I'll offer a slight adjustment; "Finance in general encourages risky behavior". It is an industry explicitly dealing in moving and dealing in risk.
We periodically become very aware of this. See financial news in 1893, 1901, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1920, 1937, 1949, 1953, 1961, 1970, 1973, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2011, and so on and so on.
It's almost as if a zero-sum, value neutral industry controlling the bulk of world finance is inherently a very very bad idea.
You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
You could also see it as economic value is commonly extremely divorced from any useful human measure of value. Enough money to feed the world is "made" and "lost" though market oscillations that aren't really based in any practical reality. Like Tesla being worth more than the rest of the next 35 car companies, say. Or just one of the several apps that calls a cab being worth the GDP of Kenya. Or the value of Bitcoin.
The fiction is that the market is an infinitely rational representation of value, denominated in the same units humans buy food and shelter with, and generally correlated with their ability to do so. But it seems "the economy" has less and less to do with life on the ground.
Economic value is entirely rooted in life on the ground, but it is simply the demand part of the equation.
Its equal to demand (in £) divided by supply (kg/gallon/BTC etc).
Market oscillations are all based in practical reality, but if they don't make sense, you're just not aware of their cause. For example, multiple traders around the world simultaneously buying /selling with high leverage according to obscure technical analysis of the price chart.
What distorts everything is that the value of what we measure economic value in is itself devalued by 50% every decade through supply inflation. Economic value over time != price over time.
I mean this is what all the textbooks say, but it's cold comfort to people who want bread, clean water, a roof and a warm bed rather than some economist-approved funny money on a graph somewhere.
Everyone's been told to trust the system, the market knows best. At this rate, I don't think they will continue to do indefinitely.
Now we're on a completely different subject, but that's fine.
Trust what system exactly?
If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread. Unfortunately, the funny money that I show in the graph means that it's not a fair playing field.
If you want to fix the world, fix the money. The world is desperately in need of a digital money that can't be created with no effort, and by just a few select people (i.e. banks). The money we're using is toxic.
>If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread.
The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
>the money we’re using is toxic
Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
Sure. But what they are really doing is giving you a pay cut each year without you realising, and the bankers and their friends closest to the money printers are pocketing it.
Compounding even 3% annual cut in real value adds up to an 80% pay cut over 50 years.
Even worse the people nearest the money printers are largely engaged in the business of starting (and most frequently losing) foreign wars of choice. The human suffering created by the system is immense.
Yes. As they're incentivised to "lend" (print) as much money as they can, to obtain the interest, the outcome is that they're encouraged to start wars and fund both sides, because war generates the highest demand for loans. The longer the war lasts, the better.
Inflation makes the problem worse, but even if inflation were zero percent, no company is going to tell its employees they can work 1 hour per week because the company is paying for the employees time.
On top of that, the fundamental competition inherent to a free market says that a company with employees that only worked 1 hour per week would be out competed by a company full of employees that worked more than that. (Up to a point, obviously.), so the company can't let it's employees take advantage of increased productivity with a shorter work weeks in order to stay competitive.
Getting rid of fractional reserve banking and inflation isn't going to change those underlying facts of capitalism.
Its not about working less, it's about not having your wages stolen. If people understood they were getting a pay cut each year, they likely wouldn't stand for it. Instead they celebrate it as a pay rise but wonder why they can't afford nice things like a traditional family with an average-sized house and 2 kids, holidays etc, all paid for only by the husband who has an average job while the wife stays at home.
> The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
Poverty is relative, but I do recognise the distinction between needs (survival) and wants.
> Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
Yes! Absolutely. I believe it's the primary mechanism that's behind the enormous gains in efficiency going to the rich rather than the general population.
It's a deep subject, but to try and summarise as best I can: Every decade in the USA the banking system and government combined creates double the currency out of thin air (in the form of loans) and charge interest on it [https://imgur.com/a/1ljSLgA]. The deal is that they must destroy the money when it's repaid. By keeping interest rates below the natural free market rate, they both monopolise lending and incentivise borrowing and so the total borrowed just keeps increasing over time. They can still profit enormously because the money they lend is not really theirs and was created out of nothing as the "loan" was made.
This has been going on for decades and sped up in 1971 (wtfhappenedin1971.com) when the dollar was "temporarily" non-redeemable for gold (because of all the money printing they had already done)
Each time the money supply doubles, the value of the monetary unit halves. It works out at about 7% a year over the last 100 years.
It's no coincidence that that's the approximate rate of increase in real-estate prices over the decades. It's not real-estate going up in value - it's that the dollar is falling in value.
Consummables are falling in value at around 5% a year (due to the productivity gains), giving a net price increase of 7-5 = 2%. So if you are getting an annual nominal pay rise of say 2%, you're actually getting a pay cut of 7-2=5%, but "luckily" consumables are falling in value at the same rate, so you can still afford food, a car etc. What you can no longer afford are the things that haven't gone down in value - hard assets like real estate, gold etc. - things that have a relatively constant supply/demand and therefore, value. These are the things that the bankers and their friends buy with all the interest they are collecting.
By giving the entire world a stealth 5% pay cut each year, the banks and those closest to the money printers are stealing away all the productivity gains. Look up the Cantillon Effect. It's a kind of pyramid scheme where the bankers take the main gains, but then reward those who support the system by taking out loans with a cut. Once you realise that the money is devalued at a faster rate than the interest, you can see that you're paying back less economic value than you borrowed, even with interest. The people who really suffer are the savers who have their savings stolen essentially at a rate of 7% minus whatever interest rate they are getting. Obviously pensions are affected too. Anything that's denominated in dollars, pounds, euros etc.
It all started with banks lending out the gold you'd given them to look after, behind your back. A fraud that has grown to monumental proportions. They are now collecting interest on all the money in the world, and they printed it all out of thin air.
> You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
If you think about it, the "economic" value is just the market trying to discover what everyone value in life.
> Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
Finding a cure for cancer will be infinite value and most people will give anything for it - including all Bitcoins in the world. This - finding the cure of cancer - is the way better store of value than anything. The reverse is not true.
It's worthless. I wouldn't buy a litre of air for even a penny. But put me at the bottom of the sea, out of oxygen (i.e. no supply), and I'd give you everything I have for it.
See: Sports gambling, prediction markets, pay-later apps. Gamified finance in general encourages risky behavior.