a month before Germany's invasion by Germany. The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, on the other hand, included more sections to a typical nonaggression pact, including the above passage about a potential reorganization of Poland which wasn't just potential, Germany stating that they had no interest in the Baltics and that they were in the USSR's sphere of influence, and that Germany had no interest in Besserabia:
"In the event of territorial-political reorganization of the districts making up the Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern border of Lithuania is simultaneously the border of the spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR"
and
"Concerning southeastern Europe, the Soviet side emphasizes the interest of the USSR in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinterest in these areas.
"This protocol will be held in strict secrecy by both sides.
"
Good luck painting the USSR as the good guys when they literally have a secret protocol with another country to divide up the country you're trying to vilify as well as invading several other countries in Europe.
"
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1. Bullshit. The US wasn't scared; they were isolationist. The British also didn't hide in their Island chain. The North African campaign and Burma road's were things. Guess Russian history just sucks when it comes to WW2.
2. Germany was at its highest power in 1939, not 1941. By 1941 Germany was already running out of resources, they already lost a huge chunk of their surface navy, and the German Luftwaffe received numerous bloody noses. The USSR also wouldn't start winning on the Eastern Front until well into 1943. By then the Western forces had already begun sending them supplies (beginning in July 1941, a month into the offensive), won in North Africa, opened up a new front in Italy, were launching regular bombing raids into Germany, were planning D-day, and, oh yeah, were fighting Japan. As for the supplies sent to the USSR, they'd amount for half of all meat supplied for the Soviet military, 20-30% of all trucks, 15% of all airplanes, etc.
3. The USSR didn't outmaneuver Germany, they just overwhelmed them.
4. The US, UK, Canada, France, etc, launched D-Day on June 6th, 1944. They were the first nation to enter occupied German territory outside of the USSR. The USSR wouldn't do similar until later in June, when they launched Operation Bagration and started the invasion of German occupied Poland. Germany also didn't beat the Americans. The US had a positive ratio for losses during the campaign and suffered very little in terms of defeats. The reason the US and UK didn't attack Berlin was because it was already agreed upon at the Yalta conference that the USSR would be the ones to do it.
5. The US and UK were part of the Allies, so they won the war. Furthermore, your whole analysis also ignored that on the other side of the war Japan was ravaging the Pacific. It was the US, UK, Australia, India, and New Zealand that dealt with Canada. The USSR wouldn't get involved until the very month Japan surrendered. Similarly it was the Western Allies that defeated Italy and forced their surrender, not the USSR.
Finally, you really don't understand why people claim the winter helped the USSR a lot. For most of 1941, the German invasion of the USSR was going exactly how they expected it to go. A swift, overwhelming victory. It was only when the weather started to cool and get wetter that Germany started experience major delays due to the mud messing with their vehicles. When winter hit, their problems only got worse, causing them to stall their offensive right outside of Moscow. The USSR would then launch a counter offensive at Moscow to force Germany back from there.
To sum this all up. Your an idiot and the Russian education system is terrible for not teaching you any of this. What's worse is that throughout your whole idiotic rant, you referred to the USSR as Russia even though Russia as a state didn't exist in the 1940's.
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@zigoter2185 Your first part is true, but this does effect GDP. High costs of inputs means businesses are going to produce less. Businesses will try to pass off these costs on the consumers, but they won't be able to do it completely, and this will lower quantity demanded for the good.
A good example of this I'd the manufacturing of cars since the pandemic. Due to supply issues due to lockdowns in China, car manufacturers have been having trouble acquiring the materials they need to make the new cars. Typically these are lithium batteries and microchips. They had had to pay a higher price for a fewer amount of these inputs, meaning they couldn't produce as many cars as they otherwise would've wanted, and the card they did produce were more expensive. You can still see the effects of this today if you go into a car lot as more than likely they have very few cars. To get a new car today you'll probably have to order one months in advance.
Obviously this glut in the car market had an effect on GDP, but our economy grew in other areas so the effects were obscured.
This is why at the most basic level inflation is defined by three factors. The Quantity Theory of Money, usually referenced by the Equation of Exchange you indirectly mentioned, demand push inflation, and cost push inflation (what this would be).
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Yeah, I know, but that doesn't do anything for your point. If a bank becomes insolvent or is failing, the Federal Reserve is allowed to loan the banking money or buy off some of their toxic assets. This is done by the Fed creating money to give to banks, and exactly what happened during TARP, the main part of the government bailout. That being said the rules for how a commercial bank operate are completely different then the Fed. For one, unlike the Fed, they can't create money. They are only allowed to reinvest a portion of money people give them as deposits, typically 90%.
Tom deposits $100 into the bank. The bank, as per regulation, is required to take 10% of that and hold on to it as reserves. The other 90% is loaned out to Stephen. Stephen takes the money and deposits it into his bank, which does the same thing as before. 10% of it ($9) is kept as reserves, and the other $81 is loaned out. Now on a deposit of $100 we have $171 being loaned out and $19 in reserve at multiple banks, but as you can see no bank actually created money. It was the process of reinvesting that created money.
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@dostap7748 Dude, what? This is so wrong it's not even funny.
The French doctrine after WW1 was solely to prepare for a war similar to WW1. They focused on a defensive doctrine, and went for a much larger focus on artillery than they previously had. Their tanks, while able to take a pounding, were not particularly mobile and not concentrated much to make a difference.
The French strategy was to use the Maginot Line to funnel any potential Germany soldiers into Belgium, and then fight a defensive war on Belgian soil. This way, it wouldn't be French civilians suffering the brunt of the conflict like before.
And to be fair to the French, this was the original strategy of Germany. Their original strategy was much more traditional, focusing their troops on an invasion through the middle of Belgium, then swinging south to invade the northern border of France. That was exactly what the British and French expected.
So what happened? While on a reconnaissance flight through Belgian, a German plane carrying an officer which held the plans went down and was intercepted by Belgian intelligence. The officer tried to burn the documents, but enough of them were recovered for the German officials to panic.
New plans were then immediately drawn up based on Manstein's idea. Originally they were laughed at by much of the German military command, but it was actually Hitler that encouraged its use. And Manstein's Plan is the plan we all know.
Instead of focusing on the Low Countries like the Allies expected, Germany instead only attacked the Low Countries as a diversion, instead focusing most of their resources much further south at the Ardennes. While the French did put up a good resistance, once their lines were breached, everything collapsed.
Moreover, you act like the French military was in amazing standing before the war. They weren't. The French government was completely out of funds and the French government all but collapsed only years prior. Everything in France was completely divided and it never had the ability to properly recover from WW1. The French military, for instance, still weren't making much use of telegraphs, instead relying on couriers to deliver messages, which led to mistimed counter attacks.
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@dostap7748 Hitler's decision to attack further south in the USSR was actually a good call. I'm not trying to praise him as he was a horrible human being and made many strategic mistakes later in the war, but his reliance on Manstein's Plan for the Battle of France and focus on the Southern USSR were good moves.
For one, taking Moscow, outside of a propaganda victory for Germany, had no strategic significance. Most of its industry had already been moved further east, and any government officials there already left. They would've lost tens of thousands and only gained a shell of a city. The Soviets would continue the fight either way.
Secondly, and again, their offensive towards Moscow was stopped by Winter 1941 and a sizable Soviet counterattack was already pushing them back. The offensive that started in Spring 1942 was a completely different offensive than 1941, and one meant for a longer term war. They were hoping to outlast the Soviets by taking their strategic war making resources, particularly oil, instead of trying to crush the Soviet morale into surrendering, as that clearly wasn't working.
Germany could've attacked Moscow then, but by then the Soviet lines were already prepared and the city not worth it.
I also have no idea why you keep saying the French had no leadership. They had just as many officers and generals to soldiers as both the UK and Germany. They also had executives in government. Neither meant much when their soldiers were cut off from supplies with their leaders or when the French weren't able to communicate and relay orders as fast as the German advance.
Many of these soldiers would also continue the fight. For instance most of the French soldiers that escaped at Dunkirk continued the fight in Brittany, and thousands of French soldiers flocked to the cause of the Free French.
Otherwise, it's important to realize that the scenario wasn't as black and right as you presume. For one, many French contended that France, in fact, still existed through Vichy France. We know it today as a puppet, but that wasn't a fully understood fact until later in the war (when Germany would get more heavy handed). Moreover, the French did not have a rosy relationship with the British after Dunkirk, feeling betrayed by the British government for evacuating too early and for the RAF being unwilling to make any more sorties over France.
That's why when a huge chunk of the French navy was cornered in harbor by a Royal Navy contingent in French Algeria, they refused the options given to them (fight for the Royal Navy and continue the fight, scuttle the fleet in port, or sail the fleet to a neutral port where they'd be interned for the rest of the war (most likely the USA)), resulting in the British firing on and destroying the French ship in port.
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I did do my own research. In fact I wrote numerous papers on the interwar years in Europe during my undergraduate study, and I am 100% certain that your claims are so full of crap it's not even funny. You realize the debates in the House of Commons (part of the British Parliament) over the matter of Hitler and Germany's demands (like the occupation of the Rhineland and the annexation of Austria) are available to the public right? They show that not only was "the elite" not unified on the issue of Hitler, but they also feared a coming war. Moreover, here is a quote from Churchill where he goes against the beliefs and reasoning of many of the British elite, including their Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, where he says that the Allies need to take a stand against Hitler instead of appeasing him:
"And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” This is his reaction to the Munich Agreement in 1938.
So how you can claim that there is some evil conspiracy by the elite, including Churchill, when Churchill was against the beliefs of the most elite person in Britain at the time, that being the Prime Minister, is laughably ignorant.
The only thing you said that has a hint of truth to it is the fact that some American businessmen gave money to the Nazi Party of Germany. So what? Private citizens can do what they want. The actions of a private citizen in no way show the actions of a country. The United States was isolationist at the time and, in terms of foreign affairs anyway, only cared about the threat of communism spreading and the growing power of Japan due to the US presence in Asia, particularly the Philippines.
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@jaqenhghar5794 More like your claims don't go with facts so I ignore them.
1. The US used atomic bombs on Japan because Japan was unwilling to accept an unconditional surrender at the time. Japan put feelers in for a possible conditional surrender, but that went nowhere as the Allies already agreed to only accepting unconditional surrenders from Germany and Japan.
Even after months of a blockade, a growing famine, and daily bombing raids on Japan though, they were still unwilling to surrender. This left the US and Allies with two options. Invade the islands, suffer a projected million casualties themselves, and wipe out the Japanese people, wait the Japanese people out, leading to hundreds of thousands of more dead in Japanese occupied territory like, you know, China, the most populace and abused country at the time, and hope the growing famine didn't kill too many people, or drop an atomic bomb to see if that would scare Japan into surrendering.
One bomb was dropped and Japan still didn't surrender. It was only after the USSR invaded Manchuria and the US dropped a second bomb that the Emperor went against his cabinet and accepted an unconditional surrender. And even that wasn't a sure thing as a military coup happened before the Emperor could broadcast his message with the aim of continuing the war. Luckily the coup failed.
So that's strike one.
2. Yes, it's somehow the US' fought that the Taliban exists and not, you know, the USSR, which attacked them and drove them to extremism in the first place. Also the Taliban has little to do with ISIS. ISIS was formed out of ex-Sunni members of the Iraqi military.
Strike 2.
3. Yes, conspiracy theories exist that the Pearl Harbor was an inside job. They are wrong and should be laughed at. US intelligence at the time only expected some Japanese action around the Philippines or Guam. which were much closer to Japan itself. No one thought Japan could hide a carrier force and sneak it as far out as Hawaii. Not even Nazi Germany was aware of what was going on, though Hitler was ecstatic when it did happen.
That's strike three, but let's go one more round!
4. You're an idiot of the highest caliber if you believe 9/11 was an inside job. Not only are you ignoring the previous terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, but you're also ignoring all the evidence that has been internationally verified and accepted that points to it being an attack from Taliban extremists.
In short, read a book, conspiracy theorist.
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@Buildings1772 That was a bit of a typo on my part. My brain was elsewhere, sorry. I'll give you a classic example to clear this up.
The Federal Reserve has a mandate that must keep 10% of all deposits in reserves. So Bob goes into his bank, Bank A, and deposits $100. Following Fed guidelines, Bank A takes the $100, keeps $10 of it in reserve, and loans out the other $90. As you can see here, no money was created. A bank MUST have the 10% reserves to cover their loans in order for the transaction to be legal.
So Bank A lends the money to Joe, who deposits the $90 into Bank B. Bank B then does similar as before, taking 10% of it ($9) and keeping it reserve, and loaning out the other $81.
With $19 in reserve and $171 loaned out on an initial deposit of only $100, so money was created, but no bank created it. They simply lent out money from their reserves.
My brain fart was talking about the end without context. I was suggesting that a bank would take a multiple of the $10 they have to keep in reserve and loan it out, even though they were still deposited a full $100.
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Ha, you know nothing of finance. We've had fractional reserve banking since the existence of banks themselves (so back during the Knight's Templar). After all, that's how banks become profitable. Also the reserve rate is usually around 10%. The Federal Reserve in the United States mandates that, and most other central banks have it around there too.
You also never addressed what the problem is. I deposit $100 into a bank. The bank loans $90 of that to Joes Schmoe. Joes uses it to pay Raul, who put the money into his bank, and that bank loans out $81 of it. So what's the problem? I benefit from have my money in a secure institution, earning small amount of interest for me. The bank benefits from being able to charge interest on these loans, generating a profit. Joe benefits from being able to have access to the money in the first place (he obviously thought that taking out a loan was better than reneging on his payment to Raul, so he's better off in this situation), and Raul benefits from being repaid. No one in this scenario is worse off from the bank existing.
"But what if everyone demands their deposits at the same time!" they won't for several reasons: the law of large numbers, the Federal Reserve having mechanisms in place for people to have no reason to (not that they can't), etc. Also, even if that does happen, the FDIC personally guarantees any money deposited into a bank up to $150,000, so most people are insured by the FDIC. I fail to see a problem here.
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I just heard a bunch of libertarian buzzwords, and you advocating a system of banking that's basically our modern system except using different terms. Otherwise, we'd have inflation with or without fractional reserve banking as low amounts of predictable inflation is good for economic growth, and provides a buffer against deflation, which is almost the worst thing that can happen to an economy, especially during an economic downturn. Because of this, a 2% inflation rate is targeted by the US government, and that'd still be a target with or without fractional reserve banking, so your core argument doesn't hold any weight here, you're just throwing around a bunch of stupid buzzwords like 'non-aggression principal', which mean nothing, and you're shown a severe misunderstanding of our financial and monetary systems in general. Good job.
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Except that's not true. Yes, they did one strategic maneuver correctly, which let them take France. Cool (not really). Then they got surrounded and lost in North Africa and arrogant in the Eastern Front. They assumed that, like France, the German military could just blitz across the USSR and force them to capitulate, not taking into account several key factors proving that couldn't happen (including the USSR's lack of infrastructure, no easy way to cut off the Soviet military, etc). Still, they only stockpiled enough supplies to last a few months at most. The campaign began in early summer. So when the Soviets were able to hold them off to winter, you'll never guess what happened. The German military started running out of supplies had didn't have the equipment for winter. Best army my ass,
Furthermore, you realize any modern military would cream them, right? Ever implies of all time. Considering A modern battle tank couldn't be penetrated by even a German Panther, nor could the German Luftwaffe do anything to a Eurofighter or F-16, it's safe to say that claim is hilariously false. Let's not glorify a group of genocidal maniacs, okay?
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Wait, how? You realize the Battle of Bataan wasn't a naval battle, right? Besides some transports and escorts, the Japanese navy was uninvolved. Sure, at the time some military officials made such a claim, but that claim was quickly refuted after the war by military historians, especially since Japanese troops were being pulled away from Bataan to help in out in the Dutch East Indies.
Japan also didn't perform any better at sea than the United States. In fact, I'd argue the opposite. As the Battle of the Corral Sea showed, the Japanese were pretty bad when it came to recouping their losses to their airmen due to how they were trained, one of the more important reasons for their defeat at the Battle of Midway. Ignoring all that though, the worst naval defeat the US experienced during the entire theater was the First Battle of Savo Island, and that battle involved no aircraft, aircraft carriers, submarines, or battleships. Saying the Japanese navy was superior to the Japanese at 'open war at sea' just doesn't make sense, even early on in the war.
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That claim is ludicrous. Even if Germany achieved air superiority, they had no way of succeeding in a naval invasion. As the kamikaze strikes showed in the Pacific Theater later into the war, air power alone wasn't enough to break a navy, and Germany's armaments weren't meant to go up against a navy. Moreover, half of Germany's navy was already at the bottom of the ocean from their invasion of Norway, including their only carrier, so how exactly was Germany's army even supposed to make it to the beaches? Swim? Good luck with that. Beyond that, the UK had just as many troops in the UK preparing for an invasion as Germany had for the entirety of Operation Sealion. The whole thing was doomed from the start.
Keep in mind that the Western Allies, when they had complete naval and air superiority, paratroopers, and a huge intelligence campaign convincing the German leadership that they were planning on invading Calais, not Normandy, still struggled to take the beaches of Normandy. How you expect Germany to do similar with no naval superiority, slight air superiority if that, a half division of paratroopers at best (as half of them were killed or wounded when they tried to secure the beaches in the Battle of Crete, and with the British fully knowing where the invasion was going to happen is beyond me.
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As for the Axis powers of Germany and Italy, they fought the war for several reasons. Italy could mainly be boiled down to trying to reclaim some past glory. They believed that they were betrayed at the Paris Peace Conference which ended WW1 as they weren't given all the territory they were promised when they entered the war, so they weren't terribly friendly with the Allied powers. Moreover, Mussolini was looking to restore the the honor and prestige Italy once had under the days of the Roman Empire, and so wanted African colonies and Eastern European territory to make Italy appear more powerful.
Germany is much more complicated. A lot of it has to do with a similar betrayal Italy felt. Germany was beat by the end of WW1, there is no doubt about it, but the German government never really shared the fact with the German people. Even towards the end of 1918, the year WW1 ended, the German people believed that, while their economic situation was desperate due to the British blockade, Germany was militarily beating the Entente Powers, and so would soon win the war. German soldiers were still occupying French territory after all, and they just ended their war with Russia, potentially freeing up many of their soldiers, so they were optimistic. The German government, including the military leadership, realized that the German military was on the brink of collapse by July of 1918, resulting in the Entente Powers reclaiming so much territory and pushing into Austria-Hungary.
So when it came time for the armistice and, eventually, the Treaty of Versailles, the people of Germany were expecting a treaty among equals. Sure, they might have to make a few territorial concessions, particularly Alsacc-Lorraine, but by-in-large Germany would gain all the territory they acquired from their treaty with Russia. This did not happen. The Entente, realizing the state Germany was in, did end up treating Germany like a defeated power (though not terribly harshly), causing Germany to feel betrayed by the treaty they eventually signed.
Much of the origins of WW2 for Germany deal with them trying to reclaim territory they thought rightfully belonged to them before the betrayal.
Add to that some bullshit racial beliefs and Malthusian economics about how the world was becoming overpopulated and soon there would be mass starvation due to a lack of resources, as well as the Nazi belief that a subset of Germans were superior to other races, particularly those of Eastern Europe. Sprinkle in boat loads of antisemitism, which existed throughout European history but were inflamed by WW1, the Great Depression, etc and you have WW2.
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I'm going to be honest, I don't really like the premise of this video and find its arguments to be very faulty. One of your big claims is that the goal of a business is to cut their bottom line (costs) so of course they'd make minimum viable products. This claim is wrong. Yes, cutting costs is one way a business can become profitable, but its only one of many ways a business can be profitable. You really think Apple's entire strategy revolves around cutting costs? Of course not, they focus on have a reliable brand image people can trust and being able to charge a premium for creating innovative products.
Beyond that, games as a service hypothetically can work. There's nothing about the concept itself that is outright horrible. These games as a service games that have come out say more about the developers than the type of game. For instance Bioware recently created both Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. Both tanked. You are using one to claim that games as a service doesn't work, but you would never use Andromeda to claim that RPG's don't work. In fact, considering they both fail, it's fair to say that Anthem didn't fail because it was a games as a service game, but because Bioware just couldn't make a good product, something they proved with Andromeda.
You then claim these games as service games tend to reuse assets, mostly pointing your finger at Fallout 76.....Did you forget Fallout New Vegas was a thing? Similar to Fallout 76, Bethesda let another developer produce a new Fallout game using assets from a previous one (Fallout New Vegas heavily borrowing from Fallout 3). Fallout 76 being a games as a service game has nothing to do with it, Bethesda's business model does. Based on previous evidence, even if Fallout 76 wasn't a games as a service game, it'd still reuse assets.
So we come back to the original problem. What's inherently bad about games as a service games?
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The motivation and driver of World War 2 was the betrayal the German's felt after World War 1 (however warranted or not) and the Great Depression. This is due to the fact that the horrors of that war rarely reached Germany itself, and many Germans thought they were winning the war up until the very end. Expecting light terms in the peace treaty, they were shocked and outraged to find the Treaty of Versailles to be much harsher than that (though not nearly as harsh as people like Keynes would have you believe). They took their outrage out against the Jews for their perceived betrayal of the German war effort during World War 1.
In the interwar period, while unstable, the German economy improved, well surpassing their economic output before the war and once again becoming the dominant power in continental Europe. Then the Great Depression hit and the German people got disillusioned due to it. This led to the rise of the Nazi party as they offered a way out and an escape from the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. After a bunch of concessions known as appeasement, Germany finally stepped too far and demanded the city of Danzig as well as the strip of land connecting East Prussia to the rest of Germany. The Allies didn't agree to this, so Germany invaded anyway, sparking World War 2.
So what was the main driver of the rise of fascism in Germany? Well the Great Depression. It caused enough discontent for the Nazi party to win the election in 1933 (similar to how the Democrats won the election in the US in 1932). Antisemitism and the so-called betrayal were drivers too, but that wouldn't explain why the Nazis won in 1933 and not, say, any of the elections prior when the two drivers were an issue. What was the main driver of World War 2 proper? Hitler's ambitions to own all the land Germany did before World War 1 and his belief that he could just step over the Allies. He even created a false flag operation to justify his invasion of Poland that no one bought as part of Operation Himmler.
Of these two drivers, one was discussed in the video, and I think the other one was discussed in his rise of Hitler video.
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The British government was unable to believe Germany and knew that, if they accepted the peace only to be betrayed, they'd be in a much worse position. The British government at the time was trying to convince the US government to support them militarily and therefore was using its propaganda to push the war as a defense of international democracy (something the US could get behind.
The peace offered by Germany only guaranteed that they would give up their occupations of France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. It would not give up Norway, Poland, or any other territory they held in Eastern Europe. As those countries were democratic, the British propaganda could no longer say that they were trying to defend international democracy when they threw democratic nations to the dogs. This would've hurt their support in the US, so, if Germany ending up betraying the UK, the UK couldn't count on much US help like they were receiving and hoping to receive.
Otherwise, you realize that the Holocaust would've continued to well past 1945 if Germany only had the USSR as an adversary, right? In other words, much more people would've died if the UK took the peace instead of if they didn't. You portray them as warmongers, which is dumb since they took every action to prevent a war. That was the whole point of appeasement.
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@CountingStars333 Uh, no, not at all. First, Banks can't just "call up" a loan unless the borrower is already about to default. No loan works that way. When you take a loan, you sign a contract saying you will pay a set amount over a set period of time. So if I take out a $100,000 loan over 15 years, I have to pay $100,000 within 15 years.
Moreover, the market bust generally happens before banking constraint. The event which set off the Financial Crisis was the housing market crash, not the other way around. When people weren't buying homes fast enough, the value of said homes plummeted. As many people took out mortgages with the expectation that housing was an investment which would only increase in value, they were screwed when instead their housing valuation fell.
They still had the $150,000 loan for their house, but then there house was only worth $100,000. Also they only had the means to afford a $120,000 house. What could they do? Well there only choice was to default. And people did that in waves. And this is what triggered the Financial Crisis itself.
Of course manias and panics also happen irrespective of what the banking industry does. They're just a natural part of the business cycle.
Finally, the Great Depression had nothing to do with overproduction. Overproduction wasn't even a factor. The problem was that, while global supply remained relatively the same, global demand for good plummeted when, due to poor policy relating to the gold standard, several developed countries went into a deflationary period at once. This, along with similar deflationary pressure in the US, led to a huge fall in demand for goods, particularly US goods, in both foreign and domestic markets.
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The philosophy behind shortselling is that the stock trader believes that the stock price for a certain company will fall for whatever reason. So if Company A's stock price is $30, I might believe that the company's stock price will fall to $25 in two month's time and decide to do something about it.
Basically shortselling is selling stocks you don't have. Say I work at an investment bank and three of my clients have 50 shares in Company A. That means my bank owns at least 50 shares of company A's stock which we hold for said clients.....except the bank doesn't actually have to hold the stock at all times. As long as the bank has the funds to acquire the stock after their client decides to do something with it, they're golden. So, me, Mr. Investment banker, believes that Company A's stock is going to drop $5 in two months time. What should I do?
Well, instead of taking (what I believe will be) a guaranteed loss, why not just sell the 50 shares now at $30 and then buy them back two months later at $25. That way the bank makes a profit of $5 a share, or $250, which we can reinvest. That's all shortselling is. Selling stock you don't technically own with the aim of buying the stock back later at (hopefully) a discounted price.
Note: Beginners should almost NEVER try to shortsell a stock as they fail more than they succeed. Due to the nature of economies, stock prices generally increase in value, so betting on a decrease is betting against the odds. Moreover, you can take a huge hit if the stock price raises in value as then you are liable to buy back the stock at an increased price. If company A overperformed and their stock price increased to $35, the investment bank would be forced to take the hit themselves and pay $250 more to acquire shares they should've owned in the first place.
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No, and I hate this kind of argument because it makes people seem weaker than they really are. Advertisers don't like controversial content on videos showing their ads because, unsurprisingly, their products then get associated with the content in question. It's the exact same reason advertisers will pull advertisements from traditional networks like Fox, MSNBC< TBS, etc. Advertisers are trying to get you to buy their product. Associating it with something the public like is only going to hurt that fact, and therefore the advertisers aren't going to pay to shoot themselves in the foot.
So when advertisers threaten to stop advertising on YouTube for their advertisements showing up on all these controversial videos on YouTube that are annoying the public, what's YouTube supposed to do? They're a business. They need to make a profit to exist. As soon as that doesn't happen, they have no reason to exist and will be shoot done by Alphabet. So they have to sate the advertisers by cracking down on these controversial videos and making sure ads don't play on them.
Has it gone too far? Yes, but it's not because people are pussies, it's because Youtube's algorithm for detecting controversial videos is too hyperactive.
Businesses want money. Associating their products with anything people might not like is exactly how you fail. Therefore, they are entirely in their right to pull advertisements from YouTube for this.
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Holy shit, I thought you were just ignorant of, well, everything you spoke of really (as a vast majority of your claims were outright wrong), but then you went into straight Holocaust denial, and there is no excuse for that. I also love how you claim you're "into" economics, yet make a claim that has nothing to do with economics, not even economic history really, and is again, flagrantly false as the Nazi kept records of all the money they ended up taking from Holocaust victims, and the number was WAY higher than yours.
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1. The North African campaign was huge as the territory in North Africa had a lot of resources pivotal to the war effort (particularly oil) and the Suez Canal. Italy made a lot of mistakes in the war. Starting the North African campaign wasn't one of them.
2. Japan going to war with the US was actually encouraged by Hitler, though he didn't know about Pearl Harbor specifically. This is because the United States was already taking steps in support of the Allies, like escorting British convoys along the North Atlantic, taking over the British occupation of Iceland (when the Icelandic government formally asked), selling the UK a bunch of old US destroyers, and, of course, Lend-Lease to both the UK and USSR during the war. In fact the United States Navy already had several conflicts Germany before Pearl Harbor, including a German U-boat torpedoing and sinking a US destroyer, killing over a hundred US sailors.
The US had a big impact on the war, but the war was lost for Germany as soon as the UK said they wouldn't surrender, and definitely lost when they chose to invade the USSR, where 80% of the German army would end up fighting.
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@liberatetheworld1776 Wow, you....really don't know history, do you? First, Germany didn't just start crumbling as soon as the US joined the war. Besides some fighting in North Africa and Italy, the US didn't even engage German soldiers until June of 1944 (D-Day). By then Germany was already on their backfoot, unable to stop the overwhelming force of the Russia military. Also, for most of WW2 the US military wasn't amazing at strategy. For instance, the US, with coaxing from the USSR, wanted to launch the D-Day invasions two years earlier, when their was next to no planning or supplies gathered for such a plan. It was only when the British said that the invasion wasn't possible that the US agreed to a much more feasible strategy (Operation Torch).
I also never mentioned an invasion of the US as an such a move would be impossible. The military leadership of the time knew this. The USSR just didn't have a surface fleet capable of competing with the US, so they had no way of reaching it safely. This is similar to the UK (which would be supported by the USN), That's why the UK would be the only holdout in Europe in case of a Soviet invasion. It was the only place the USSR couldn't actually reach.
As for forces in Europe, for the 1940's and 1950's (and later honestly) the Soviets had a larger military presence in Europe. That's why war planning exercises by the Western Allies, later NATO always expected a successful Soviet offensive into Central and Western Europe. The US had a large presence, sure, but it wasn't nearly as large as the USSR, and by the surrender of Germany, there were constant calls for the men to leave, whether to support the planned invasion of Japan (which was cancelled), or to return to the US. That's why NATO was formed in the first place. So that a coordinated military presence could be guaranteed in Europe even when most US troops left. This led to the controversy which was letting West Germany joining NATO for added military protection.
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@liberatetheworld1776 Dude, read a history book. You're treating Americans like some superior people. The last guy who thought his race was superior fucked up his country and committed suicide.
Beyond that, Germany invaded the USSR in June, 1941, before the US was even in the war (which they joined in December 1941). The Eastern Front, or the war between Germany and the USSR was a continuous conflict between the two countries that lasted until Germany's surrender. It was full of offensives, counter offensives, etc. Eventually though Germany didn't have enough men and supplies to hold the line, and the USSR pushed them back to Berlin from the east. This was 1943-1945. The Western Allies didn't land at Normandy until June 1944. They pushed Germany from the west. The USSR clearly pushed Germany back before the Normandy landings. Beyond that, it was agreed upon at one of the wartime conferences that it would be the USSR, not the Western Allies, that would assault Berlin, which they successfully did. Your reverence of the US military isn't helping matters. It wasn't particularly special, and it didn't have some special leadership that made it superior to others.
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The idea that Hitler was socialist is so absurd that it's hilarious when people from the right say it (a reverse of paraphrase of your own comment on 'the left')
Hitler was anti-socialist. What was the first thing he did when he came to power? Kill or imprison every socialist in the Nazi Party and German government. Because we all know how people of the same ideology love to kill each other? In fact the first concentration camps were used to house political prisoners, mainly communists and socialists.
So what else did Hitler do while in power? Freeze worker wages, which was antisocialist (though the use of a monetary system at all was antithetical to socialism), crack down on worker strikes, dismantle nearly every labor union, etc. Wow, that really doesn't sound socialist, does it?
So then what did Hitler believe when it comes to socialism? Well besides him infamous "people are inherently unequal" quote, which is antithetical to socialism again, he also numerous times stated how he wanted socialism to die, like here: "In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated." (page 303 of Mein Kampf)
But then why were they called national socialists? Because socialist was just a buzzword at the time and Hitler was hoping to attract disenfranchised voters to his cause. Even then most of his base came from the conservative and liberal parties, the socialist and communist parties lost next to none of their voter base even when the Nazis grew in popularity. This was all before the communist and socialist parties were abolished by Hitler of course.
BTW: learn the definition of socialism. You come off as ignorant otherwise. Government intervention does not equal socialism. Socialism is clearly defined as the collective/governmental ownership of the factors of production. That's it. Also, before you say it, I'm not a socialist.
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The US government always wants to have some debt. It might seem counterintuitive since debt itself is usually considered bad, but that isn't always true. For instance, if you could borrow a set of money for 5% interest, and then invest it and make 8% interest, you totally should as you effectively made money. That's what the government does. They might issue a bond at 5% interest, but then they'd invest it in an infrastructure project estimated to raise GDP by an amount larger than the 5% interest, meaning the US government made a profit.
Beyond that, US debt is loved by investors as its considered the safest investment asset in existence. If you have a stake in a mutual fund or the likes, you most likely own a piece of government debt. So investors would have to look elsewhere for safe investments.
Finally, the Federal Reserve would have to look elsewhere for an asset to hold against Federal Reserve Notes printed. Currently Congress demands that they hold US government debt as the asset, but without the debt, the Fed would probably look to gold or something else.
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@leolamminmaki4642 I thought it was pretty obvious why I mentioned both. There is some debate over when WW2 started. Most controversially the conflict that would be tied into WW2 (and the conflict that would last the whole war) was Japan's invasion of China. Considering this theater was a part of WW2 and began before 1939, it only makes sense to say that the war started when this theater was initiated. If we're using that as the basis, then Japan was clearly the first to use strategic bombing.
There's also the other argument that the war started in 1939, when Germany initiated hostilities and when the war started attracting countless superpowers. Using this argument, Germany would be the first to start strategic bombing as they started bombing Polish cities as soon as their invasion started. In contrast, the Japanese were bombing China less frequently for a number of reasons.
Also, let's be fair here. You only give a crap about the European Theater. When you make a claim as bold as "the UK started strategic bombing" you're going to be referring to the war in Europe only. So for the war in Europe, the above paragraph is your answer.
Then there's the argument that WW2 only became a World War in 1941 as that's when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, which not only brought in the USA, but also several South American nations, meaning the war finally spanned all the continents of the globe.
Ignoring ALL OF THIS, you're just deflecting at this point. You know you're claim's full of shit, so you're just trying to get me on whatever you can. Germany was the bad guys. End of story.
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@Maxxrevv What about penny stocks? The reason they are so lowly valued is because they are risky. So, sure, I guess a billionaire could invest in a lot of risky small businesses if they wanted to, but it wouldn't influence the economy at large and they'd set themselves up for losing a large chunk of it very quickly.
Furthermore, you realize billionaires (and the uber wealthy in general) typically don't have much liquid cash sitting around, right? For instance Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men alive and the creator of Amazon, has a net worth of $116 billion. Impressive, right? Except $106 billion of that is solely in Amazon stock. And that's not even getting into his other numerous investments. Even if he wanted to manipulate share prices of other stock, he wouldn't have the resources.
And even if he did, what then? He'd only be able to manipulate it by the price he's willing to buy it. In other words, the price of Walmart stock would only get to $150 a share because he was willing to buy it at $150 a share and he already bought everything below that. So now the stock price is "artificially" higher than the market rate, but the only thing he got out of that is some overvalued stock which would soon fall back in price.
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@NickSmith-hv9zi Ha, what? You realize his financials are easily tracked, right? First, the Biden family has always been pretty wealthy and Biden grew up privileged. Second, he had been making a lot of money basically straight out of law school, working as an attorney and renting out several properties. and later getting a large income as a Senator.
"But in 2016 he didn't have a lot of money!" You mean because he was trying to financially support his son dying of fucking brain cancer? Whatever, use his son's death for political gain. Whatever.
"But then he earned so much in 2017! It's only possible if the "Establishment" helped him!" Wrong, he made a crap ton of money from speaking tours, both his and his wife's salaries as professors, and, most importantly, a book deal. :https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2019/07/10/bidens-made-nearly-twice-as-much-in-2017-than-previous-19-years-combined/#6b01e48b68ef
Seriously, you're acting like this information is hard to fine even when he releases his tax returns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2019/08/28/joe-bidens-net-worth-how-the-2020-presidential-candidate-built-a-9-million-fortune/#27b495ff104d
As for the Burisma scandal, this article beautifully goes into why you're full of shit: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/1/20891510/hunter-biden-burisma-ukraine-shokin
I also love how, in order to try to prove corruption, Trump ended up committing numerous acts of corruption himself that nearly got him impeached (and should've if it weren't for partisanship).
So are we don here, Mr. Troll?
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@NickSmith-hv9zi Good job proving you never even looked at my sources. And you call me dumb. Yes, the Hunter saga played out, but it was irrespective of anything Biden did. Hunter used Biden's name to get the position, but Biden never condoned such a move. There was nothing illegal done there, especially not compared to anything the Trump family has done.
The James Biden case is similar. Him being a Biden got him a lot of attention, but outside of getting him to the negotiations simply by being a Biden, Joe Biden in no way participated in the ongoing dealings of his family: https://nypost.com/2019/10/15/joe-bidens-brother-and-son-have-a-long-history-of-profiting-off-his-name/
“Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,”
“People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama, he would get in the door easier.”
Taken straight from the article since I know you won't read it.
It's also funny because Biden specifically railed against the favoritism shown to his family, particularly James, calling out the banks which had been giving him loans based solely on him being a Biden, saying that James should never have been given the loan.
I can't wait for you to eat your words when Trump comes down as one of the most corrupt presidents in history.
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While the answers above are right, there's also the aspect of the initial stock market offering being an investment on your business in the future.
Say, for instance, you own a store worth $100,000. Business has been booming and you want to expand into another two stores. Of course the expansions costs a lot of money though, and, while you're making money, you don't have enough to buy two new buildings. Instead you decide to sell 49% of your business for the funds to buy two more stores. In a few years time, you own 51% of three different stores for a total of $300,000. Even though you sold about half you stake in the company, your stake is still a higher value dollar wise that your 100% stakes was earlier.
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This is not true. Well mostly not true. The British government was sympathetic towards the CSA during the American Civil War, but its people, being harshly abolitionist, supported the North. It's important to note that, while the US tried to say that the fight wasn't over slavery to gain some support from people within the CSA, and, more importantly, the border states that remained neutral (since many of them were slave-owning), outside the US this was seen as the core issue before the Emancipation Proclamation. So the UK only ever offered very minimal support. They sent some military attachments to the Confederate army to observe their efforts, built a couple of blockade runners (not a significant amount), and tried to trade for cotton where they could, though they also started focusing trade elsewhere for cotton, causing a lot of problems for the CSA financially.
France was very similar to the UK in this period. They also found the CSA's cotton vital and very timidly supported the CSA, though I don't know of any support for their army or navy. France was actually slightly in favor of a military intervention, but only if the UK would also agree to it, which the UK obviously didn't. This caused France to focus their efforts in Mexico while the US was busy fighting their civil war.
Central Europe never really got involved much beyond shipping some stockpiled munitions to the North.
After this period saw growing relations between the UK and US, particularly the early 1890's when a territorial dispute broke out between the UK and Venezuela. This eventually came to blows when a British fleet occupied a Venezuelan port. Such a move drew ire from the United States as the public found it in blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine, something Venezuela itself was claiming. It's important to note that, while not as powerful as the Royal Navy, the American navy was very powerful, and the most powerful in the region. Eventually both the UK and Venezuela agreed to arbitration by the US, and the US ruled favorable for the UK. This recognition of the Monroe Doctrine before by the UK as well as the US' favorable ruling towards the UK helped draw their relations closer.
Beyond that, the US and UK became increasingly important trade partners to one another, didn't really have any more territorial disputes that needed to be settled, were culturally similar (always a plus), and the UK started courting the US when Germany started gaining strength, particularly when Germany started to build up its navy to one day surpass the UK's. The UK was hoping to prevent a naval arms race with two powers at once. Even then, they didn't become true allies until WW1.
Ignoring all this, I think the narrator took the claim of the US and UK's "special relationship" and took it as also implying that their relationship was long-lasting, even though it wasn't.
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No, the required reserve is 10%, and you skipped so many steps to reach the $100 million dollars (really ten with the new ratio), that you're claim comes off as disingenuous. On the deposit of 1 million dollars, the bank is only allowed to loan out 90% of it, or $900,000. The money then can go to another bank, which would do similar. This process continues until the absolute limit is reached, which is 1/(rr), or 1/(.1) in this case, which is 10x.
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@JustRockMySoul Wow, you've really eaten the conspiracy cake. First: Your realize that that quote itself disproves the claim, right? The claim 'History is written by the victors' is attributed to famed Nazi Hermann Goring, you know, one of the losers of history. Yet everyone takes what he said as fact. Funny that.
Other good examples include the Lost Cause mentality after the American Civil War, and the Treaty of Versailles being unduly harsh after WW1. History isn't written by the winners.
As for your examples, you use a recent incident that no one has any proof about yet. It's just a "he said, she said' type of deal. There is no credible proof either way for where the drone was.
And do I even have to address how 9/11 wasn't a false flag attack? There's already been large analyses on experts on the issue that debunk this claim. Yes, yes, I know all experts are bought by the illuminati or whatever, but it's safe to say I trust them more than you.
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That's because what you said is bullshit. Banks straight up don't create money out of thin air. That's illegal; plain and simple. Only the Federal Reserve (or other central banks (Read: not commercial banks)) can print money. When a bank loans out money to an individual, it MUST have the money in reserve. Else it will go below the required reserve requirements of the Fed (or other central bank) and face governmental action. They can get this money from their own reserves, take out a loan from another bank, or get a loan from the Federal Reserve. Either way, when the transaction takes place, they MUST have the money.
So why has money in circulation increased? The process of fractional reserve banking. No individual bank 'creates' money. The process does when banks lend out a portion of their deposits. Example:
John deposits $100 in his bank. The bank takes 10% of it and holds it in reserving, lending out the remaining $90 to Bill. Bill then takes the $90 and deposits it in his bank, which does the same as before, keeping 10% of it ($9) and holding it in reserve, lending out the extra $81.
We not have $90+81 loaned out, and a further $10+$9 in reserve ($190 total) on an initial deposit of only $100. Money has been created, but no bank created it. This process is also overseen by the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) so it's no scam.
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No, the strategy that made defeating France so easy during World War 2 (and the only hard part for Germany until their African Campaign) was going around the French fortifications at the Maginot Line by crossing the Ardennes Forest, a forest that, up to that point, had been impassible. This plan was made by both Manstein and Halder though, not Hitler.
Otherwise the German war effort failed in just about every aspect. Their air force couldn't contend with the British RAF (and later Soviet and American air forces), the German navy was useless against the British navy, and even their lauded U-boats, while successful, weren't strong enough to really damage the war effort to any major degree. The German campaign in Africa, while seeing some successes originally, ended up with the complete destruction of a German army due to the combined efforts of the British and Americans. And their campaign in the USSR went similarly poorly.
How this is considered an expert waging of war is beyond me.
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@alexiscp123 The US has nothing to do with Palestine, didn't interact with Cuba beyond the Bay of Pigs incident, North Korea was the aggressor in the conflict, never attacked people living in China (never even invaded China, the Japanese cities are Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, once again, Japan was the aggressor, and lastly North Vietnam was also the aggressor.
So you named three conflicts the US was a defender in and another that didn't happen. Congratulations on being ignorant! Also even if the US was the aggressor and we added up all these conflicts together, they'd still be only a fraction of the total dead from the German Holocaust, which was an intentional killing program. This isn't counting the tens of millions of deaths from WW2 that would also be attributed to Hitler (especially with your logic). So no matter what Hitler killed way more people than the US in the entire 20th and 21st centuries so far, yet you still choose to defend him. It's really telling of your character.
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Germany's government basically focused all their resources bar a few on rebuilding the Germany military. Conversely the British government invested in public works and the likes for most of the interwar period, and only started serious rearmament efforts of their own around 1937. This is due to the fact that their administration perceived no possible conflicts for them to get entangled in until 1937, with the annexation of Austria by Germany. It was only then that the British government realized that Germany was being a bit too aggressive for their tastes and started rearming. Also the British and French were still weary of another world war, and preparing for another would not look good in the public eye.
Also the French (and British) troops that were encircled were actually cut off in Belgium. Knowing full well that Germany wouldn't attack the well defended Maginot Line (the defensive line on the French German border). Both countries planned on sending their most veteran soldiers, the best the had, into Belgium to stop the German offensive there, saving both Belgium and France in the process. The problem was that the German offensive into Belgium was only a diversion, and their real offensive was going to happen in the Ardennes forest. This forest is just south of Belgium on the French Germany border, and the only part of France's defensive line that wasn't well defended. This is due to the fact that no one thought it was possible to cross the Ardennes forest as it was just so dense. Well Germany was able to cross it and punch a whole right through the defensive line. They then blitzed west all the way to the ocean, taking France's northern borders. This left the veteran British and French troops trapped in Belgium with a lack of communication and diminishing supplies.
They themselves still fought on, climaxing in the battle of Dunkirk, where a valiant effort by the RAF and French forces acting as a rearguard defense of the city, allowed the entire British Expeditionary Force and some French forces to escape back to Britain. That was the bulk of the French forces though, and otherwise the Germany offensive was too quick for the French forces to receive proper communications over what was going on, so the French defense was very disorganized at best.
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@uturniaphobic Are....are you really being serious right now? What could JFK, the president of the United States during the most tense period in the Cold War, be talking about when he refers to a monolithic force opposing the US on every front. Huh, let me think. Now it could be, maybe, possible, the USSR?
In the exact same speech he also said: "its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."
and: "For the facts of the matter are that this nation's foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage"
Basically his speech is an appeal to the media to not so easily give away sensitive information as the information would then be used by the Soviet Union. JFK said he wouldn't go so far as to ban the information being printed as the US wasn't at war and freedom of the press, but he would instead appeal to their patriotism.
Federal Reserve note don't bear interest. I'm not even sure where that conspiracy theory came from as it has no bearing on reality. The only interest the Fed makes money from are interest on government debt, which they are required to hold due to Congressional legislation, and interest on loans to banking institutions. Around 97% of this interest is remitted back to the US Treasury every year too. The Fed has audited financial statements you can find online if you don't believe me.
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@uturniaphobic Wow, your evidence is so amazing you can't even name it, besides saying it's in the City of London somewhere. I'll go scour the entire city to find it right now! Also, as I already showed you, the Federal Reserve itself claims they are a government institution. They didn't admit shit.
The planted Wilson in office? Are you high. He won a federal election and had both the electoral representatives needed and the popular vote. It really wasn't even a contest.
As for the Federal Reserve Act, we're getting into conspiracy central. First, Jekyll Island has nothing to do with the Federal Reserve system. The Jekyll Island meeting created the plan for a National Reserve Association, which would be struck down by the Democrats in Congress(ironic since you consider Wilson to be a plant). A separate act created from a compromise by two Democrats and based largely off of the ideas of the head of the National Monetary Commission, a commission given authority by the US Congress to find a good regulatory authority for monetary policy. It's head was also a famous Republican. So two democrats compromise using the framework set up by a Republican. Yeah, I fail to see a problem here.
But the actual vote, you cry. What about it? The Senate approved it 54-34. Meaning 88 Senators voted on the bill. This is also in the time when the Senate only had 96 representative since Alaska and Hawaii weren't states. Also this wasn't during the Christmas season:
This conspiracy doesn't even have any legs to stand on as the Senate is legally unable to vote on an issue unless they reach the necessary minimum number of Senators, which is 51. With 51 members, no Senate meeting has any legal validation. Even then, you realize absent senators can still vote, right? That's how the bill got 11 of its 'yeas'
Seriously, dude, Google some of these claims before your spout them. Simple searches should clear most of this information up.
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+nekocekoBiH and this is counter to my argument how? Yes, the USSR was willing to use its military to stop Germany.....if they had British support. You know what other country was willing to use its army as long as they had British support? France. You know what other country didn't like the idea of Germany remilitarizing the Rhineland region and taking most of Czechoslovakia? France. The USSR's actions during Appeasement were no different than the actions taken by France, and, to a lesser extent, the UK. In fact, the USSR was the one to extend Appeasement through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which allowed Germany to take over a huge chunk of Poland, and agreed to a trade agreement where Germany would get vital resources to their war effort. Britain and France on the other hand declared war on Germany in defense of Poland. In fact, while Britain and France fought Germany in support of another country's sovereignty, the USSR only joined when they themselves were invaded.
And honestly, like the United States, the UK had the least reason to join the war since Germany's actions didn't threaten the sovereignty of the UK. They were an island nation with the strongest fleet in the world (similar in strength to the US navy) and an air force that, as shown, was strong enough to beat the German Luftwaffe. They could've used a similar argument the United States did to support their neutral policy during World War 2, and yet they chose to honor their agreement anyway.
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Why, the bullshit you are spewing Is insane. First: you aren't giving the French any agency. It was the French who chose to ally with Poland before even the British. It was France who had a particularly hostile disposition toward Germany in the interwar years (however deserved). The UK was far more sympathetic towards the Germans than the French ever were as shown in works like The Economic Consequences of the Peace by famous British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Second: The UK sent what forces they had to France. Unsurprisingly a naval power with an all volunteer army only just started to remilitarize didn't exactly have the largest army. That's why the BEF was meant to be a veteran, heavily mobile military to aid France. It was supposed to be a spearhead.
Third: Saying the UK "Just sat around" is a disgrace to history. The British, while defending their own isles, was fighting the British and Italians in North Africa, trying to gain superiority in the Mediterranean Sea and suffering a lot of casualties doing so, trying to gain superiority in the Atlantic Ocean, and trying to shore up their defenses in Asia due to the expanding threat of Japan.
Fourth: Your claim doesn't even make sense. If the British suffered even have of what Germany did to the French, they would've surrendered? You realize 99% of the stuff that happened to France happened AFTER they surrendered, right? Talk about ignoring history. Also good job ignoring how the British were preparing to defend their very isles from an invasion and create a private militia to do so. Oh, and how Germany did try to make peace with the UK in 1941 and it was rejected.
Fifth: Your last claim is also so full of crap. The UK cheated France out of every worthwhile colony? Fucking what? Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria, etc were excellent colonies! Way better than countries like Germany or Japan ever had. Let's also not forgot that they owned a huge chunk of the modern day US, which they voluntarily sold to the US without any input in the UK. Love to know how the UK cheated them there. Otherwise, they were outcompeted for colonies. You'd never complain that the US "cheated" Spain out of Puerto Rico, the Phillippines, Guam, etc, would you? Or how Mexico was cheated out of California, Arizona, New Mexico, etc.
Sixth: France had next to no ability to join Hitler. Part of Hitler's ambitions was reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine from France. Joining Hitler would've required France giving it up, which would've been the most humiliating thing possible. And what would they have gotten in return? Nothing
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@Audioteka-Vsemirnoy-Literatury Talk about conspiracy theories. Yes, a Serbian-nationalist group assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Anyone who knows their history should know this. Yet their is no similar event to cause WW2. No leader in Europe was assassinated around 1939, and especially not in Germany, Poland, the UK, or France.
Otherwise, yes, nationalism and militarism (at least in the part of Germany and Italy) did play a major part in WW2, but let me ask you this: what caused the nationalism and militarism to rise? They couldn't have always been their after all, else WW2 would've started much earlier. What caused the rising resentment for the liberal order and the desire to create a new utopia or sorts? The Great Depression. The economies of Europe were doing somewhat well for themselves in the 1920's, so, while there may have been some resentment, the people of Germany were largely able to look past it since their lives were personally doing well. After the stock market crash in 1929 though, people's lives were completely ruined. They had no money, no job, and no assistance from the government. This led to renewed resentment, especially against the Jews, who were already scapegoated numerous times, including as a major reason for Germany's defeat in WW1. Add on to it the fact that political parties in Germany were literally campaigning on the Jews being the fault for everything bad, and you can see where the nationalism and antisemitism took off.
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@vagabondwastrel2361 Wow, someone really took the Red Pill. Sigh, you really shouldn't be talking about issues you have no knowledge of, even if you're just using them as an analogy. For example, the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam is much greater than just inheritance law, and trying to generalize the whole conflict into that blurb is asinine. Ask any Sunni fighting for the Islamic State in Syria why they are fighting and I can guarantee you they won't say, "well hundreds of years ago in Egypt....."
Your claim is even more ignorant when you realize Hitler decried socialism many times in his speeches, particularly after he took power. He even mentions it in Mein Kampf when he blames the fall of Russia and the turning of it (and the related countries) into the Soviet Union, which he claimed was secretly controlled by Jewish puppets.
"Do not forget that the international Jew who completely dominates Russia today regards Germany not as an ally, but as a state destined to the same fate." That's a direct quote from Mein Kampf.
Yes, in the 1920's there were socialists within the Nazi party, but they were purged from the party almost immediately after Hitler took power in the Night of Long Knives. Even then, the leader of this left wing part of the party did not believe in the fundamental claims of socialism, saying "People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life, and are therefore to be valued unequally in their position in society and in the state." Keep in mind that this is the man that Hitler found so far left leaning that he had him and his followers extra-judicially killed.
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@leolamminmaki4642 It was critically important for the US to join the war. Could the war have been won without US help? Eh, maybe, but the US joining definitely changed how the war would progress. Without the US, the Invasion of Normandy (and similar invasions) never would've happened.
In the Pacific the situation would've been worse. Sure, China the UK, and India bogged down the Japanese army, but their navy was free to run wild, as evident by the fact that a huge task force was able to move all the way to Hawaii. This navy (and their army contingents) were devastating Australia, New Zealand, the Dutch, and the UK. It was only thanks to key naval battles like the Coral Sea and Midway which finally alleviated the stress put on by the Japanese navy. These battles were fought mostly by Americans.
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@holdinmuhl4959 He did mention, if vaguely. Here is an excerpt from the speech:
"But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone– the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state and the devoted service of our 100 million people–the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
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@TeamJella No offense, but I find your arguments here to be boringly simplistic.
Would Guam have happened without Pearl Harbor? No, but that's also not what you claimed. You claimed that if Japan attack another Us territory outside of Pearl Harbor, the US probably wouldn't have reacted. That's straight up false for what I said above.
As for the battles themselves outside of Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Guam led to nearly 500 killed or captured by the Japanese. As we all know, the US doesn't care about its captured soldiers, right? The invasion of Wake Island, which was around the same time, resulted in nearly 500 more American soldiers being killed or wounded, with over 1,000 American civilians also being taken prisoner. You don't think the US would've care about that? The Japanese campaign in the Phillippines would also result in the deaths or capture of 23,000 US servicemen. Not Filipino nationals; their casualties would be even worse. You don't think the US would care about that?
Otherwise, you're just using hindsight bias in your argument. Oh, because Hawaii is considered a state now, it must have been hugely important to the American people and all Hawaiians must have been considered Americans in 1941. No, not at all. By 1959, it only had a population of 60,000, and a good chunk of that was native Hawaiian. Pearl Harbor was devastating because it was the largest Us base in the Pacific and where most of the US Pacific fleet was stationed. It wasn't devastating because of Hawaii specifically. If the base were in Guam, Wake island, the Philippines, etc, it would still be equally as devastating.
"do you think if the Soviets basically capitulate the germans on their own, and after things like stalingrad, they're going to just accept ceding territory just cuz they promised? "
All I can do is look at the facts, and facts are that they tended to honor their international agreements. They held to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact even when Germany broke it. They held to their agreement with the UK allowing Greece to fall under their influence when the Soviets could've easily occupied it themselves. And they allowed the formation of the post war institutions they agreed to in the various international conferences of the war. I'm not saying the Soviets were good, but they typically did what they said they would do.
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Dude, how high were you when you wrote this?
1. WW1 was by no means done by the US entry into it. Russia had just declared peace with Germany and conceded a huge swath of land to them in doing so, and the Western Front hadn't move much in years of fighting. While we know now that Germany was experiencing a lot of internal turmoil and supply issues at this point, that wasn't known at the time.
2. You claim is even more hilarious for WW2. You realize the lowest point for the Allies was in 1942, right? The year after the US joined? That was the time the Axis made a lot of their conquests. Japan took over Dutch New Guinea, British Malaya, a huge chunk of China, Burma, some of India, the Philippines, were invading Papau New Guinea, which threatened Australia, and had an equivocal and much more experienced navy than the US in the Pacific.
Germany similarly was still slugging it out with the British in North Africa where the outcome was a toss up, and strangling the British forces in the Mediterranean thanks to the Italian air and naval dominance in the region. They would also take another huge swath of territory from the USSR, going as far as Stalingrad and even taking the city at one point. I wonder what the German U-boats called this period. Oh yeah, The Second Happy Time. Really tells you how successful they were during 1942.
The power of Germany only began to wane in 1943 (very late 1942 for the Japanese), and wouldn't outright collapse until June 1944.
'Both wars were done by the time you guys came in' my ass.
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Ha, what? What does Congress' ability even have to do with banking? 80% of all US debt is held by nonbank entities. The other 20% is held by the Federal Reserve, a government controlled central bank whose chairman and the FOMC are picked by the US president and approved by the Senate.
Furthermore, and this may come as a shock to you, having government debt is a good thing. Not to the quantities the United States has today, but some government debt is good. You see, when these things called countries experience economic downturns, like say a recession that hit in 2008, modern economics says it is usually a good idea for the government to run a deficit. This act as a stabilizer to the economy, propping it up a bit before it recovers. If you don't believe me, compare the 2008 Recession to the Great Depression in 1929. In one the government choose to contract its budget and the economy imploded. In the other the government choose to prop up the economy and the economy stabilized and grew again. Like I said, it's not always the case as there are special circumstances where it won't work, but generally it holds true.
Ignoring that though, government debt is also beneficial when its use has a greater return than its interest. Say the government took out a $1,000 bond at 10% annual interest. They then used that bond to construct a highway from New York to California, bringing in the government an estimated revenue of $200. As the $200 was greater than $100 (.1*1,000), the government taking out said debt was beneficial.
Finally, investors need a safe asset to invest in. A large amount of our most recent economic downturns have been due to the banking industry trying to find a new safe asset to invest in. First it was developing governments, particularly in South America. This sparked the Savings and Loans Crash. There was also the Tech Bubble, and the 2008 Financial Crisis caused by the Housing Bubble bursting. All were banks thinking they find the new "safe" asset and said asset imploding. US government debt, being the safest asset in the whole world since the US government has the largest economy in the world and never once missed a payment on its debt, is able to offset some of the banking industry's desire for a new "it" asset.
There's other stuff I could get into but I'll leave it here. Though I find it hilarious that the first thing you go to is me being brainwashed. Are you going to call me a sheeple next?
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Your colony argument doesn't hold any water as the Entente didn't start the war. If they did, they you can say they intended to conquer land from the start, but they were the defenders. Beyond that, the reason Britain and France took their colonies was more to destroy German power as they feared another World War in the future, not because they actually cared for the land.
I was wrong about Ukraine, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk did see the Soviet Union relinquish the Baltic states to Germany and Austria as well as some territory to the Ottomans. While this might seem unimportant, this was around 20% of the Soviet Union's total population. Beyond that, they already showed that, while they didn't want much territory from France of Russia before the war, they wanted hegemony over the entirety of continental Europe. This is evidenced by how they were pushing their weight around in France when France was isolated due to the Russo-Japanese war. In fact, this pressure on France was one of the main reasons France and Britain got so close before the war as Britain started to recognize how out of control Germany was getting in Europe and how this could affect them if the British weren't careful.
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This is just badeconomics. First, not every country runs a deficit. That's fallacious. Many government in Europe, like Sweden and Germany, have been running budgetary surpluses. China also has been running a huge budgetary surplus. The reason Republican administrations are usually chastised for doing nothing about the US budgetary deficit is because they are usually in power during a period of economic growth. For example, from the period of 2000-2008 was a time of economic growth for the United States, part of the Great Moderation. You know what presidency coincided with that? George W. Bush was elected in 2001 and served until 2009. Only at the tail end of his presidency was the Great Recession kicking in. Likewise, now that the United States is out of said recession for all intents and purposes, Trump, another Republican, has been elected during another US growth period.
The problem here is that all economic experts agree the US should be running a budgetary surplus during periods of growth to offset the deficits spent during economic contractions. Bush and Trump haven't done this. Both have continued to run budgetary deficits when they shouldn't.
Finally, only 30% of all US government debt is held by foreign governments. 70% is held by other entities within the US government or private citizens.
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@acudoc1949 You've only been making unfalsiable assertions. All you did is go, "We're all serfs to modern day feudalism, here's my solution." That's great? You never said how we were serfs to begin with. Otherwise the only "claim" you made is that bankers create money from nothing. This is 100% false.
First: No non-government institution is allowed to just poof money into existence. That's illegal and they'd be prosecuted by the US Secret Service.
Second: The only USD printed comes from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, part of the US Treasury department. Your claim only becomes more ignorant when I look at your proposed amendment where you claim to want a new currency created by the Treasury since USD already is. Source: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx
Third: As I said earlier, this all stems from your fundamental misunderstanding of how fractional reserve banking works (even though its in the name). Banks don't print money or press a button to poof money into existence, they lend out a portion of their reserves. The repeated lending of this money creates new money. The process of fractional reserve banking, not the banks themselves, create money, and this process is regulated by the government.
Ex: Bob deposits $100 in his bank. The bank holds 10% of it in reserve (the fractional reserve), and loans out the other 90%. Bill comes along and borrows the $90, depositing it in his own bank. The second bank does similarly as before, keeping $9 (10%) I reserves, and loaning out the other $81. So on an initial deposit of $100, we have $19 sitting in reserves and $171 loaned out, yet no bank actually created money. As for the 10%, that is the current absolute minimum of deposits the federal government requires banks to hold in reserve.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebanking.asp
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fractional-reserve-banking
https://www.frbatlanta.org/education/classroom-economist/fractional-reserve-banking/economists-perspective-transcript
So when you claim that banks should have accounts to draw from to make their loans, and the interests on these loans should be mutually agreed upon, they already are. "But they're not separate from checking and savings accounts!" So? Banks are profit seeking institutions. You can't expect (or force them) to offer services they won't make any profit from. If they weren't allowed to loan out your deposits for a profit, they wouldn't offer the ability in the first place. Besides, you'll get your money back no matter what since your money is insured by FDIC (something banks have to pay a fee for), so it's not like it's doing you any harm.
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I'm going to be honest, while I agree with the first two portions of this video to varying extents, there were quite a few errors from Mexie's feature to your closing argument.
1. Mexie suggests that an economist would argue against some form of universal healthcare because "people are being robbed of choice" and then you later used a clip from AOC saying something similar to argue that economics is wrong about healthcare. Except you should at least hear something in an econ 101 class about how healthcare is the perfect example of a market failure and why government (or other non-market) interventions are needed to make it more efficient, so I have no idea how this is a critique of modern economic theory or even econ 101.
2. Mexie claims that economists would argue against increasing taxes on the upper class. This is 100% wrong and most economists would argue exactly the opposite. The typical argument against this in economics is that upper class people tend to have a much small propensity to consume than a lower class person (IE: They don't spend as much of their money as a percentage of their income on consumption) while the government can use the funds for their own projects or welfare programs, leading to greater overall consumption and better infrastructure for everyone. Then there's also the argument of helping wealth inequality, though I don't think that's typically addressed in Econ 101 (probably Public Finance)
3. Mexie then claims that if income taxes are raised, econ theory would suggest that an individual would work less given that the value for their work is less. She's completely ignoring the other side of the equation though. What she described is what economics refers to as the Substitution effect. IE: You're more likely to substitute your labor for something else since the value of your labor has fallen. What wasn't mentioned was the Income effect, which is basically what she described. Everyone has a income level they set and are willing to work more or less to reach that income. So if your wage decreases, you're willing to take on more hours to reach that income threshold. If you wage rises, you may be willing to take less hours since you already crossed that threshold.
This is all to say that economic theory actually leaves the total result of a wage increase or decrease as ambiguous as it depends on which effect is stronger for the individual. Are you more willing to substitute out your labor or do you desire a certain income threshold more?
It was also hilarious to bring up Keynes as some heterodox thinker in economics when that is very much not the case. The modern school of economics is largely synthesized from Keynesian economics, and even back in Keynes' times, his ideas were widely popular almost as soon as they came out. Case in point, FDR's New Deal, which you stated was Keynesian, started the same year Keynes started publishing books on his economic thinking in fiscal policy, and his pivotal book on the subject, laying everything out, didn't come out until a few years after most European countries already adopted several Keynesian policies.
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@anubisgod23 1. You can repeat the claim all you want. It’s still wrong.
2. “The US government has no control over it,” except, you know, the President handpicking the head of the Federal Reserve, half the people on the Federal Reserve monetary committee, the Senate having to confirm these picks, required annual hearings in front of Congress to go over monetary policy decisions, required audits by both private and governmental entities, and quarterly remittance of profits back to the US Treasury based on independent audits, etc.
Come to think of it, is sounds like the government has A LOT of influence over the Federal Reserve. Huh.
Here is a quote from the Fed’s (government) website: “The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government. The Board--appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate--provides general guidance for the Federal Reserve System and oversees the 12 Reserve Banks. The Board reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress but, unlike many other public agencies, it is not funded by congressional appropriations”
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
They’re also listed as a government agency on the US government’s website: https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/federal-reserve-system
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@anubisgod23 Not thoroughly? What? They are audited by the inspector General, an independent financial services firm, the government accountability office, and post their financials online for the world to see. It's impossible for an audit to be more thorough.
The Federal Reserve system as a whole is a government entity. The board is set up more like a traditional government regulatory board, but even the regional banks, which look more privatized, are still part of the government. The article I linked even talks about that further down.
"Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund."
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@anubisgod23 You're not even being coherent anymore. Do you think the FBI, Smithsonian, UPS, etc all get direct instructions from the US government every day? No, like the Fed they are independent government institutions, allowed to make their own decisions day-to-day, yet still overseen by the US government. You'd never claim they weren't part of the US government though, so what makes the Fed special? Nothing.
I also have no idea what you mean by denying money requests. You do realize the government doesn't see the USD printed by the Fed's (and US Mint's) monetary policy, right? The money is usually loaned out to financial institutions. If the government needs money, they issue US Treasury bonds. The only money the government ever gets from the Fed is money remitted to the US Treasury.
Also the Federal Reserve does have regulations to follow. Specifically their dual mandate, an amendment Congress made to the Federal Reserve Act in 1977 requiring the Fed's monetary policy focus on keeping inflation and unemployment low (https://www.chicagofed.org/research/dual-mandate/dual-mandate). It's almost like they're a government institution like I said...…
This actually makes your statement on money requests even more incoherent because, even if they were a thing, the Fed would be following government orders to keep inflation low, part of the dual mandate, by denying government requests for more money. Shame on the Fed for.....following Congressional legislation?
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@anubisgod23 History lesson! When were the central banks of the developed nations created. Well obviously being the most important, the Federal Reserve was created first in 1913...….except it was actually one of the last central bank in the developed world. The first central bank in the world was a Swedish entity created in 1668. The Bank of England would follow soon after in the 1690's. France first had a central bank in the early 18th century, Germany in 1876, etc.
After the Panic of 1907, the US public was clamoring for a new central banking authority as they believed private bankers like JP Morgan had too much control over the system, causing Congress to establish the National Monetary Commission, a commission created for the purpose of exploring the central banking of other nations (particularly Canada, the UK, France, and Germany) and coming up with recommendations for an American system based on the exploration. Here's the report: https://web.archive.org/web/20100609015132/http://www.llsdc.org/attachments/files/124/FRA-LH_S-Doc-62-243.pdf
Beyond that, the USD is the most widely used currency in the world, making up around 87% of all forex transaction (https://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx13fx.pdf)
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The government does influence the banking sector, especially after our latest recession. The main problem with the US system is how patchwork our regulatory authorities are. Unlike Canada and other countries, whose have only a few regulatory authorities for the financial sector, the US has numerous. Credit unions get their own, small commercial banks get their own, state banks get their own, huge conglomerates get their own, etc. This forced many of the regulatory agencies in the US to become much more lenient in order to attract banks to join them so they can stay relevant, which ended up leading to bookkeeping slights. That and some parts of the US financial sector, like our investment banks, weren't regulated as they should've been.
Since the recession though this has gotten better. Not perfect, but better. Now the US has a board to decide when a company has become too integral to the US economy, and, if they have been deemed so, they face similar regulations to commercial banks. A lot more oversight and scrutiny has also been placed on the banking industry, and the Federal Reserve, by far the largest US banking regulatory agency, among other things, has gained a lot more power in what they can and cannot regulate.
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@dostap7748 You do realize that the U-boat loses came at the end of the war, right? When the US and British navies found successful countermeasures to submarines. In 1939 only 9 U-boats were losses. 1940 brought in a further 24, six of them being from losses during the invasion of Norway. Also I was arguing losses to their surface fleet, not to the U-boats. While effective against merchant shipping in the Atlantic, submarines are no nearly as good in more patrolled waters, especially the English Channel, and would not have been very useful in protecting transports traversing through the English channel.
Also my whole argument before stemmed from the supremacy of the British navy. Who do you think the Luftwaffe was clearing the path through the English Channel of? Sharks? No, the British Navy which dominated the English Channel and was constantly preparing for a naval invasion of the UK. Knowing this, German military leaders were hoping to use the German Luftwaffe to weaken the British presence in the English channel so their transports wouldn't get shot during a naval invasion, but doing so required the German Luftwaffe first gain air superiority over the RAF, necessitating the Battle of Britain, which Germany lost. The whole of the Battle of Britain stemmed from the fact that the German surface navy could not compete with the British navy.
U-boats were only ever a major threat to merchant shipping, not the British navy itself. The original comment is right in saying that the German navy didn't hold a candle to the British.
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This just isn't true. There were no Allied soldiers in Belgium or the Netherlands on August 31st, 1939 (or the German invasion in 1940. This is because Belgium knew what the Allied war strategy was (on its most basic level at least) and knew that their strategy would destroy Belgium, so they tried their best to remain out of the conflict by declaring neutrality.
So why did Germany attack Belgium? Easy, because the border between Belgium and France was very lightly defended compared to the Maginot Line, which bordered Germany. The Maginot Line was considered almost impregnable, and, when Germany tried to take a small chunk of it for propaganda purposes after the successful invasion of France, they suffered very high casualties. Of course this was all part of the Allied strategy. The Allies knew Belgium was going to be a tempting target, so they positioned their veteran and more mechanized forces (and a vast majority of the BEF) on the border of Belgium,set to move into Belgium to defend it if Germany did invade it. The problem was that, due to Belgian intelligence and a gaff on Germany's part, they ended up quickly having to change their war strategy, instead moving their troops across the Ardennes, a much lower part of Belgium than originally expected. This let that German military cut through the Allies, cutting off the more veteran Allied soldiers from mainland France and supplies, resulting in the Battle of Dunkirk.
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@christiannipales9937 The laws are actually supply and demand. Supply and demand determine the valuation of goods, not profit and price. And these laws would exist if the economy was centrally planned or not. These markets also aren't centrally planned. They are regulated, sure, but that's completely different. A single farmer can lower the price of apples, bananas, corn, etc, if they only just produce more of it, irrespective of what a central planner says.
We also use markets because they are the most efficient. That's the fundamental principle of markets. Lets use the apples and bananas again. Why aren't they valued the same? Because one take more resources to produce than the other. A single banana is much easier to produce than a single apple because the plants that produce apples are easier to grow, produce more bananas more quickly, etc. If a farmer can produce either 300 bananas in a season or 100 apples, then that automatically means that a single apple is worth 3 bananas to the farmer. This exists without prices or markets. Its just productive efficiency.
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@joshkelly36 They do though. They don't mention the Hull Note specifically, but they do mention that the US, Netherlands, UK, etc, embargoed Japan due to their invasion and occupation of several Asian territories. It's easy to assume, therefore, that Japan stopping this would end the embargo, which is basically what the Hull Note said. Beyond that, their were negotiations going on in Washington between Japan and the US, so it's not like the Hull Note would've been the actual terms/
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@ralfrath-new a. I have seen absolutely no proof of the Soviet Union breaking the peace treaty (and really why would they when they're already being defeated by Nazi Germany?) All I see is a war declaration from Finland on the USSR, which officially broke the treaty. Beyond that, why would Finland declare war on the USSR? Is that a trick question? Once again the USSR was in full retreat tha ks to Operation Barbarossa so....uh....to reclaim lost territory against a weakened foe? Thought that was obvious. Also why did the UK (NOT JUST BRITAIN) declare war on Finland? Already explained that too. Are you just going to keep asking questions I already answered? You might not like them, but they're answers all the same.
b. Poland had no defensive alliance with Germany. That's just flat out wrong. Hitler had made his intention clear as early as the 1920's that he considered the Polish to be inferior due to their Jewish heritage and that he wanted Poland (and territories within the USSR) for what he referred to as "living space". It was only mentioned in a little known book titled Mein Kampf. Also its a misconception that the Treaty of Versailles caused WW2 considering economically Germany was much better off after the war than France, and the reparations were lowered several times in the 1920's. That myth isn't even supported by mainstream historians anymore. It's much more realistic to say that the displacement caused by the Great Depression led to a lot of anger and resentment among Germans, which gave Hitler a lot more supporters. Even that isn't telling the whole story though
Your next statement gets on to full on conspiracy territory. First, there was no love between France and the UK, and the USSR. They were some of the main nations stopping the USSR from entering the League of Nations and were still fearful of allowing communism to spread elsewhere, especially into Eastern Europe. It was only after Germany's flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles, their remilitarization (also a violation of said treaty) and the Munich crisis that both the UK and France started approaching the USSR with friendlier terms (including League membership) but even then there was never an alliance. Likewise there was never an alliance between Nazi Germany and the USSR. They had several cooperation treaties going (particularly cooperation in plane research), but they never signed a treaty saying they would come to the defense of the other, what an alliance is. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which I think you're referencing, was also not a public agreement. Neither France nor UK knew much of its contents until the Soviet Union invaded Poland and Germany stopped at the predetermined line. After all, no country is going to so flagrantly announce a planned invasion of another and let them prepare.
The UK did not declare war on the USSR because they did not know yet about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact during the debates and assumed that, as Hitler spoke ill of the USSR numerous times (saying their government was a puppet of the "Bolshevik-Jews") they would no doubt come into conflict for ideological reasons. A declaration on the USSR would only unite the two countries against an exterior threat, something the UK (and France) didn't want. Beyond that, the UK and France's defensive agreement with Poland was never meant to be against the USSR, something alluded to in the documents themselves. They both reference the adversary to Poland being specifically an "European Power". That's because they were still trying to get the USSR to warm up to their defensive alliance.
I also have absolutely no idea how you can claim the UK and France started WW2. They had a defensive alliance with Poland against Germany. Germany knew this, arranged an atrocity to try and get around it, and declared war on Poland, bringing in the UK and France. Yep, totally sounds like the UK and France started it. It's like claiming that the United States or the UK would've started a war with the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union invaded a NATO country. No shit when you invade an alliance specifically created to curb your expansion, the alliance is going to fight you.
I also love how you're ignoring all the atrocities committed by Germany, the USSR, and even Finland to point your finger at the UK to somehow claim the war was all their fault. That's nothing but ignorance.
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I have heard a lot of dumb shit, but this is definitely top tier stupidity. First, the USA didn't join the war into 3 years in and had little interest in it to that point. In fact, when the Zimmerman Telegram came out, most Americans didn't believe it was legitimate as they thought the British were trying to create a reason for the US to join the war (into was then confirmed to be a legitimate document by the German Foreign Secretary in a speech he gave to the Reichstag). You do realize that the US up until World War 2 (and even after) had been a big proponent of staying out of "European Wars". That's why it took such large provocations from Germany for the US to finally join themselves.
Your comment only becomes even more stupid once your realize monarchies and capitalism have nothing to do with each other. One is an economic system, the other political. Britain was already a huge free market power, being the policing power of the seas and a huge proponent of free trade, a free market idea, way before even World War 1. Ignoring even all of this though, IT WAS AUSTRIA-HUNGARY WHO DECLARED WAR ON SERBIA, STARTING THE WAR! No Allied power started it.
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This can get confusing because it's odd for the anti-socialist party to have 'socialism' in its name. Socialism at the time was more of a buzzword though. Kind of like how it is used today in the United States. The term was added to the Nazi party because Hitler knew it'd attract disenfranchised voters looking for an alternative.
That being said, the Nazi party was very much an anti-socialist party. As soon as Hitler took power, he imprisoned or killed all socialists in his party and government, threw yet more in concentration camps, dissolved nearly every labor union, froze workers' wages, etc. Also in the Doctrine of Fascism, a document written by Mussolini, the leader of Italy, trying to define what fascism was, it was clearly stated that fascists opposed the two main arguments made by socialists (that of the class struggle and another I'm blanking on), as well as rejecting liberalism.
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Seriously, I am sick and tired of these idiotic posts. NO! GERMANY COULD NOT HAVE WON WW2. It was a lost cause as soon as it was started. Germany DID focus on the UK (not just Britain) first and it was a disaster, culminating in the Battle of Britain and a major defeat for the Luftwaffe. It turns out fighting a campaign of attrition over enemy territory is a dumb idea. Who would've known?
Even with the Luftwaffe though, Germany had absolutely no ability to invade the UK effectively. They were an Island nation with one of the two largest and most powerful navies in the world, being supported by the other of the two most powerful navies in the world, and you think Germany would've somehow been able to land and successfully supply troops in an invasion of the UK? That's insane. The best they could do is paradrop some men onto the UK, but they didn't even have a full division of paratroopers due to the heavy casualties they sustained at the Battle of Crete.
Finally, Germany basically did leave the USSR (not just Russia) for last. There was also almost no way to surround them. The USSR extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Did you expect Germany to take over the Middle East, India, Nepal, Western China, etc before they invaded the USSR?
This is ignoring the fact that even if they did take the USSR, Germany still had no ability to get to the Americas. Once again, the two largest, and easily the most powerful navies on the world were regularly patrolling around the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In comparison, Germany's surface navy was shit. They had a few standout battleships that would due nothing in the open oceans of the Atlantic (as the Pacific campaign proved) and that was about it.
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Uh, no, not really. You're description of Hitler's rise is very simplistic, but in terms of a rudimentary analysis it at least works. Your description of the piece after WW2 is completely wrong though. Germany was in no way let off the hook for WW2, they didn't even get to exist as a country until near half a century later, instead being occupied by the four major Allied powers (the UK, France, US, and USSR), and having to pay huge (though not unfair) reparations. That's why the industry in Germany's east was so stripped. There was also the mass rapes, starvation, and huge unofficial PoW camps set up after the war.
The only reason the country as a whole wasn't punished more was because the US and UK were growing increasingly fearful of the USSR, particularly the USSR's ability to invade Europe. To prevent this, they both agreed to try and rebuild the Western European economy, which required rebuilding the West German economy as they were heavily connected to the rest of Western and Central Europe.
Otherwise, the whole point of the unconditional surrenders the Allies forced on the Axis powers was that it was them saying that they lost. There could be no doubt about the fact that the Axis powers lost and the reason they lost (unlike after WW1).
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There's no way Germany would've won WW2. It was impossible. They did not have the capabilities of getting to the UK, and especially not the US. Even the Allies had A LOT of trouble with D-Day, and that was when they had absolute air and naval supremacy. So World War 2 would probably go mostly cold in Europe for a little bit. Fighting would still happen in other theaters, possibly even Italy, but the Allies would not perform a D-Day as the German army wouldn't have been weakened during Barbarossa. They'd probably just hold off and hope for a potential Soviet invasion of Germany. That was actually part of the reason that Hitler launched Barbarossa in the first place.
Revisionists will claim that the USSR was preparing for an invasion of Germany first, which is why Germany broke their nonaggression pact. This is entirely false. The USSR had no such intentions in 1941, but the idea does help highlight Hitler's fears. As part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the USSR was giving Germany many raw materials that Germany used for their war effort, specifically in their mechanization. This wasn't free though, and Germany ended up giving the USSR many of their military schematics in return. Because of this and Soviet industrialization, the Soviet military and economy would potentially outpace even Nazi Germany in the coming years. Hitler feared that the USSR would use its growing power to eventually bully Nazi Germany into giving it better deals, or even outright invading them.
If that would've happened is up for debate of course.
Otherwise, the Allies were still far outpacing Germany in building an atomic bomb, Germany deciding to focus more of its research to other programs, like the V-series of rockets. It's possible that the bomb's use could've forced Germany's surrender.
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Oh fuck off. We aren't known for fighting out of loyalty or honor? Once again we had no alliance to honor in either world war, and we have fully participated in every NATO conflict, as well as supporting every UN conflict, whether the US desired it or not. So yeah, we only honor our alliances when we have them. Ain't that strange?
Also the wars are always provoked. This video explains World War 1 (when Germany was literally trying to start an alliance to attack us), World War 2 was caused by Japan's illegal attack on a military base and Germany's declaration of war on us (not the other way around), The Korean War started because the North Koreans started an invasion of South Korea to unite the nation (with Soviet and Chinese support) (this also shows us being loyal to an ally, but I guess you chose to ignore that?), the Vietnam War was to stop the invasion of South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese (us honoring an alliance again), The First Gulf War was the unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, another American ally, by Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was a direct result of the attack on the World Trade Center, and finally there's the Second Gulf War, which is the only war with a dubious claim. History. It's a thing.
Also the US economy was the world's strongest economy by 1900, a decade and a half before World War 1, since the US just had more resources to dedicate to industrialization. While Britain's home islands were heavily industries, they only cared about extracting resources from their overseas territory, so the territory was never industrialized. It's basic economics. Inclusive institutions raise the economic productivity of nations, and the US had more people under inclusive institutions than the British did.
As for your claim about the US supplying Germany in either world war with weapons. That's horseshit. Some Pro-German businesses lent money to Germany, sure, but that was VERY early on in the war. Once the British propaganda showing German atrocities in Belgium started arriving, this financial support all but dried up. There was also next to no material aid given, because, as you SHOULD know, Britain's navy was blockading Germany, stopping all material from entering the country. It's hard for the US to give them material when there's a giant navy telling them to turn back. That's one of the reasons Germany didn't care so much when they provoked the US, they weren't getting any support from them anyway.
And finally your claim of American influence on Europe is hilariously wrong. Any basic history course should've taught you that the US entered a period of isolationism after World War 1 since they were so traumatized by the war (even though they suffered the least casualties in the war). Heck, during the war itself they carried this aloofness. They were never considered an Allied power during the war, and were also labelled as an Associated power. This is because they didn't want to get too entangled in the European Alliances after the war. Similarly they left Europe as soon as they could after the war, leaving Britain and France to create the Versailles Treaty by themselves (as mentioned in Keynes the Economic Consequences of the Peace). This is why the Marshall Plan and NATO were so important after World War 2 as they showed that, unlike the First World War, the US would commit to rebuilding and acting as the peacekeepers of Europe until the countries got back on their feet. Even then though there was still a large outcry from the American public to send their troops home, so the US started building up West Germany to act as a bulwark against possible Soviet invasion.
99% of what you said is just a false narrative with no evidence to back it up.
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@Pazu Wow, your claims are so bullshit. First: She was still being operated solely by the business which commissioned her (Cunard Line). Could she possibly converted into a warship with enough time and equipment? Absolutely. That was a common aspect of British cruiseliners. I fial to see how this has anything to do with the topic at hand though.
First: While it could be converted, it wasn't. The cruiseliner had no ship to ship or anti-submarine weapons.
Second: I'd love to see evidence that the Lusitania didn't have a flag up as I've seen nothing. Even the German government contradicted itself on that aspect, first saying it never had a flag, then later saying it was flying the flag of a neutral country.
Finally, it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that the German Navy committed a war crime, irrespective of what the Lusitania was doing as the Lusitania, once again, was unarmed. I don't care if the Lusitania was carrying the entire war coffers of the Entente, I don't care if the Lusitania flew every flag but the ony of the UK, and I don't care if the Lusitania was a troop transport (even though it wasn't). a German submarine sinking an unarmed enemy ship was a war crime. You can't get around that.
And more imperialist German propaganda you want to throw at me?
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@SK-fy8dl 1. Investment institutions and credit reporting agencies to some degree, sure. Commercial banks not so much.
2. Sure, but you can't blame a financial institution due to a financial bubble and economic downturn simply for operating in the industry. Bubble's happen because an asset is evaluated well above its true value. There's nothing criminal about it, just a mania and panic.
3. Some of that was shady, but a good portion was just good business. Your company is in a rut due to a global economic crash. Obviously you're going to pay a premium to make sure the CEO doesn't jump ship when you need a leader the most.
In other words, companies in a rut are the ones in the most demand for good leadership.
So how did the bankers working at these banks not know that these assets were risky? This is actually an excellent question, but first we have to properly define what a bank is. A bank usually refers to two different entities. Either a commercial bank, which acts as your typical bank would, a financial intermediary between depositors and borrowers, and an investment bank, which solely tries to profit off of the purchase of financial assets.
It's important to note that the commercial banks going out and loaning out the subprime mortgage money were not the ones holding on to these mortgages. Instead they'd package hundreds of them up together, split up the package, have them rated by a credit rating agency, and then sell them off to investors.
So as an investor instead of buying up ten mortgages, where even if one mortgage defaulted, I'd lose money, I'm instead buying a small stake into hundreds of mortgages. This way if one or two mortgages fail, I'll still make a profit. Also my profit will be more consistent thanks to the law of large numbers, a fundamental of statistics.
Because of this, these packages were often rated much safer than they should've been. It didn't help that the credit reporting agencies had their own desire to rate them as higher than they should've been as then they'd get a kickback of their own.
And then investment banks would buy them, not realizing how risky they actually were. In the background these investment banks were doing incredibly shady and unethical crap to acquire constant funding to purchase these packages, but that's a topic for another day.
So that's basically it. After the collapse of the bubbles for the two safe assets all banks were trying to invest in before this (developing country governmental debt and tech stocks), banks thought they found a new safe asset in these packaged mortgages, which made mortgage loans safer and more predictable ignoring external factors.
Of course then the entire housing market collapsed, throwing an external factor into everything. Mortgage backed securities (the packages) are 100% safer than traditional mortgages, which is why they're still used, but even they don't help when the entire market collapses.
Ironically most commercial banks were spared the vast majority of the problems as they weren't the ones holding the mortgages. It's the investment banks that lost out big, and it's that reason, among others, that many of them went under. The most obvious and notorious being Lehmann Brothers.
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@SK-fy8dl The interest payments generally weren't high. That was actually one of the problems. Since the pool of people to give mortgage loans to was growing so small, commercial banks resorted to giving a lot of incentives to subprime borrowers to get them to, well, borrow. These incentives include lower interest rates, delayed payment, the ability to refinance in the future, etc.
And again, you're acting like everyone knew that these loans were risky. I few did (The Big Short gives a good example of them), but most thought that these packaged mortgages were completely safe.
This is because everyone already knew the rate at which subprime borrowers defaulted on their loans, so predicting how many mortgages would default on any give day was easy to predict.
Few people expected the whole housing market to crash like it did, and no one understood how closely connected the housing market was to our financial industry, nor how closely connected our financial industry was to everything else.
This all would've been known if the US financial regulatory system was more centralized, but instead it was, and still is, very patchwork, so no single entity has all the information when it comes to financial institutions.
Similarly before there was absolutely no regulation for investment banks and credit reporting agencies since they weren't financial intermediaries. This is where the term shadow banking comes from. Dodd-Frank, while patchwork itself, did add some regulation to them, and other entities considered too important for the US economy, but I'm not sure if it's still even a thing under Trump.
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@SK-fy8dl There's a lot of important details to cover.
1. Banks never made anyone take these loans. Instead the loans were offered to the subprime borrowers and they accepted them.
So if you make $20,000 and have a poor credit score, you still might be offered a comparatively low interest mortgage loan by your bank. If you don't want it, they might offer some incentives, like a 12 month delayed payment on the mortgage, or try to sell you on it, but at the end of the day, you're the one to take the loan.
The banker would typically mention how housing is an investment. So in five years the house you bought would be worth more money. If you wait until then and sell the house, then you could pay back the mortgage with money left over.
Historically this has been correct. Since the populations of most countries has been increasing, and housing in developed countries usually doesn't keep up with it (for reasons I won't get into), housing prices generally increase over time.
In other words, it was a little sleazy, but (most) bankers weren't forcing these loans on anybody, and they didn't intend to destroy the economy.
2. Remember, the people holding the mortgages were not the same ones who originally gave them out. A commercial bank would usually end up selling the mortgages to other companies for a quick injection of cash to, well, make more mortgages.
So Bank of America would sell slices of a package of 1,000 mortgages to Lehmann Brothers and get millions of dollars that they could then loan out again.
When it came to repossession of a house, it would be given over to the holder of the mortgage, which would be an investing institution, mutual fund, etc.
It's also important to note that repossession was always the worst case scenario for both sides. The investing institutions never wanted the house, they wanted the money from the mortgage. Houses take time and money for them to sell, and they were only going to make cents on the dollar, never recooping the full amount of the mortgage loan.
That's why places like Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt. Instead of receiving payments from the mortgages, they instead received houses, which they couldn't pay their own expenses with.
3. So why did no one realizing that this was contributing to the housing bubble? Well for the early parts of this, no one was sure there even was a bubble. A bubble is only when the perceived value of an asset is above the fundamental "true" value, but that value is impossible to calculate.....generally. Technically models can be made, Nobel Price winning economist Robert Shiller is the most famous example of this, but the models weren't tested, so no one knew how accurate they were.
This was also the time of the Tech bubble, so people were worried about other things.
Around 2004-2005 the majority of financial experts started to agree that the housing market was probably in a bubble. Yet again though, knowing you're in a bubble is only half the battle. What's to be done about it? If you're too loud about it, you're only going to cause a panic and make the potential crash even worse. Say nothing and it will probably only grow bigger.
I don't want to say much more as this period of time I know the least about, but more generally the financial experts were hoping, and implementing policy, for the housing market to gradually devalue over time, avoiding an inevitable crash. This type of thing happens all the time in financial markets. For every bubble that burst, there were ten bubbles that we didn't even see because they fizzled out.
4. And finally, wasn't loaning money to subprime candidates viewed as unethical? Quite the contrary actually. This was actually promoted by the US government since the 1990's (Started under Bush Senior, expanded under Clinton, continued under Bush Junior). This is because the economic research at the time (and even today to a lesser extent), showed that the ownership of a house was one of the leading indicators on a person's potential economic upward mobility.
This goes back to the view of a house as an investment. Outside of its monetary value, it provides a stable place for kids to learn and grow, gives them a sense of community, and is passed down through the family.
So the US government would promote subprime mortgages under the belief that just owning a house for a poor person would make them much more likely to increase their income and move them into the middle or upper class.
Some people like to say that the government solely caused the bubble and Financial Crisis because of this (and a few other things). While they didn't help matters, the banking industry was already moving in that direction after the Savings and Loans bubble,
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@atari7001 Except one of the direct causes of the 1929 crash was that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to tighten the money supply when the money supply in Europe was already going through a deflationary period. This led to a drop in US exports as soon as American spending also started to fall due to the tightening money, causing a deflationary spiral and many missed stock market projections.
You're also wrong about the Fed. What made the 1907 Financial Panic so bad was the, well, panics. Specifically banking panics. With nothing to guarantee the solvency of banks, many people rushed to their bank at the first hint of trouble, which would cause more people to also take out their money, causing yet another spiral. This spiral only stopped when JP Morgan and other financiers used their own money to publicly guarantee the deposits within many of the banks, stopping the panic and finally letting the US economy recover.
If only we had some sort of entity which could do that. Oh, yeah! The Fed! Of course they can print money and yada yada, but they can also lend funding to banks to help protect them against such crises, basically becoming a governmental JP Morgan. That and US monetary policy at the time was chaotic and stupid. It was still stupid up until the mid-1930's due to the US being on the gold standard, the main cause of the Great Depression if you ask most any economist.
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@atari7001 I'm sorry but your claims are just getting worse and worse. Please read the introduction to a money and banking textbook, find a free lecture on the subject online (YouTube even has these series), read a credible article on it, anything really. Until you do that.
1. It's not fraud since the bank literally tells you what it does with your money. You know what happens to your money when you put it in a bank. Nothing fraudulent about it.
2. "Wiser generations" would punish bankers for making bad investments, which honestly isn't fair to the banker. If I invest in a project with a 95% chance of proving profitable and it doesn't, it's not exactly the fairest thing in the world to kick my ass and/or kill me for bad luck.
3. The banking system in the 19th and early 20th century was bad. Good thing we've learned from our mistakes. Not only do we have the Federal Reserve, which basically guarantees a low, stable inflation rate on our currency as well as loans to banking institutions which are still profitable, just insolvent, we also have insurance institutions like the FDIC, which insure all deposits made at a commercial banking institution up to a certain amount that no normal American would reach. Also this insurance is paid for by member banks.
So far the story has changed to: the bank tells you what they're going to do with your money when you make an account. If something bad happens to the bank, your money is still insured through the FDIC (or relating institution), so you'll get your money no matter what.
4. You didn't mention this, but I think it deserves mentioning. The banks in trouble during the Financial Crisis? The ones everyone decries as "too big to fail"? Yeah, though aren't traditional banks like you or I are talking about. So even during the Financial Crisis the banks you and I are talking about weren't the problem.
5. Banks destroying society? You're just speaking insanity. You realize 99% of the economies of the world are still growing, right? Nothing is being destroyed. Moreover, ask any developmental economist and they'll see that banks are vital for poorer countries especially. Let's say you're a farmer and you had a bad season. What are your options? Well if you have any savings, you could try and hold over until the next season? Without savings? You could take out a loan (which most do) and then pay it back with the harvest next year. Okay, but without a bank? Sell your farm? Banks provide an insurance against negative shocks like a bad harvest, unemployment, a sudden expense, etc, and are also great avenues for investment (sending a kid to college so they can have a better life). The vast majority of loans are paid off and the vast majority of borrowers aren't eternally in debt.
6. Of course end the Fed. You're just calling for a talking point you don't understand. You haven't once made a claim against the Fed or Fed policy. You just hear other people say "end the Fed" and follow them along. The Federal Reserve is one of the best institutions the US has and easily the most technocratic of them. There's a reason US monetary policy since the Great Depression has been so great.
7. Oh, money printing. You're wrong on every claim you make. The Fed doesn't print money. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, part of the US Treasury, does. The Fed orders the money, but they do not print it. Furthermore, who gave them the authority? Uh, Congress? Through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (renewed several times since)? The House had the original authority and they passed it on to the Federal. That's how just about every government entity, like the FBI, USPS, etc work.
Furthermore, they don't charge us interest on USD printed. That's just blatantly not true. If you don't believe me, you can always check their financial statements online. "They're fake!" you say. Except every year the Fed has to publish their financial statements online, and these statements are always audited by the GAO and a private financial services firm that changes every few years to make sure they don't build a connection. The Fed makes money off of interest payments on loans lent to other banks and US government bonds only, the latter the Fed is forced to hold due to legislation Congress attached to the Federal Reserve Act during one of its renewals.
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@atari7001 Yeah, no, you just don't understanding banking.
1. People don't expect their money to be held by the bank forever. The bank clearly states what they are doing with your money. All they say is that they'll have the money necessary for any of your deposits, which is 100% true. If you honestly expect banks to always hold 100% of your money, then you have no idea how business works.
2. Commercial banks generally don't invest in Wall Street for that specific reasons. There are regulations they have to follow to make sure banks remain stable, and many of these regulations concern how safe an asset must be for a bank to be able to invest in it. Generally these are only assets rated AA or AAA, the two best ratings an asset can get.
3. Results include economic growth, monetary stability, more investing, etc. Yeah, I fail to see much of a problem here. Banks are hugely important in developmental economics for provide a type of insurance for the poor.
4. I have no idea where you got the claim about the FDIC as it's not true. The FDIC guarantees all depositors of any member institution up to $150,000. As most people don't have even close to that in a single bank account, they are well within the insurance limits of the FDIC and would be covered if the bank collapses. It doesn't matter how widespread the collapse is.
I'm appalled that you never learned any of this in a Finance 101 course. Also I am not, nor have I ever had, worked for a bank.
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@atari7001 Of course you bring up the Financial Crisis.
1. The banks that went under during the crisis were not the banks you and I are discussing, commercial banks. They were investment banks. They didn't take deposits and lend money to people. Customer opened accounts with them and used the funds in their accounts to make investments. Hence the term investment bank.
For example, the most notorious bank to fail during the crisis, Lehmann Brother, was solely an investment bank.
2. I never saw a single line or panic from people going to a bank to withdraw all their money from it due to a panic. There was no such declared panic in the entire banking sector. There were some insolvency issues due to investments going bad, but after some asset purchases and loans from the government, the insolvency issue wasn't a problem.
This is because commercial banks are overseen by the Federal Reserve. Investment banks like Lehmann Brothers had no such oversight, and so had no way of getting a loan since the Fed does not loan to them. This is why these institutions are referred to as shadowbanking. That was one of the core problems relating to the Financial Crisis, not fractional reserve banking, something that has existed for hundreds upon hundreds of years to the benefit of society.
5. Banks have money to cover all withdrawals. If a sudden shock happens causing more withdrawals than predicted, they have ways of acquiring funding for said withdrawals, typically through government loans. These loans have to be paid back to the government with interest.
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@atari7001 1. Fractional reserve banking has existed way before central banks. Kind of surprised I really needed to say that.
2. Stimulus and QE ended a long time. 2012-2014 was when the programs were wound down and ended. Economic growths after that have nothing to do with either program
3. Globalization exists independently of central banking. The US globalized before it even had a central bank.
4. The Fed HAS helped market stability. Before the Fed, the US had a recession every few. The US had a recession in 1901, 1903, 1907 - the recession which was so devastating that it forced government action -, 1911, and then in 1914. Ironically the Fed was created to keep the financial power out of private hands as, while beneficial in the 1907 recession, seeing how much influence financiers like JP Morgan had worried many Americans. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, economic downturns in the United States have been less frequent, less severe, and don't last nearly as long.
There's a handy graph that shows just that, but I'm having trouble locating it. If I do, I'll put it up. For now, this paper goes into the Federal Reserve's expert handling of crises in recent decades: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/04/03/Neely.pdf
You can also just look at USD inflation too: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NQAuKUEl4Y0/T3EjXaTS-2I/AAAAAAAABUQ/k21b2SrBnZQ/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/U.S.+Yearly+Inflation+Since+1900.jpg
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@Crashed131963 Because Dresden was too far east to be practically bombed by the Western Allies? The Allies were already having trouble escorting bombers across the English Channel, much less across all of Germany to a city near the German border with Poland. Just look at a fucking map.
Dresden was also a huge manufacturing and railroad hub for German soldiers moving to the eastern front, so it was a very desirable military target.
Moreover you realize that no one realized that taking Berlin would mean the end of the war, right? It was an important objective, sure, but the Allies were expecting Germany to continue fighting. I don't know a whole lot about Soviet expectation, but the Western Allies were expecting any remaining German soldiers to head into the mountains in Southern Germany and continue the fight there. That's why, when the Soviets were assaulting Berlin, the Western Allies were moving southward in a race to get to the Alps and other such mountain ranges.
It's also funny since the warplanners at the time considered Dresden to be the largest unbombed build up of German forces and industry. It was Germany's seventh largest city after all, and, being on the Eastern side of Germany, not easy to bomb until later in the war. So I wonder why the Allies choose to bomb the largest uncontested build up of German forces when they were at war with Germany. Really makes me think.
Overall your comment is just ignorant. Of course if you disagree, I'd love to see the exact war crime committed. Please cite the document or code!
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@drivingthebenz802 Funny, because the economy under Biden has been way better than under Trump. Under Trump we were still under a pandemic with over a million Americans dead, barely left our stay at home order, massive unemployment, especially in the services space, and many supply chain failures like toilet paper, masks, etc.
Under Biden we've seen the biggest uplift of the lower and middle class in a generation in terms of real wage growth (wage growth minus inflation), the largest production of oil ever, the highest stock market in history, the lowest unemployment since the 90's, etc.
Real tough choice there.
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You are spewing so much bullshit its not even funny. First: the UK didn't just shelter themselves in the British Isles for most of the war, they tried to fight Germany and Japan (later on) on other fronts. Particularly North Africa and Norway. What, you expect them to launch a naval invasion against a nation with a larger military? That's fucking insane.
Secondly, Germany didn't stop their attack on the UK because they didn't see them as a point. It was actually the exact opposite. Germany was hoping that the Battle of Britain, or their air raids over the British Isles, would eventually force the UK to surrender, but the British RAF proved to be too formidable and ended up giving the German Luftwaffe numerous black eyes over the British Isles. Already constrained for resources, the German military decided that the Battle of Britain was useless and a waste of resources, so they focused on getting more resources instead (culminating in their invasion of the USSR) Germany never stopped their raids over the UK though. Even when they were losing the war in 1944 and 1945, constantly having to fall back, they'd still launch V-1 and V-2 rockets at London.
Thirdly, you have absolutely no proof that the UK would've surrendered if the USSR (NOT JUST RUSSIA) surrendered. You're pulling that claiming out of your ass. This is especially sad since Churchill gave a speech after France's surrender saying that the UK was prepared to fight to the end. Guess you forgot that tidbit.
Fourth, you claim that the UK's sole goal was to keep their colonies, but this is false. True, they would've loved to have kept their colonies, but after the Fall of France, the UK became more desperate for support from the US. The US, historically a supporter of free trade, demanded that the UK give up the special trade privilege they gave their colonies though (among other things). Of course Churchill's administration knew that in the long term this would mean the effective end the British colonies, but they agreed to it anyway because they needed the lend-lease supplies to fight Germany.
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@attilavarga3413 Keep talking out of your ass. I'm sure you'll find a way to get out of the whole you're digging! Yes, the British colonies had a major contribution to the Allied war effort, by the British Isles themselves also had a major contribution. For one, there's the Royal Navy (with support from Canada's Navy). They patrolled the Atlantic, defended the British Isles from possible invasion, blockaded Germany, and they were perhaps the biggest threat to Italy as they could completely cut off Italy from its colonies. Also the BEF and original combatants in North Africa were British nationals.
Overall the UK lost 450,000 soldiers (not counting civilians) in the war. That's more than even the United States. As a percentage of its population, it's three times as much as the United States. But sure, keep talking about how the British did absolutely nothing because you never looked up these basic facts.
Your leaked documents claim is also completely horsehit. Did Hitler respect the UK's history? Yes. It didn't mean he wasn't going to do anything to defeat them though. That idea is ludicrous. Not only did Nazi Germany try to gain areal superiority and then bomb the UK into submission, but they also attracted the BEF in North Africa. Are we also going to ignore Germany's planned invasion of the UK in Operation Sealion?
Wanna know why the operation never took place? It was too infeasible. Germany, a nation with a much weaker navy than the UK's and with no experience in naval invasions, was planning on somehow capturing the beaches of the UK, a strip of land smaller than the coasts of France Germany had to defend before the Normandy Landings, and with a defense much more centrally located. The plan was pure suicide. If the German troops weren't shot to bits in the English Channel, they would've been shot to bits on the beaches.
Keep in mind, even when the Allies had complete air and naval superiority, a huge troops advantage planned for years in advance, and faced a more sparsely populated defense, they still struggled. Yet you think Germany could've done so with everything against them. Yeah, you're fucking deluded.
Oh no, Churchill was responsible for the invasion of an Axis country! Whatever shall we do! This is also false. The US leadership were clamoring for an invasion of Europe as soon as they joined the war as they wanted the European war to end as soon as possible so they could face the real enemy to them, Japan. They were the ones to bomb Pearl Harbor after all. Churchill was the one to demand caution though, saying that the US military was too green to face the brunt of the German military, which, based on the US experience in North Africa, he was right.
Throughout all of this, Stalin was also demanding that a front in Europe be opened to alleviate some pressure on the Eastern Front. After much debate, it was agreed that Italy would be that front. But sure, blame Churchill for that.
I'm no expert on the Bengal Famine, and Churchill clearly didn't give two shits about them either (he was a huge racist), but the famine wasn't directly his fault either. It was more caused by mismanagement of food resources under a total war economy. This wasn't the only place it happened either.
As for the USSR, they probably could've won the war by themselves. Well I'd leave the caveat that lend-lease would be needed in the beginning as it provided vital help in supplying food, trucks, trains cars, etc, which proved vital for the USSR, but they could've defeated Germany by themselves......What's you point? That would've taken a much larger loss of life than even the Eastern Front brought, and, as everyone notes, that front was extremely brutal. Are you trying to say its a bad thing that the German lines collapsed sooner thanks to them having to defeat resources to two fronts that weren't as brutal or costly in casualties by comparison? That's also stupid.
The Western Allies invaded Europe to stop the USSR (not Russia) from taking over Europe? Are you high? First: the USSR isn't just Russia. Don't be a complete idiot. Second: Once again, STALIN WAS CLAMORING FOR THE ALLIES TO OPEN UP ANOTHER FRONT! He desperately wanted them to relieve pressure from the Eastern Front, and was infuriated by them dragging their feet over the issue. The Italian campaign got bogged down pretty quickly and was too narrow to really draw much resources from Germany, so Stalin was demanding more action. D-Day was that action. Also Roosevelt didn't see Stalin as a potential enemy. Ignored how he was literally giving Stalin military equipment at the time, he also negotiated for more Soviet support, particularly when he got Stalin to agree to send his soldiers eastward to fight Japan after Germany was dealt with. It wasn't until years later (and after Roosevelt was already dead) that the Cold War tensions would start.
Churchill was more divisive on the matter, finding the USSR more reprehensible and a potential threat to Europe, even advocating a possible attack on the USSR after Germany. What's important to note though is that Churchill negotiated with Stalin to set some of the spheres-of-influences post war. Most notably the UK was given access to Greece (which would remain as a NATO member throughout the Cold War). Otherwise the divisions were decided in one of the three conferences held during the war, so there was no question as to which country would occupy what. That's why the US< UK, and France were able to occupy parts of Berlin even though the city was taken by the Soviets. The borders were already decided.
In short: read a fucking book before you spew out more shit.
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Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. First, in practice there is no distinction between socialism and communism. For instance, the USSR, the main ideological rival of fascism, was officially titled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Second, fascists did not advocate for the takeover of all industry. They advocated autarky, or the complete independence of a country from foreign trade. Nazi Germany was actually the last of the main powers in WW2 to transition over to a war economy. Otherwise they froze workers' wages (not socialist), cracked down on workers' strikes (not socialist), received most of their support from industrialists (DEFINITELY not socialist), etc.
On a more theoretical level, fascists rejected the fundamental pillars of socialism. You already mentioned how they rejected its egalitarian nature, but they also rejected what they saw as it's "materialistic" view of the world, and the history of the class struggle. Mussolini even directly stated as such when he wrote him pamphlet The Doctrine of Fascism, which you can easily find online. So neither in practice or in theory was fascism a part of socialism.
In terms of the Nazis themselves. They did have a socialist wing of their party in the 1920's and early 1930's. Too bad they were extrajudicially killed by Hitler as soon as he took power in the Night of Long Knives.
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@leolamminmaki4642 Your figure for casualties inflicted on Nazi Germany by the Western Allies is off. In the Ruhr Pocket alone Nazi Germany lost over 300,000 men, and they lost a further 100,000 during the Battle of the Bulge. In North Africa a further 150,000 Germans were lost. Already we're over the estimated 500K figure, and yet we haven't even covered the Normandy invasions, the Allied liberation of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the war in the Atlantic, the Italian campaign, and most of the central European campaigns,
The USSR definitely did the most in terms of casualties against Nazi Germany, but your figure for the Western Allies Is way off.
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You don't know much about international relations, do you? The United States is allied with Pakistan, Germany, Italy, and France. Heck, they're allied with half the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan, etc). Beyond that, 99% of the world is diplomatically against North Korea. So that leaves, what? Russia? That nation known for invading its neighbors and whose only friends are former soviet republics, China, North Korea, and Syria? China, who shares a hugely beneficial trade relationship with the United States and who actively invests a lot in the US? Really the only country you can make any sort of an argument for is Iran, and even then the US WAS working to cooling relations with them with the Iran Deal. Trump is just a colossal fuck up.
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@Haymdahl Hypothetically you're somewhat correct. To get around a required reserve ratio a bank could hypothetically go to the central bank for a loan to show up their reserves and still be fine. This in practice doesn't happen as anyone going to the Federal Reserve (or any central bank) for a loan is a HUGE red flag and seen as a desperation move. They're known as the lender of last resort for a reason. Your institution must be in a crisis to go to them for funds. Typically if a bank ended out lending over their reserve requirement, their only two realistic options are to encourage more deposits in the bank, or to go to another commercial banking institution for a loan.
This also isn't terribly common though for two reasons: One, banks don't like going to each other for loans as it means a potential loss of profits. They can, but usually only if the loan they're giving out has a higher interest than the loan they'd be taking in, which, again, isn't common. And then more importantly, this would only happen if a bank was constrained by the require reserve. Meaning they had to have already let out all the money up to their required reserve. This is an incredibly, incredibly rare thing for a bank to do post-2008. In the early 2010's the US government was doing everything possible to get the banks to lend out more of their reserves since they were lending so little, and even then they didn't reach their constraint.
If a bank hasn't reached its constraint, they are still taking money from their reserve, what I mentioned in my reply above. It's only in the very rare time when they've surpassed their constraint that they'll get a loan from another bank.
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Your comment is so bullshit it's not even funny.
1) Germany wasn't financed by the UK or US. The German government got most of its money from printing new money (known as MEFO bills), looting the treasuries of territory they conquered, and stealing money from those deemed undesirable like the Jews. I'm not even sure how you can claim they were financed by the US and UK when this was during the Great Depression, when banks were being very stringent with their money due to the flood of banking panics and deflation. Does economics mean nothing to you?
3) Yep, just ignore the efforts of the British Expeditionary Force and Polish volunteers. This is fucking disgraceful.
4, 5, and 6) Ignoring the part where the US was helping to retake French colonies in Africa, you realize that it takes time to launch a naval invasion an ocean away against a militaristic nation with the resources captured from the Allies in 1940, right? Trying to blame the US for not launching a suicidal invasion is stupid. Even then, this was the original plan of Roosevelt, for the US to launch an invasion of France as soon as possible (early 1943 as it'd still take a year to get supplies over), but Churchill was against it for the above reasons and instead convinced Roosevelt to help out in the North African Theater while preparations were drawn up for an invasion of continental Europe.
7) The US and other members of the Allies started their liberation of France in 1944. Did you just forget this? Also the US and other Allies were already in continental Europe through their invasion of Italy.
8) This statistic is wrong. Around 80% of the German military fought on the Eastern Front, but the Eastern Front was much more than Stalingrad. Are you saying that 90% of Germany military fought in a battle lasting less than half a year? That's insane.
10) I'd love to se a credible source for this
12) You can't even spell 'Iraq' correctly...…
14) Already addressed how the US didn't finance the Nazis, but if the US and Allies didn't save France, who did? Sure, the USSR did most of the fighting against Nazi Germany, but they never reached past Berlin. The people that actually liberated France belonged to the Western Allies. Also, as history showed, the USSR didn't liberate, they annexed and puppetted. IF you're honestly suggesting that you would've preferred France be occupied by the USSR, you're so fucking delusional and really need to stay in school.
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You really like your conspiracy theories don't you? You realize 95% of foreign exchange trades involve the dollar right? It's not some random conspiracy that the Middle East trades their oil in the dollar. It's because the dollar is an easily abundant currency that is not regulated and whose value is recognized by everyone, making it the perfect currency for foreign trade. Other currencies like the euro and pound-sterling are plentiful enough to achieve this, China's currency is too heavily regulated (they have a different value for their currency depending on its use). It also helped that the US was their biggest customer at the time, so they already had plenty of dollars for already selling their oil.
Otherwise you just talk more aobut how the US is controlled by banks, which is a bit ignorant. First, the Federal Reserve is considered a private entity within the US government as, while their day-to-day activities are handled in house, they still face oversight by the government, like how their chairman and board of governors is appointed by the President of the US and approved by the Senate, or the aforementioned remittance to the Treasury in my other comment. Furthermore, the Fed isn't even made up by mostly bankers, but economists and researchers. This is because they are supposed to conduct monetary policy, not handle typical operations of a commercial bank.
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To be slightly fair to the Nazis (ew), the Battle of Britain didn't involve the Germany army. The German army had been able to beat the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the BEF in a matter of weeks, so they had a reason to be confident. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was looking extremely weak as they fought a humiliating war against Finland where, while they won, they ended up looking incompetent.
Many world leaders, including the advisors to Roosevelt, were expecting the Soviet Union to fall in a matter of months. Roosevelt was even advised not to extend Lend-Lease to the USSR as the equipment would only end up in German hands in a couple weeks.
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@無-p8i You're an idiot if you don't think Operation Barbarossa was a mistake. The viability and practicality of invading the USSR is one thing, but Operation Barbarossa was a specific plan by the Germans that was destined for failure due to the arrogance on the part of the German leadership.
For example, isn't it funny how Germany was much more affected by the Russian winter than the Soviet troops were? I mean it's not like Germany didn't know how to produce winterized equipment after all. So how were the German soldiers so badly equipped and supplied during the winter? Because the offensive planned in Operation Barbarossa was only planned for, and also supplied for, ten or so weeks. They took their invasion of France as the rule, not the exception to the rule, and figured that they'd easily be able to blitz through all of the USSR in only a half dozen weeks, so why bother preparing for winter. This meant that when September and October of 1941 hit and the USSR started getting colder and wetter, Germany was already facing critical supply shortage due to their own horrible planning.
As for the whole "do you really think Stalin" question, yes, yes, most historians do. First, the USSR had other priorities of the time, like continuing their subjugation of the Balkans, taking more territory from Finland, retraining an officer reserve, modernizing their military, worrying about Japan, and supporting Communist China, that they didn't have any desire to go to war with Nazi Germany anytime soon. Hell, the USSR was actively shipping valuable war material to Germany and gaining military blueprints in return. The deal was one of the reasons the USSR military was modernizing so quickly. Even when the UK and US intelligence officials went to Stalin and told him Germany was planning an invasion of the USSR, he didn't believe them, trusting Hitler's word of theirs.
Of course that's not to say they were friends, but the USSR was helping and trusting Nazi Germany way more than you're giving them credit for.
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Hitler and Mussolini weren't socialist. "But it sayings National Socialist!" Yeah, and the Doctrine of Fascism, a pamphlet Mussolini wrote himself describing the tenets of fascism, claimed that fascism and socialism were opposed on the most fundamental of levels. Fascists didn't believe in egalitarianism, they believed people were inherently unequal. Fascists didn't like the so-called materialist views taken up by socialists. They didn't agree with the class struggle (seeing a struggle that was more due to culture and race), etc. Hitler himself saw "Bolshevik socialism (AKA: socialism), as a Jewish plot to rule the world.
Hitler was also never "buddies" with Stalin. In Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote in the 1920's, he made clear his intentions of taking over Ukraine, then part of the USSR, and using it as a breadbasket to feed his people. Stalin knew this of course, and throughout 1939-1941, both countries were preparing for war with the other. Both just saw it in their best interest to not immediately go to war with the other as it wasn't in either of their best interests. Germany didn't want to fight a protracted war on two fronts like in WW1, and Stalin didn't believe his military was modernized or its officers trained well enough (mostly because the experienced ones were executed) to fight a war.
Moreover, they never perfected anything. The German economy under the Nazis was EXTREMELY unstable since it was funded by German government loans. Loans for which they had no money to pay back. If Germany didn't start annexing countries and raiding their treasuries, the government would've been fucked. Likewise, the German government also froze workers wages during their time in power, cracked down on workers strikes, through socialists and others who disagreed with them in concentration camps, etc. Real fucking utopia there.
Finally, I honestly can't understand how much you're twisting to make your argument work. You talk about how the fascists went to war with "capitalist nations and whatnot" and were buddies with Stalin, but you completely ignore that for most of WW2 Germany was at war with the USSR. Because it totally makes sense for two socialist nations to fight on an ideological basis, right?
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@ms-pu1pe Ha, I love how the Serbian is calling everyone else fascists. Weren't the Serbians the ones that tried to ethnically cleanse the Bosnians and several other groups, eventually resulting in NATO intervention due to the resulting humanitarian crisis? But sure, it's Europe that are fascists.
Also Russia didn't give anyone freedom during WW2. For one, the entity that controlled Russia was the USSR. Russia as a independent state wasn't a thing. Furthermore, they colluded with Germany until Germany's eventual betrayal, annexing the Baltics and invading Poland in the process. Come 1944-1945, during their "liberation" and they ended up puppeting everything they took outside of Greece and Austria.
"But the people loved their liberation!" Tell that to the Poles who rose up in Warsaw and were brutally slaughtered by the German military while the Soviets watched from across the river. The only people to give them any support were the Western Allies, who did what they could to air drop supplies to the Poles. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and the Soviets did fuck all because they gave no shit for the Poles. Hell, they tried to conquer them twice already in the 20th century.
Another good example is when people started protesting and leaving the Warsaw Pact after WW2. What happened? Oh yeah, the Soviets built a wall to keep their people in (because fuck freedom), and then when a country would try to democratize, like Czechoslovakia in 1968, they'd be brutally put down by Soviet and Warsaw Pact military forces.
That's not even getting into the hilarity of the Helsinki Accords or modern Russia's actions today. Yet you dare call Western Europe as the fascists? Fuck off.
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As always when nuance is involved, I don't think you're quite portraying this situations right either.
Germany's declaration of war on the US: The declaration of war was more of a bet than anything. First, it should be noted that the USN and Kriegsmarine had already gone to blows several times by December 1941, resulting in a US ship being sunk, so quite a few higher ups in both countries saw an eventual war as being inevitable. Hitler was also hoping that, based on Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the strength of their fleet, the Japanese Navy would be able to tie up, and even defeat, the USN.
That being said, he was also expecting to get something out of the declaration of war: Japan's willingness to invade the USSR from the east, potentially collapsing their entire defensive line. That expectation would never come, so Hitler's bet failed on two parts.
Maginot Line: This argument is a little weird to be as Belgium 100% had fortifications of their own. Hell, they were even known for these fortifications during the war. The reason France never extended the Maginot Line past where they did is because, frankly, France was counting a potential invasion by Germany requiring them to go through Belgium. Germany having to go through Belgium meant they could fight there and not in France, which was still reeling from the destruction of WW1 (of course Belgium was too, but the French planners didn't much care for that). And if Germany kept their original plans for the invasion of Belgium, that's exactly what would've happened.
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@karl5722 I'm not a Keynesian, nor is mainstream economics. That being said, economics has taken the things Keynes has been found to be right about: sticky wages, the fiscal multiplier, say's law not always holding true, etc, and incorporated them, just like economics has incorporated ideas from Monetarism, Keynesianism's biggest rival.
So why have you argued for Say's Law? Because you're arguing that the economy quickly recovers from a downturn, which just isn't true. Specifically for the Great Depression, the economy faced a supply glut. The economy was able to produce a lot of goods, but few people were willing to buy them, so the economy crashed. According to Say's Law, this isn't possible.
Similarly, Say's Law argues that the labor markets should always lean towards full employment, something the Great Depression obviously proves false, and Keynes proved even more false with his theory on sticky wages and prices.
So you argued for Say's Law by saying the economy would quickly be able to recover from an economic downturn, something proven false by the fact that no global economy quickly recovered from the Great Depression.
Ignoring all of that though, economic analyses on the subject show you are just wrong. Below I have listed three of the most famous and highly accredited academic papers and book on the subject. All come to the conclusion that the fiscal policy of the United States had a positive effect on the US' recovery during the Great Depression.
https://www.nber.org/chapters/c6888.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/what-ended-the-great-depression/2A7B32F9B7FBA233528B8FDA4E0ABF9D
and, of course, A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
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@karl5722 Oh, you're restating your argument like that somehow makes it right. Does that mean all I have to do to refute you again is restate my argument? Doesn't help that the cause of the Great Depression was monetary policy issues linked to the international gold standard. That's not something an economy can easily recover from, as shown by the fact that no economy easily recovered from it.
Anyway, at least your not completely economically illiterate, though how you think immigration isn't an economic issue is beyond me. You don't think our level of consumer demand, the levels of our skilled and unskilled labor forces, our balance of cash flows, etc are economic issues? Economic experts have even written tons of literature on immigration due to its economic nature (literature you must not have read given your anti-immigration stance). Yes, yes, I know it's anti ILLEGAL immigration, but let's be honest here, it's just anti-immigration. If we made the illegal immigration into the US perfectly legal, that being there were next to no restrictions on crossing the Mexican-US border, you'd still have fault with the policy. It's not the fact that they're breaking some law that grinds your gears, its because you seem them in an inherently negative light.
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@CraigSkipsey Dude, you're not even trying to make a fair argument. Bitcoin mining, or the creation of new bitcoin, is the reason for Bitcoin's huge energy consumption. In terms of our real world financial system, the only real comparison is the Treasury's (not the Fed) printing of new money, which I can tell you isn't even a single percent of the energy used by Bitcoin miners.
Also nowhere does it saying an asset needs speculation in order for it to have a store of value. In fact it's usually the opposite. People use assets that have a consistent, stable valuation as their store of value. That's why people like the USD and Euro, each with an inflation rate targeted around 2%, and historically precious metals like gold and silver, which, besides huge economic shocks like the founding of the New World, kept their valuations stable. There's no point in storing your money if one day it can be worth $5 and the next $500.
The only true possible benefit for Bitcoin is that it offers a 100% market based currency unregulated by any government. The only problem with that is that it's not actually a good thing. There's a reason currencies are typically controlled and regulated by governments, and its because currency tends to be unstable without government regulation and central banking, as evidenced by the 18th century US, when we had Panics ever half decade. Also in terms of Bitcoin specifically, it's almost inherently deflationary, which is a terrible thing. There's a reason central banks tend to hold a stable, small inflation rate. Deflation is bad, much worse than inflation, especially during economic downturns, as evidenced by the Great Depression.
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with using the USD or euro, so looking to cryptocurrencies for a problem that doesn't even exist is pretty pointless and just a waste of energy.....literally.
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Unlike what a lot of Trump supporters will tell you, the tax breaks are almost definitely a net negative. In economics there is what's known as the Laffer Curve: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2009/09/laffer-curve.jpg
Basically at a 1% tax rate on income the government just isn't making enough revenue, and at a 99% tax rate on income people aren' incentivized to work for an income, meaning the government still doesn't get enough revenue. Somewhere between the two is a point where the government can maximize revenue without hurting incentives too much. The US current tax system is to the left of this point. Because of this, the tax cuts will be revenue negative for the US government. As our government provides critical resources to the economy and already runs a deficit, this is definitely not a good thing. Some countries like France are probably to the right of this maximum point and could increase revenue from this, but we are not France.
Recent economic history: China's industry grew way faster than economists in the US thought it would, leading to a lot of displacement in the US work force due to our trade with China. That was the early 2000's anyway. Since before even the Financial Crisis automation has been the main job displacer (not job killer. Big difference). This has resulted in a lot of the US' unskilled workforce being left unemployed and without sufficient means to acquire a new stable job. Even when the economy started to improve after the Financial Crisis and jobs began to return, they didn't return in these unskilled industries, leading to a dissatisfied workforce in some areas. Trump blamed the immigrants and unfair trade deals (which is laughable to most economists), committed a huge lump of labor fallacy: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lump-of-labour-fallacy.asp and so here we are, undoing a lot of the work we helped create, and annoying our trade partners in the process.
99% of economists support free trade with government programs set up to help the disadvantaged. The problem was that these programs weren't prepared for the amount of worker displacement seen because of China's growing industry. Even then, this is still a big slap in the face for a vast majority of economists: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/free-trade
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@avatarneji You realize strategic bombing is indiscriminate, right? Need I remind you of the accidental bombing of London above? The bomber crew thought London was a completely different city and accidentally unloaded their bombs on it. There are also dozens of incidents of Allied aircraft accidentally bombing Swiss cities as they were mistaken for their German targets. In 1940 the air raids over Berlin typically had a specific target in mind, but at night things are easily mistaken.
Ignoring all of this, your original claim is still wrong. Churchill was not the first person to target civilians in bombing raids. Hitler was. Again, look at Warsaw.
Because you said you won't respond, I just want to clear up some more of your bullshit.
One: Strategic bombing, while thought of as immoral, was not a war crime. The Allied countries originally strayed away from doing so (hence why they didn't start strategic bombing campaigns until during the Battle of Britain, a year into the war, but they ended up committing to it as a necessity anyway.
Two: You lumped Berlin and Dresden together for a reason. Why not Hamburg or another major German city instead? Is it because you're trying to tie Berlin to the bullshit neo-nazi myths surrounding the bombing of Dresden that even the city itself has disproven? Make me think.
Third: The myth that victors write the history is both wrong (hence the myth) and itself Nazi propaganda. The quote originated from, get this, infamous Nazi Hermann Goring. That's not the greatest person to make your bedfellow, but you do you I guess.
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@connerblank5069
1. You completely ignored how minimum wage workers are a subset of a subset of workers. The average worker isn't going' to have an increased income from a minimum wage increase. So maybe a Walmart worker might have increased discretionary spending for McDonalds, but an Accountant working at PWC or an Analyst at Microsoft won't. Considering most of McDonald's customers are going to earn more than a minimum wage, even if low income, most of their customers won't be impacted by it. Also I have no idea why you called groceries a natural monopoly. They compete in the same towns and cities all the time.
2. Prices haven't come down because we are still experiencing the supply disruptions. Gas is still being conserved and restricted in Europe due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, businesses are still experiencing tons of problems in China due to Covid, we still have a huge labor shortage with many businesses running understaffed, and now many businesses are cutting activity due to a possible future recession. Otherwise, you're not going to see a sharp drop in prices across the board because deflation is extremely bad for an economy, especially around a recession. Deflation causes demand to crater, half the reason the Great Depression was as bad as it was.
Your second paragraph ignores the fact that a demand curve is a thing so I won't bother to address it. Just look at a demand curve I guess? Also refer back to my comment that pushing the costs on the consumer still hurts the business, only to a lesser degree than doing nothing. Pesky demand curve. Can't escape it.
3. They are actually excellent examples because McDonald's and Burger Kings are franchised out. McDonald's corporate runs very few of the restaurants in the US. That McDonald's on the corner is really own and run by Joe Schmoe, who doesn't benefit nearly as much from economies of scale. Sure, Mcdonalds may supply him with the meat and bread, but everything else, from the advertising to the maintenance, and so much more is all the responsibility of Joe. A McDonald's franshise has an average profit margin of 6%. Considering labor is already the largest expense for a restaurant, that's not leaving them much room to raise wages by.
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Someone doesn't know how monetary policy works.
1. You are confusing cause and effect. The USD is the world's premier reserve currency because it has been since World War 2, when the US had over half the world's gold supply. Since many European economies were destroyed, the USD became the dominant currency in the world in the ensuing decades. The Marshall Plan? That was mostly given in USD, not local currencies. Even when Bretton Woods collapsed, the USD continued to be the world's dominant currency since it was so stable, open, and freely available around the world. Even after Bretton Woods, over 90% of foreign exchange transactions involved the USD. Obviously oil would also be traded in it. It's not an exception, it's the rule itself.
2. Infinite printing? Do you even know what inflation is? We have been sitting at around 2% inflation for years. In fact during the recession we almost entered a deflationary period, something that would've been horrible due to the economic downturn.
3. There's such a thing as real valuation you know. This accounting for inflation.
In short, you know nothing about what you're talking about.
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@kingtigerii1141 Germany and Japan literally had industrial genocide camps set up to kill millions of people. The Allies, not even the USSR, EVER had those. And, similar to WW1, just going to war the Axis Powers committed war crimes like, again, invading neutral Belgium without a proper declaration of war, or, you know, the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, Guam, the Philippines, etc by Japan without an official declaration of war.
The ground your supposed high horse is standing on is so shakey that the slightest of breezes would send it tumbling down.
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@RalphPlubwart Dude, you realize Google is a thing, right? There are clear records of what the defendants of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were charged with. They're for the most part obvious. Crimes against humanity like the Holocaust, war crimes like the illegal invasion of the USSR, Belgium, etc, so on and so forth. None of these related to the bombings you mentioned. Pearl Harbor's only on this list because Japan and the US weren't in a state of war to that point.
Also I love how you brought up Dresden. It shows how shaken your ground is. Funny how you picked that German city instead of another, like Cologne or Hamburg. After all, they had similar or greater casualty figures. Yet you picked Dresden, the city often used by White Nationalists to denounce the Allies. Funny.
So what was the reason the Allies bombed Dresden? Dresden was a major railway and communications hub between western and eastern Germany, or the Western and Eastern Fronts. This was at a time when the US and UK had agreed to use their air forces to stop Germany from reinforcing their collapsing defenses in the eastern front during the Yalta Conference. It was a military target for logistically supporting the German war machine. That's ignoring it's importance as an industrial hub, the largest such Germany controlled that hadn't been bombed up to that point in the war.
The USAAF even conducted two different investigations into the bombing and concluded that, yes, Dresden was a legitimate military target: https://media.defense.gov/2011/Feb/08/2001329907/-1/-1/0/Bombings%20of%20Dresden.pdf and https://media.defense.gov/2013/May/23/2001329959/-1/-1/0/Dresden%20again.pdf
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Except what you just stated is factually inaccurate. Banks don't just "create money out of thin air", You're referring to fractional reserve banking, but you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the phrase means.
Ex: Joe deposits $100 dollars in Bank A. Bank A, as part of the Federal Reserve System, is required to hold 10% of that money in reserves and does so. That leaves $90 to be loaned out. Specifically they loan out the money to Jerry, who deposits it in his bank, Bank B. Bank B goes through the same process as before, holding 10% of it ($9) in reserve, and loaning out the other 90% ($81). If you go through the math, you will see that more money exists than was originally deposited. Now there is $19 kept in reserve and $171 loaned out on an initial deposit of only $100, yet not bank created any money.
That's why the process is called fractional reserve banking. Because only a fraction of the deposit is kept as reserves.
As for the rest of your claims, you realize money isn't burned after one use, right? It circulates. More specifically, the process of fractional reserve banking can work in reverse, though we generally don't want it to as that would cause a contraction in the money supply, causing economic anxiety.
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Yep, that's why they are called publicly traded companies. In fact if you have a retirement account or the likes, you almost definitely own shares of stock. That's also why companies like Microsoft have so many shares outstanding. Otherwise, what do you get for buying them? Generally you'll get a say in how the company runs things. All major company decisions are handled by a shareholder vote usually, so you get to vote on strategic issues for the company. Companies can also offer dividends. Basically if they have any money left after making all their investments, they may choose to just give the money back to the shareholders themselves. This isn't much, something like 20 cents a share, but it adds up and is free money.
Beyond that, it's better to think of a share of stock as a physical good. When you buy gold, you don't expect to make money off of it just by holding on to it. You make money off of it by selling it later. You pay $50 for it, and then two years later sell it at $60, earning $10. It's same for stock. If you expect a company will do good in the future, you may buy some of their stock, selling it later when you think the company has peaked in value. So for instance, buying stock in Apple for $5 a share in 2005, before they came out with the iPhone, and then selling it today for $200 a share today. That's a 300% return on your investment year over year. Of course that's not the norm for stocks, but generally stocks do increase over time since, well, the economy grows every year. Buy low, sell high as they say.
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@chingpu Dude, you are being so ignorant it's not even funny. First, you told me to read a conspiracy book. It's been laughed at by economists for being, well, a conspiracy book. It has no basis in economics.
Second: Where is the thousand dollars the US promised to give its citizens coming from? Not printing money. The thousand dollar promise is a fiscal policy move, not a monetary one. Hence the money can only come from taxing and government bonds. If the Fed were to announce they were giving everyone $1,000, then it could come from printing, but that's not even a tool they have to use.
Third: The reasons the US and Allies invaded Iraq are well documented. Why you believe it has to do with the USD when 99% of US allies who provided aid use a different, competing currency (Germany and France the euro, the UK the pound, Japan the yen, etc), makes no sense. Their currency isn't related to the USD.
Furthermore, the USD was never tied to oil. That's another conspiracy theory. The only thing relating to this is that Saudi Arabia said they'd only do oil transactions in oil, which wasn't anything new. The USD takes part in 87% of all foreign exchange transaction in the world: https://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx13fx.pdf
Of course an oil producing nation is going to do FX transactions in it.
So yeah, besides the above, read any monetary and banking textbook as your education on the subject is misinformed at best.
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Video quality is the only thing that matters when it comes to subscriptions. If you had to actively go to his channel everyday to see if he made a new video, then yes, I'd agree with you. Actively going to his channel and not seeing a new video often enough would be cause for not going to his channel, but YouTube tells you when he posts a new video. As long as you use YouTube, and especially if you're already checking your notifications for other channels you subscribe to, quantity doesn't matter.
Since YouTube tells me when videos are out, it doesn't matter if he uploads once a week or once a year, as long as I like his videos, I should be willing to click the notification to watch them. If he doesn't upload quick enough, then I'll forget about the subscription until he next uploads. You may argue that this is a bad thing, but how? I'm not using up my time or energy by him taking his time since I never have to click on his channel. YouTube will tell me when a new video is up. No time commitment means no reason not to subscribe as long as I like the content itself. You click, you forget, you get notified of a new video being out.
FYI: I'm not pushing you to subscribe to this channel. You've already made your choice and I don't care to change your mind on it. I just think your reasoning is weird.
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Except that's not supported by the data or history. Banks were already overly-investing in the housing market due to their need to find a safe asset to hold their money while maintaining a profit. Previously they had been using undeveloped countries with the belief that countries, no matter how imbalanced, couldn't go bankrupt like companies can. Their overeagerness to invest lead to the savings and loan crisis. Afterward they invested into the tech industries on the stock market, believing that, as a new, growing industry, they wouldn't fail. This led to the tech bubble. Their investments then went into the housing industry thanks to the creation of mortgage backed securities, a new asset deemed completely safe,, and, well, you can assume the rest.
Ignoring al that though, your narrative completely ignores the major role played by the shadowing banking industry and credit rating agencies in the crisis. The overeagerness of commercial banks to invest in the housing market was only part of the problem.
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@johnmartinez12347 No, just no. You know when I cited the Doctrine of Fascism as fascists clearly stating their fundamental differences with socialism? Do you know who wrote that? Mussolini. Don't say that Mussolini thought himself as pretty socialist when he states that he disagrees with the ideology on the most fundamental of levels.
As for the Nazis, they weren't socialist and the fact that you think they were uniting races is hilariously bad history. They were racial supremacists, believing some falsified version of the Nordic race was superior to all others, to the point that they looked down on other "races" within Germany itself. Particularly the people living near the Alps (which Hitler called the Alpine peoples. Hitler thought of them as a muddled version of the Nords, inferior in every way. Other undesirable races include: blacks, mixed-race people. Arabic people, Romani, Slavic people, Jews, etc. The Nazis went so far as even to push this ideology into laws through such as the Nuremberg Laws, which declared people of certain races to be "life undeserving of life" . Once again, they were not egalitarian.
Here is a famous quote from a Nazi pamphlet: "People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!"
Finally, the autobahn wasn't a Nazi project. It was started by the Weimer Republic before Hitler took power and used as a huge propaganda move by the Nazis afterward.
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@ralfrath-new Another key thing to note about the Munich Crisis that I left out, and which is important here, is that the UK had no alliance with Czechoslovakia. This led to the not infamous quote of no British citizen being willing to die for some minor country in Central Europe. This changed with Poland for a couple reasons. First, Hitler blatantly broke their agreement with Chamberlain twice over, showing he couldn't be trusted and that he was an active threat to the European order at the very least. He broke the agreement by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia and by invading Poland later on. Second, the UK actually had an alliance with Poland. It was originally meant as a deterrence for Germany, but when Germany invaded, they were honor bound (alongside France) to defend Poland. This wasn't the case for the UK during the Munich Crisis.
Beyond that, like I said before, France didn't have any military plans drawn up for an offensive into Germany. That's why they built the Maginot Line. They expected any war with Germany to result in Germany invading into France. An interesting bit of WW2 that no one talks about is that the Maginot Line actually worked. The point of the fortifications were never to blunt the brunt of the German assault as the French military leaders knew Germany would never launch an all out assault of the forts. They expected, and were somewhat correct in the idea that, Germany would try to circumvent the line by invading through Belgium. This is what France wanted as that meant the fighting would take place in Belgium, not France, and so France wouldn't again be devastated by the war. This is also originally what happened until Germany successfully crossed the Ardennes, something thought uncrossable, cut off the most experienced French soldiers and near majority of the BEF from France itself.
Also you realize Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, the USSR, Scandinavia, Spain, etc, were not included in the war originally, right? Many of them didn't even enter the war at all or were invaded by Germany. Are you blaming the UK and France for Germany invading countries like Denmark?
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@ralfrath-new Uh, what? The Versailles Treaty wasn’t broken by France. In fact, it was just the opposite. In 1923 Germany refused to continue their reparation payments to the Allies, breaking their part of the treaty. The treaty laid out that if that were to happen, France (and Belgium) were allowed to occupy the German Ruhr region to reclaim payments. Whether they should’ve is a topic for another day, but they never broke the Versailles Treaty by doing it. This event ended with the Dawes Plan, which agreed to end the occupation for the Ruhr as long as Germany agreed to continue their reparation payments to a lesser degree. Germany was also loaned money from the US.
Beyond that, the Weimer Republic (the democratic government of Germany until the early 1930’s) was not peaceful. The country was fragmented politically after the war, with more radical elements vying for control of the government. It wasn’t exactly peaceful.
Moving on, the Nazi party didn’t grow in power due to the Treaty of Versailles. That’s a misconception that next to no modern historian (or economist) holds. This is because Germany, even with the reparations, was better off than France was during the period. There are two things that modern historians point to today. The fact that WW1 wasn’t felt much on the German homeland, so many Germans were angered and confused when their government eventually surrendered to the Allies. This lead to a lot of finger pointing and scapegoats. It was the Jews who weren’t doing their part. No it was the dirty communists. This resentment exploded during the start of the Great Depression thanks to many Germans finding themselves jobless and penniless. Then people once again started pointing fingers at the previous scapegoats, leading to a radicalization of the German populace.
You can see this going on to a much lesser degree in the United States. The majority of Americans have never looked favorable on illegal immigration, but it wasn’t until the Financial Crisis where many people lost their jobs and incomes that people really started getting pissed off with illegal immigration, saying they were the reason they couldn’t get a job, they were the reason they were poor. These claims were unfounded, but that didn’t stop a large group of Americans from getting radicalized to stop the illegal immigration. Now the nation somehow elected a president whose main policy is building a giant wall on the US-Mexican border to stop immigration.
As for the Treaty of Versailles being illegitimate, you realize that armistices always come before official treaties, right? The armistice is there to stop the fighting during the peace negotiations to stop tempers from flaring. The armistice was never supposed to permanent, as shown by the fact that it had to be prolonged several times over until the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
Beyond that, the Allies mostly took up the policy of self-determination for their redrawing of borders during the Paris Peace Conference. To stop the issue that caused WW1 from happening again (Serbians being angered over their rule by Austria-Hungary, not a Serbian nation, the Allies decided to let the Poles govern the Poles, Austrians govern Austrian, Hungarians govern Hungarians, etc. I also love how you claim that Germany was somehow justified in re-annexing these areas. Instead of invading, why not just ask the people what they wanted? In fact that’s what Austria tried to do. They tried to hold a plebiscite to have their people vote on the matter of reintegrating with Germany. Coincidentally (NOT!) Germany invaded the country before the plebiscite could happen and only let the plebiscite continue under German occupation. Because pointing a gun at voters is definitely how you have a fair vote!
Your second paragraph is also bullshit. First, the UK and France taking the defensive gives no justification for Germany invading neutral countries. You can try and twist a narrative all you want, but at the end of the day the blame lies solely on Germany. Furthermore, you realize a victorious country doesn’t need to take territory, right? The WW1 Allies never once held German territory for any long period of time, and by the time of Germany’s signing of the armistice, they were still in France. War isn’t a video game. The Allie’s plan was to destroy the German military, not to occupy German land, so they took the defensive. During the time of the Phony War they were also hoping to persuade the German public to stop the bloodshed (AKA: leave Poland) before it got worse. This was a time when no one truly knew the capabilities of strategic bombing. The effects of it were only observed during the Spanish Civil War, so no one quite knew how it’d play out with two industrious nations, so obviously the UK and France were hesitant to use it at first.
And your last paragraph gets into conspiracy territory. Because of course it does. Neither the UK or France had particularly strong Nazi (really fascist) movements. In fact France had a larger communist movement than a fascist one). The reason the UK and France declared war on Germany (beyond the obvious invasion of an ally), was that they saw Germany as a threat to European stability. Germany even without the annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, etc, was a more productive and populous nation than France, so their annexation of said countries, as well as their blatant remilitarization, led to a lot of questioning of what the end goal of Germany really was. Was it prudent to wait for Germany to grow even more powerful and potentially invade France or the UK? Should they act now before its too late? That’s why Chamberlain made his now infamous agreement with Hitler during the Munich Agreement. He realized that Hitler had somewhat of a point (though not really) in that the Sudetenland was majority German and should be German. He also realized that the British public would not be willing to fight for Czechoslovakia for numerous reasons. That said, he was also worried over the increasing power and expansion of Germany turning Europe into a Germanic bloc, something the UK entered WW1 to avoid. When Germany blatantly reneged on the deal by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia, the UK and France went for a policy of containment: stop Germany from growing stronger. They did this by allying Germany next target, Poland, in the hopes it’s force Hitler to back down. It didn’t.
If you make one more post trying to claim that the war was somehow the fault of the UK and France and Germany had absolutely no blame in it, I think I’m going to scream. Do I have to remind you that while this is all going on, Germany is literally building camps and chucking people they consider to be undesirable into them for forced labor? Or how about them enacting a law to make Jews non-citizens and forcing many Jewish establishments closed? But sure, the UK and France are the REAL bad guys for trying to protect a country from being invaded. Makes sense.
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@victoriassecretisluv Actually the US' trade deficit with China is equal to about half of the US' total trade deficit ($375 billion out of $600 billion total). Why this matters in the first place I have no idea. Trade deficits in and of themselves are no bad. They merely show consumer preferences.
Moreover, that is NOT how tariffs work at all, and your ignorance in the matter is why we're in the position in the first place. The tariffs paid are not paid by China, and especially not the Chinese government. They are paid on any good coming into the US from China. Whether the goods come from an American company or otherwise. In fact most of the companies paying the tariff are American. And let's remember that businesses aren't the sole entities eating up these tariffs. Much of the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer, meaning consumers have less money in real terms to spend on goods.
Apparently you don't care about fucking over American consumers though, especially the poor, because, what? These tariffs create jobs in America?
That's a load of shit. First, the US doesn't need new jobs, Our unemployment rate is below 5%, what is considered the natural rate of unemployment. Generally anyone who wants a job has one. It's not like people are still struggling to get a job. Second, China wasn't even the reason the US lost many of its jobs in the first place, automation was. Don't believe me? Here's proof: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QQkK0hs8Lb4/T5revMy9zNI/AAAAAAAARWA/YV60eLcyrfo/s1600/mfg1.jpg
While manufacturing jobs have jumped off a cliff in recent decades, American manufacturing output has only been on the up and up.
Also it's glad to see that you care about Chinese currency manipulation! You must've been a huge supporter of the TPP then, right. After all, the main goal of the TPP was to punish China for its currency manipulation by creating a free trade zone with everyone around China, excluding China itself, so that they could trade more with each other and not China. Too bad Trump killed the TPP in the name of protectionism, right?
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Wow, you're glorifying an administration that committed some of the most horrifying atrocities this planet has ever seen just because they experienced some racial discrimination. Granted, racial discrimination is bad, and there treatment by many Westerners was horrible, that their treatment of the Chinese during WW2 was even worse. One only had to look at some of the experiments of Unit 721, the Nanjing Incident, which the Japanese government admitted too already, or their treatment of prisoners of war. That administration deserved to be destroyed for those atrocities.
What rose in its place is a huge bastion for free market based thinking, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, is one of the most advanced economies in the world, and the third largest economy in the world They still have problems of course, but they are a thousand times better than their fascist counterparts before and during World War 2.
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Your fourth point is fucking hilarious! Is your only evidence of Japan helping China from 100 years before the period we are talking about. With that logic the United States and Japan are still bitter enemies to this day because 80 years ago we fought in World War 2. Yeah, doesn't hold up, does it?
Otherwise, you're ignoring that China signed similar unequal treaties with Japan. Like the Treaty of Shimonoseki, where China had to pay war reparations to Japan, give the island of Taiwan to Japan, and give the Japanese the exact same trade status as the Chinese were giving the Europeans. How, that treaty sounds very similar to the treaties the Chinese signed with the British and other western nations. That was in 1895. In 1901 Japan was part of the 8 Nation Alliance which defeated the Chinese government and anti-foreigner forces during the Boxer Rebellion and one of the signatories of the unequal treaty that followed. That was 1901.
Yep, sounds like China and Japan had some really friendly relations. Two wars not even ten years apart. Both came after your incidents proving they had friendly relations. Guess because that goes against your narrative. You also completely ignored that the last two unequal treaties China ever signed were with Japan in the form of the 21 Demands (which the US and UK opposed) in 1915, and the Tangu Truce in 1933 which ceded Manchuria to Japan.
Sorry to tell you this, but those aren't what normal people consider to be friendly relations.
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No, never. Germany's army was never the thing holding Germany from taking over Britain, it was their navy and air force. The British navy completely outclassed the German's, and the British air force won a critical campaign over the skies of Germany, and were even attacking mainland Germany. Because of this, they had absolutely no possibility of reliably landing a large amount of troops and supplying them for an invasion of Britain. In other words, Britain couldn't be defeated.
Bringing the USSR into the war wouldn't have changed that. They didn't have much of a navy, especially not in the area, and their air force, while quite formidable in the later years, wasn't much to look at in 1941. Even if it were powerful though, they'd have to get past the British navy to invade the British isles, and that was never going to happen.
This is only 10 times worse for the United States due to its distance from Eurasia. No plan could yet be made to travel across the Pacific or Atlantic to reach the United States yet, meaning the only possible way to do so would be to use aircraft carriers. Unfortunately Germany and the USSR didn't have any. Germany had one at the start of the war, but it sank early on. That means it would be a straight duel between the navies. While Britain was the number one naval power, the United States was a clear number two, and would become the number one naval power by the end of the war. Germany and the USSR would stand no chance fighting a naval campaign in the Atlantic.
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You do realize gold faces the exact same problems you claim paper currency like the USD does, right?
1. Just like the USD, gold has next to no intrinsic value since only a small portion of it is used in computer parts. The vast majority of its demand has nothing to do with its use.
2. Gold's supply isn't constant. You see there's this thing called the ground, and gold comes from it. Every year more and more gold is mined out of the ground, and eventually we'll be able to get gold and other such materials from asteroids. Huh, a constant increase on the supply of gold to put pressure on its valuation. Doesn't that sound like inflation?
3. The value of gold is in no way stable. In 2008 the price of gold was $1,000 an ounce, then it jumped to nearly $1,900 in 2011, dropped down to $1,100 in 2016, and now, with fears of a new crisis, is up to $1,500. How the fuck are sellers and consumers supposed to work around a currency that fluctuates so much?
Compare that to the USD. How much did it's value change in 2019? 2.3% In 2018? 2.4% In 2017? 2.8%. The USD is clearly WAY more stable than gold, hence one of the many, many reasons people prefer it over gold.
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I mean Germany has a larger population than France by about 3/2. Beyond that, Nazi Germany focused much of their economic reconstruction effort following the Great Depression on their military, so many Germans who lost jobs either ended up working in factories to support the military or a soldier in the military itself. Beyond that, many soldiers from other nations ended up fighting for Germany as well, including a small contingent sent from fascist Spain, Austrians, Italians, Romanians, Czechoslovakians, etc. During their campaign in the USSR they had a huge propaganda effort going on in German occupied Europe trying to paint the war as a united Europe standing up to the Jewish puppetmasters: whether they be the evil Bolsheviks who controlled the USSR, the freemasons who controlled the UK, or, when the US joined, the Jewish bankers that run things there. Europe had a history of anti-Semitism, so the propaganda worked for a surprising number of people.
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@robertlymberopoulos4683 You're just spouting more wrong facts.
1) Does that means the modern day light bulb can be traced back to Edison (not Tesla)? Yes. What does this have to do with your original claim anyway? You said it was Gentile, not Mussolini, who created fascism, and that Gentile was a leftist. My point was that his writings clearly show otherwise.
A book is written by the authors who wrote it (obviously). Mussolini and Gentile both wrote 'The Doctrine of Fascism'.
2_ German socialization was never called Nazism. Nazi is the shortened form of the German word for national socialist. There used to be a homonym in Bavaria which meant "backwards peasant". Socialists were called a different word, Sozi.
Nazism shares very little with socialism. It's a fascist take on already debunked Malthusian logic. The racism, culture politics, dictatorial power, militarism, and need for autarky were all products of fascism., The only people claiming Nazism wasn't right wing are right wing pundits today. You'll find next to no, if any, historian or expert on the subject agreeing with them.
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I've never used Discord and don't care much for an in depth conversation on this mainly because there's not much to converse about, but you should really look up what inflation is before you make such a bold claim like that central banks create it. As shown by the Fisher Equation: MV=PT or, in other words, the monetary supply times the velocity of money (how quickly it changes hands), equals the price level times the volume of goods being sold. As the volume of goods remains constant in the short run, this is typically simplified to say money supply times velocity of money equals inflation.
Of the two, the Federal Reserve has influence over both, but doesn't directly control either. Thanks to fractional reserve banking, much of the money supply is directly controlled by commercial banks (not a bad thing). Only a small portion of it was printed by the Federal Reserve. They can influence the money supply by setting a lower or higher required reserve ratio, but even this is only a constraint, nothing more. In other words, if the Fed requires that instead of being forced to hold 10% of all deposits as reserves, banks have to hold 15%, this wouldn't affect banks that have already been holding that amount as reserves. This is what happened directly following the 2008 recession. Banks, facing a lot of uncertainty, were unwilling to invest a lot, so held a lot of their deposits as reserves, so changing the required reserves ratio wouldn't change anything for them.
Then there's the velocity of money, or how quickly money changes hands. A good indicator of this is consumer confidence. If consumer confidence is high, there is a lot of economic activity, so money changes hands faster, causing inflation. If consumer confidence is low, economic activity slows and you get disinflation, possibly even deflation. Besides encouraging banks to invest, thereby increasing the ease at which consumers can get money, the Fed has no way of influencing this.
Beyond that, the central bank reacting to unemployment and inflation is inherently a market phenomenon as unemployment and inflation are determined by market activity. It's the firm's choice whether to hire people. It's the consumer's choice whether to use their money or save it for later. These are market decisions that can have a serious impact on both unemployment and inflation, making them market phenomenon.
Finally, it is important to note that the Federal Reserve pursued a pretty aggressive policy in terms of raising interest rates. It might not look that way to the layman, but that's only interest rates don't typically fluctuate a whole low. This is mainly due to the effects of the interest rate not being felt until months after the initial change, so economists and economics experts don't know if the markets will respond well to a change in the interest rate until months afterward. Because of this, they usually don't make major changes to it, and make sure the changes they do make aren't detrimental to the economy before making the change more extreme. The US was also just coming out a recession during the time in the Tech Bubble, so obviously interest rates were going to be low.
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I'm not even three minutes in and you've already said way more incorrect statements than you have correct ones.
1. The Federal Reserve IS part of the US government. They are an independent institution much like the FBI, UPS, Smithsonian, etc, yet they still answer to the US Congress, President, and Inspector General.
2. Money comes from the government. Even if you don't believe the Fed is a governmental institution, you realize the US Mint exists for a reason, right? They don't just sit on their asses all day. Specifically there is the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and you'll never guess what they do.
3. The quote from Henry Ford is bullshit. We have no direct evidence that he ever said it. Instead we have a Congressman who said he said it in the 1930's. Yeah, not a very airtight source there. Beyond that, so what? Ford was an infamous anti-Semite and not an expert in finance. Why should he be believed over Joe Schmoe the farmer?
4. The Bank of England wasn't created so that they could "print money out of thin air". That doesn't even make sense since England followed the gold standard all the way until the 1970's. This standard existed specifically to prevent the printing of money out of thin air.
5. It wasn't the bankers calling for a central bank in the US, it was the American public. After the devastating Panic of 1907, the public soon realized that it was only thanks to many hugely prominent bankers like JP Morgan and his friends that the country was even able to recover as well as this did. This scared the public as they feared how much power these bankers had over the US economy. This lead to a huge push by Congress and the presidents (particularly Wilson) to get a central bank which could be within the US government to handle monetary policy. Even then, the institution didn't really come into its own until the late 1930's.
Those were all wrong claims you made in the first 3 minutes. Really I have to wonder if you said anything correct in that time.
Bonus: As I'm 99% sure you mentioned the Jekyll Island meeting later on, it should be pointed out that the Federal Reserve did not come from said meeting. That meeting created the bill for the National Reserve Association and was rejected in Congress (mainly by Congressional Democrats). A different bill then made it through Congress and was signed by the president known as the Federal Reserve Act, which, obviously, created the Federal Reserve system.
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@matthewmartin3765
1. Learn words. Independent doesn't mean non-governmental. It only means that the day to day actions of the Federal Reserve are made in-house. Just like the FBI, which even you should be able to admit is part of the government. They still answer to the US Congress, President, and Inspector General though. The President himself even picks who will head the Fed.
2. Because there's a difference between fiscal and monetary policy. The Federal Reserve prints money to stabilize the US monetary reserve, NOT to balance the US government's budget. That's the whole reason they're independent in the first place. To keep money creation out of the hands of politicians who have historically over inflated the economy by printing money in order to please their constituents.
3. I brought up the quote because it was part of this video's thesis statement and a statement based on authority. "Hey, look what this famous man said about the financial system", ignoring that he never said that. You can say he did all you want, but it's a known fact that he didn't. The quote first showed up in a House of Representatives debate during the Great Depression: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Congressional_Record_Volume_81_Part_3.djvu/154
4. This is one of the dumbest things you could've said. The value of gold was determined by supply and demand. That's it. And the idea was to keep the price of gold stable (with the expected given that supply and demand would likewise be stable). So governments couldn't just print money as that'd cause the price of gold to skyrocket due to inflation. The whole idea was that, no matter what, if you truly wanted to, you could go to your local bank and exchange you paper currency for gold, the "real" currency which the paper represents.
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You're wrong on so many accounts.
First: the narrator's claim wasn't wrong. The League of Nations was set out specifically to stop these kinds of conflicts from starting, but the League largely did nothing when it came to Japan's invasion of Manchuria and the rest of China, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, and Germany's breaking of the Treaty of Versailles numerous times over, and the Munich Crisis started. This is in large part because the League of Nations never had much teeth and never reached its full potential, partially because the US never joined it. You can talk about US sacrifice all you want, but the above statement is largely agreed upon by historians of the 20th century.
Second: The largest contributor in WW2 was the USSR, especially in reference to the European Theater, not the US. While US supplies to the UK were beneficial, they're not what turned it in the UK's favor, and the Battle of Britain was the only time when the UK was actually directly threatened by Germany, and even then the threat wasn't much. Germany still had next to no ability to invade them successfully. Keep in mind that the D-day landings were very iffy for the Allies even when they had huge superiority in troops, aerial dominance, naval dominance, and surprise on their side. Germany would've had none of this.
When it comes to who defeated the most Germans, took out the most tanks, and took the most territory from Germany, the answer is the USSR. Would they have been so successful without US support? No, but they still probably would've won either way. The US support that really mattered to the USSR up until 1944 was their material aid.
I too am grateful for every service member of the Allies who fought for their cause, but that doesn't mean you can discount facts already agreed upon by historians.
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What the fuck? You don't know what fractional reserve banking or double-entry bookkeeping are, do you? Double-entry bookkeeping just means that both sides of the accounting equation: assets=liabilities+equity must balance out. Equity being the profits of a company and the valuation of the company's shares. Why you think this proves that loans create deposits is beyond me. The entries are updated at the same time. If a take out a loan for $100, I update my accounts payable, a liability, and my cash, an asset, at the same time. Otherwise the sides wouldn't be equal.
Beyond that, the accounting is the whole reason banks DON'T don't debit your account. They know not everyone's going to come clamoring for their money all at once, so they only need to keep a portion of it on hand at any given time for those that want to make a withdrawal. The rest they are free to loan out. So, while Joe Schmoe might have $100 with Bank of America, Bank of America didn't keep his entire $100. They loaned most of it out. That being said, he can still withdraw his money at any time, the money would just come from the reserves the bank holds made up of everyone's money, not just his.
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Because that destroys people's incentives, cause massive deflation, and the government literally doesn't have the resources to do such a thing? You realize that government revenue is only bout 1/5 of our GDP (that being the total value of the productive capacity of a country in a year). Last year the US federal government made about $3.5 trillion in government revenue. Divide that by our population of 320 million, and everyone is given $10,937.5 a year, which is below poverty. That getting rid of all government services too. No military, no police, no education subsidies, no Medicaid or Medicare, etc. What about only for our adult population only then? They'd get $14,435, which is above poverty, but good luck supporting a family with that.
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You are so wrong it's not even funny. Germany declared war on Poland on September 1st, 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop plan, a mostly secret agreement made by Germany and the USSR a week prior to divide up Poland based on an important river which ran through it. The USSR then invaded Poland on the 17th of September, taking tens of thousands of Polish soldiers as prisoners. There is no way you can write that as an invasion of Germany, especially since war between Germany and the USSR didn't begin until 1941 with the German invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa.
I also fail to see where the Berlin Wall fits into this. Following one of the several peace conferences between the three leaders of the Allies: Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, they agreed to divide up the occupation zones of Germany following the surrender of Germany. As Berlin was its capital, they also agreed to divide up the capital amongst the major Allies (the UK, France, US, and USSR). Basically the USSR got Eastern Germany and Easter Berlin, and the Western halves were divided between the Western Allies, though that territory was soon turned into a single occupation zone. Following a string of people leaving Eastern Berlin to the West, and in an effort to strengthen the so-called Iron Curtain, the USSR.....well Warsaw Pact, built a wall separating East and West Berlin in early 1960's. Once again, not sure how any of this proves that the USSR didn't attack Poland.....
Finally, yeah, the USSR took Berlin. So what? That was the agreed upon battle strategy in the Peace Conferences mentioned above. It wasn't that the USSR was somehow quicker to get to Berlin, Roosevelt and Churchill just agreed to let Stalin get the "glory" of taking Germany's capital (and taking the combat losses) while the Western Allies focused on taking the territory south of Berlin and begin shifting their war efforts to the Pacific Theater.
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Except it's true. Hitler was firmly against socialism. If you don't believe me, you can just look at his track record. Almost as soon as he took office he started the Night of Long Knives, which was the extrajudicial killings of any socialist in the Nazi party or government with even a modicum of power. Afterward, socialists were among the political prisoners thrown into the first concentration camp, Dachau, making up a large percentage of those interned. He then went on to dissolve all the labor unions except for one, and then used that labor union to suppress worker wages. That's not exactly pro-worker, is it? Then there's the fact that he brutally suppressed worker strikes like the February Strike, and wrote about the evils of "Judeo-Bolshevism" (socialism) in several of his speeches and books, including Mein Kampf.
Hitler hated socialism, believing it was a conspiracy created by the Jews to rule the world.
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@semperfi1587 Except it 100% did have a positive connotation to those the Nazis were trying to influence. This was in the late 1920's and early 1930's, right before and during the Great Depression. The Nazi party was looking to gain the support of as many of the disenfranchised as they could. Unsurprisingly the disenfranchised were looking for an alternative to that way of life, so the Nazi party called themselves national socialists.
If you look at their policies though, they were very much not socialist. One of the first things Hitler did while in power was imprison or outright kill all socialists in his party and government. Dachau, the first concentration camp, was used to house political prisoner like socialists. Workers' wages were then frozen, strikes brutally put down, and the Nuremberg laws passed, making sure everyone knew that huge swaths of the population were considered inferior to the rest. I could go on, but I'll leave you with this quote from Gregor Strasser:
"We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power. People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state."
That's not very socialist. Also this was the man who led the left wing of the Nazi and who would later be killed by Hitler in the mentioned killings for being too far left.
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@semperfi1587 You missed me entire point. Good job? No fascist ideology, including that of Nazism, is socialist. Mussolini even wrote a whole essay on why that is in his 'Doctrine of Fascism'. Basically all fascist ideology, including Nazism, reject the "materialist view of history" held by socialists and also reject their class struggle, finding the struggle to be more related to race and culture. Mussolini goes on to say that fascism rejects the fundamental pillars of socialism (for which the above two are a part).
"But Strasser said that they were socialist!" Yeah, and he was killed by Hitler for being so. I'm glad you reiterated what I said? But even Strasser wasn't actually socialist as one of the fundamental pillars of socialism is its egalitarian nature and view of the class struggle, both of which Strasser rejected. He was totalitarian, sure, but monarchies before the 19th century were totalitarian before the invention of socialism.
There's a reason the Nazi party sat at the right wing of the Reichstag (where their position reflected their political beliefs), there's a reason Germany would eventually attack the USSR, there's a reason the Nazis and Soviets would hate each other, etc.
You can spin your bullcrap narrative however you want, it won't hold up to scrutiny. You also haven't addressed Hitler's policies during the 1930's and 1940's either. Are we just going to skip over them because they don't suit your narrative?
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