#dollar losing its reserve currency standard

[indianahal]

The US. government has placed new generations of Americans in financial peril because of their out-of-control spending.  The congress has crossed over the $33 trillion threshold of debt.  In recent months the debt is accelerating with over $1 trillion added almost every three months.  Spending is out running revenues by such a huge margin that the ratio of public debt to GDP cannot be maintained.  My new video looks at this, and also how the non-stop printing of money is weakening the value of the dollar worldwide.

[unpluggedfinancial]

Why Hyper-Bitcoinization is Closer Than We Think

The world is on the cusp of a massive shift—a shift that could redefine how we think about money, store value, and exchange goods globally. This transformation, often referred to as hyper-Bitcoinization, is the process by which Bitcoin becomes the dominant form of money, replacing fiat currencies on a global scale. While this idea may have once seemed distant, several key factors suggest that hyper-Bitcoinization could be much closer than we think.

Bitcoin ETFs: A Major Catalyst

One of the clearest signs that hyper-Bitcoinization is approaching is the approval of Bitcoin ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds). ETFs make it easier for institutional investors and everyday people to gain exposure to Bitcoin without having to hold the asset directly. This is a game-changer because it removes many of the technical barriers and trust issues that have held back adoption in the past.

With ETFs, we’re witnessing a flood of capital entering the Bitcoin market from traditional financial players who would otherwise be wary of buying Bitcoin on exchanges. This influx of capital could dramatically boost Bitcoin’s market cap and legitimacy. As more ETFs are approved, Bitcoin's reputation as a serious asset class will only grow, bringing hyper-Bitcoinization closer to reality.

Nation-States Warming Up to Bitcoin

We’re also seeing the beginning stages of nation-state adoption. El Salvador has already made Bitcoin legal tender, and other countries are considering similar moves. The implications of this are enormous. Bitcoin isn’t just a digital asset; it's becoming a national asset for countries looking to hedge against inflation, financial instability, or reliance on the U.S. dollar.

Beyond El Salvador, countries like Argentina, Turkey, and even large economies like Russia and China are exploring the use of Bitcoin, either for mining, trading, or reserve assets. As more countries adopt Bitcoin, an arms race could develop, where nations will rush to be the first to establish a Bitcoin standard. This potential competition among nation-states could fast-track hyper-Bitcoinization as countries scramble to secure their positions in a new Bitcoin-powered global economy.

Rising Distrust in Traditional Financial Systems

The world’s financial systems are facing unprecedented challenges. Rising debt levels, inflation, and questionable central bank policies are eroding trust in traditional currencies. People are growing increasingly aware that the money in their bank accounts is losing value over time. Centralized control over money is revealing its flaws, and more individuals are looking for alternatives.

Bitcoin, with its decentralized nature and finite supply, presents the perfect antidote to the problems plaguing fiat currencies. Unlike fiat money, which can be printed at will, Bitcoin’s hard cap of 21 million coins ensures that it remains deflationary over time. This scarcity makes it an attractive option for individuals, institutions, and now even governments looking to preserve wealth. As the cracks in the global financial system widen, Bitcoin is stepping in as a viable and reliable alternative.

The Network Effect and Bitcoin's Growing User Base

Bitcoin’s network effect is another crucial element driving us toward hyper-Bitcoinization. The more people use Bitcoin, the more valuable it becomes. This isn't just because of its price but because of the infrastructure being built around it. Payment systems, applications, and services are springing up around Bitcoin at a rapid pace, making it easier and more practical for everyday transactions.

The Lightning Network, for example, allows for faster, cheaper Bitcoin transactions, solving one of the most common criticisms of Bitcoin—that it’s too slow or expensive for everyday use. As this technology matures and adoption continues to grow, the global shift toward Bitcoin will only accelerate.

How to DCA Into Bitcoin: A Simple Strategy for Everyone

While all these trends point to hyper-Bitcoinization, the average person might wonder how they can get involved in Bitcoin without risking everything on price volatility. This is where Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) comes in—a simple, effective strategy for gradually accumulating Bitcoin over time.

What is DCA?

DCA involves investing a fixed amount of money into Bitcoin at regular intervals, regardless of its price. Instead of trying to time the market, which can be stressful and ineffective, DCA allows you to spread out your investment, buying Bitcoin whether the price is high or low.

Why DCA Works in Bitcoin

Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, with massive price swings that can be intimidating to new investors. DCA helps smooth out these fluctuations by allowing you to buy in at various price points over time. This reduces the risk of buying at the “wrong” time and gives you exposure to Bitcoin's long-term upward trend.

Practical Steps to Start DCAing

Set a Budget: Determine how much you can comfortably invest regularly, whether it's weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Pick a Platform: Many exchanges offer automatic recurring purchases, making it easy to DCA without manually placing each order.

Stick to the Plan: Bitcoin’s price may rise or fall dramatically in the short term, but sticking to a DCA strategy ensures you’re continually building your position.

The Long-Term Benefits of DCA

Over time, DCA can help you accumulate more Bitcoin without the stress of trying to predict price movements. Given Bitcoin’s potential to replace fiat currencies in a hyper-Bitcoinized world, even small regular investments could result in significant long-term gains. DCA into Bitcoin is a straightforward way to participate in this financial revolution.

Conclusion: Hyper-Bitcoinization is Closer Than We Think

The world is changing, and Bitcoin is at the center of this transformation. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs, increasing nation-state interest, the rising distrust in traditional financial systems, and Bitcoin’s growing network effect are all signals that hyper-Bitcoinization could happen sooner than we think. Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just getting started, the opportunity to be a part of this financial revolution is here. By incorporating strategies like DCA, anyone can position themselves for the incredible potential of a hyper-Bitcoinized future.

Now is the time to take Bitcoin seriously. The writing is on the wall: the shift is happening, and hyper-Bitcoinization is not some far-off fantasy but an approaching reality. Will you be ready when it arrives?

Take Action Towards Financial Independence

If this article has sparked your interest in the transformative potential of Bitcoin, there's so much more to explore! Dive deeper into the world of financial independence and revolutionize your understanding of money by following my blog and subscribing to my YouTube channel.

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[upbonline7]

 The Risks of Stablecoins: What You Need to Know with UPB

In recent years, stablecoins have rapidly gained a grip in the crypto space, in some cases, being referred to as ‘the safe asset’ during the ups and downs of other digital currencies. Stablecoins are designed to offer stability by linking their value to external assets such as the American dollar or gold. Nonetheless, despite their perceived stability, stablecoins have their risks. With this in mind, let us examine some of the hazards you need to be aware of, especially while considering adopting stablecoins with UPB Crypto Bank, Universal Payment Bank (UPB), or Cross Chain Payment solutions of UPB. 

1. Constraints on Decentralization and Issues of Trust 

While cryptocurrencies, for the most part, can be characterized by their decentralized construct, a feature that is largely present in the Bitcoin system, this is not the case with so many stablecoins whose value is pegged to some currency and have a managing body that is tasked with controlling and holding reserves that correspond to the value of the coins they issue. As noted previously, this approach to regulation – structural or suchlike – creates a system whereby it is possible to have a single failure point, which opens up possibilities for poor management and even scams. In such cases where users are offered services of a centralized organization, in this case, UPB Crypto Bank, it is important to cover such an institution with sufficient regulation and ensure that it provides transparent reserves management to avoid adverse events. 

2. Lack of clarity in regulations 

As the regulations surrounding cryptocurrencies continue to change, much emphasis is placed on stablecoins. Many governments and financial institutions are targeting stablecoins pegged to other currencies. For example, a country that outlaws or severely restricts the use of stablecoins will undermine the worth and the utility of the UPB coin and its related crypto-payment services. Furthermore, regulators could seek to introduce further restrictions on stablecoins to restrict their encroachment on the AI currency, which would affect the business operations of firms like UPB. 

3. Risks of Reserve Management and Redemption 

As a standard practice, stablecoin issuers are expected to keep a reserve of sufficiently backing the stablecoins they have issued at a ratio of 1:1. Otherwise, most of them have not been able to provide such transparency about their reserves, hence the concern whether they can ever indeed enable redemptions in times of crisis. The inability to redeem your UPB Token or the UPB coin at the specified fiat value could result in huge losses. Companies such as UPB must enforce ample reserve protection and transparent auditing practices to benefit users. 

4. Risks of Operational and Technical Nature 

Most frequently, stablecoins would operate on a blockchain system that could be prone to hacking especially where cross-chain or UPI crypto transactions are involved. In addition, as with any other digital payment method, wallets can be hacked, or some bug within the smart contract can be triggered. For instance, if you are a user of UPB Cross Chain Payment, then the level of risk will be higher because the stablecoin will have to be used within different blockchains, each introducing its risks. 

5. Financial Stability Issues 

The trust and economic underpinnings of stablecoins are important in preserving their pegs for deaths. If stablecoins were to lose faith and monetary value, a situation of “run” where all stablecoin holders try to cash out their stables would lead to losses in stable coin value. For a crypto banking institution such as UPB, that could cause liquidity challenges or a customer burnout crisis. Stability can only be achieved while there is market confidence, and this can vary just like any other financial product. 

Conclusion 

Although they bring significant advantages, including facilitating cryptocurrency payments and working seamlessly with Universal Payment Bank systems, stablecoins also carry risks. Users should stay alert by realizing the relative nature of stablecoin value stabilization, which mostly relies on external trust and regulation. When exceptionally high levels of risk are incurred, for example, when USDC stablecoins are deposited in UPB Crypto Bank, pay attention to the dangers, especially the regulatory environment, reserves, and operational risks. 

[ecosmining]

USDT: A Comprehensive Guide to Tether – What it is, How it Works, and Why it's Popular

USDT is a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar exchange rate. Each coin is backed by fiat currency reserves held on the balance sheet of the issuing company, Tether Limited.

In 2014, the Realcoin project appeared on Omni Layer. Over the next year, the project was refined and received a new name — Tether. In January 2015, the initial coin offering (ICO) of Tether took place on the Bitfinex exchange.

USDT is a stablecoin, so this digital currency has several advantages:

Stability. Tether is pegged to the dollar, so the value of the cryptocurrency is little affected by “external” factors. The USDT rate remains stable even when the cryptocurrency market is “feverish.” Fiat currency reserves. According to the issuing company, all coins are backed by the dollar. This means that all holders can exchange USDT for USD. This also strengthens the stability of the cryptocurrency. Trust. For many participants in the cryptocurrency market, Tether is a “safe haven.” Thanks to the dollar backing, it is trusted not only by crypto investors but also by other companies ready to accept payment using USDT. Convenient transactions. The speed of operations with USDT exceeds even standard bank transfers, not to mention other cryptocurrencies. Universality. Thanks to the peg to the dollar, USDT is supported by most cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets worldwide.

The issuance of USDT is not limited. The number of issued coins depends only on the volume of fiat currency on the balance sheet of Tether Limited.

How USDT Works

The issuance of new USDT coins is handled by Tether Limited. To achieve full backing by fiat money, the company sells cryptocurrency to users and attracts investments through loans or partnerships with various financial organizations. Thanks to this, the digital assets of USDT holders do not lose their value.

Tether does not have its own blockchain network. USDT technology allows the issuance of coins on the basis of other blockchains. The most popular are:

Tron (USDT TRC-20) Ethereum (USDT ERC-20) Omni (USDT Omni) Binance Smart Chain (BEP-20) Algorand and others

Wide integration with different blockchain networks makes the cryptocurrency a universal coin for everyone. At the same time, in any network, it costs $1.

In addition to the US dollar-pegged USDT, Tether also issues stablecoins pegged to other national currencies: the euro (EURT), the peso (MXN), and the offshore yuan (CNHT). There is also a coin backed by gold — XAUT.

The USDT operation scheme is quite simple. To understand it, it is enough to remember that the coin is a digital twin of the USD. Let’s consider an example.

A user wants to enter the cryptocurrency market but does not have digital assets. They contact Tether Limited and transfer a certain amount in dollars. The company issues USDT in this amount and transfers them to the user’s account.

Once the user decides to withdraw the existing cryptocurrency in dollars, they can exchange it for USDT coins, transfer them to their account at Tether Limited, and exchange them for fiat dollars.

What Can USDT Cryptocurrency Be Used For? Since it is a stablecoin, the main goals of holders are:

Preservation of assets. Tether has less volatility than other cryptocurrencies. Therefore, it will be easier to survive the instability of the cryptocurrency market and preserve the value of digital assets. Earning interest. Some cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets offer to hold USDT on their deposit accounts. The user receives interest in this case. The rate is often higher than in ordinary banks for fiat currency. Trading on the cryptocurrency market. Cryptocurrency traders use USDT for fast exchange between different coins. Transfers. Thanks to the stable price, USDT is actively used when conducting transactions between cryptocurrency exchanges and their clients. DeFi (“decentralized finance”). The application possibilities of USDT in this area are quite wide — from lending to staking.

It is also worth noting that in some cases, traders use Tether as a way to diversify risks in their investment portfolio. In this variant, the cryptocurrency acts as an analog of the national currency.

Where to Store USDT? Thanks to its universality, with this cryptocurrency, you can use any convenient options for you personally: a USDT wallet Tether Limited, internal wallets of cryptocurrency exchanges, or a separate wallet. The latter option is considered the most reliable. All popular wallets — Trust Wallet, Trezor, Ledger — support USDT.

How is the USDT Exchange Rate Stability Ensured?

The stability of USDT is ensured by Tether’s reserve assets. Until 2019, the company planned to use only US dollars to back USDT. However, the conditions were revised, allowing the use of other assets as reserves.

At the end of March 2024, the company released a report on what exactly backs the cryptocurrency:

The USDT exchange rate is pegged to the US dollar, and Tether’s backing allows the issuing company to exchange the cryptocurrency for fiat money and vice versa at any time. Sometimes the rate may fluctuate: for example, in 2017, there were jumps in the market price from $0.91 to $1.1 per token.

Tether ensures the stability of USDT through the constant buildup of reserves. Moreover, the stablecoin mechanism itself does not allow the issuer to issue tokens that will not be backed by the dollar or another valuable asset.

In addition, the stability of the USDT exchange rate is ensured by the issuance or burning of tokens by the cryptocurrency issuer. With an increase in demand and the receipt of the necessary amount of fiat currency, the issuance of new coins increases. And if the demand falls, then the surplus USDT tokens are burned. Thus, the value of the coin is additionally regulated.

Audit and Transparency of USDT Backing

Tether Limited regularly undergoes an audit of USDT backing. The results of the checks are published on the company’s official website. At the same time, not only the size of the available assets backing the cryptocurrency is evaluated. Moreover, Tether publishes its own quarterly report on available reserves.

In April 2024, the company successfully passed the System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2) audit. This is one of the most serious audits dedicated to control protocols for managing information security and privacy risks of client and company data.

Tether’s transparency is one of the stated foundations of the company’s operation. Information on issued tokens in circulation and aggregate assets backing them is updated on the company’s website daily.

Detailed auditor reports of the independent company BDO Italia are in open access. They describe how many tokens have been issued and what they are backed by.

Disclosure of data on issued Tether tokens

Thanks to regular audits and verification of USDT backing, the cryptocurrency maintains a high level of trust among both cryptocurrency exchanges and end-users. At the beginning of its development, Tether Limited did not strive to show the entire structure of the cryptocurrency backing, but after the intervention of US regulatory authorities, the company began to disclose information about this.

Why USDT is so Popular in the Cryptocurrency World

One of the main reasons for the popularity of USDT is that it was the first stablecoin. Now there are other cryptocurrencies working on similar technology. However, Tether managed to establish itself as a digital analog of the US dollar before its competitors appeared. And now USDT ranks third in the world in terms of capitalization and daily trading volumes. It is second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

“Another reason for the popularity is the low volatility of the coin. USDT continues to maintain its value while it is difficult to predict changes in the value of Bitcoin or Ether,” notes 0xprocessing co-founder Nikita Vassev.

The popularity of Tether is a direct consequence of the advantages of the stablecoin:

Stability. The value of the token is pegged to the US dollar and does not change. Liquidity. USDT is backed by Tether assets, so you can always sell the cryptocurrency and get fiat money. Convenience. USDT is accepted both on cryptocurrency exchanges and as payment for goods and services worldwide. Security. During the entire existence of Tether, there has not been a single case related to the security of using USDT.

USDT Disadvantages and Risks

Every cryptocurrency has its disadvantages or associated risks. One has extremely high volatility; another has constant theft or hacking cases. USDT has two main disadvantages:

Lack of transparency. Despite the fact that Tether Limited regularly undergoes audits and publishes the results of checks, the backing of tokens with reserves remains not entirely transparent. In the cryptocurrency community, discussions are still ongoing about how much USDT is backed by dollars. After the proceedings with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the company admitted that the dollar backing is 74%, and the rest is securities and loans. Centralization. The cryptocurrency is managed by one issuer. This means that in case of its hacking or technical failure, user data and accounts will be at risk.

Uneven distribution. In 2019, a study by Intotheblock appeared, which stated that 70% of the total volume of USDT tokens are owned by only 104 addresses. This directly allows the possibility of manipulating the cryptocurrency exchange rate.

The main risk of using Tether is the possibility of USDT being recognized in the US as an illegally issued security. A similar story has already happened with the Binance stablecoin (BUSD) when its issuer, Paxos Trust, was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). And this puts the very concept of the existence of a digital twin of the dollar at risk.

“With the appearance of restrictive norms that directly affect stablecoins and the formalization of market regulation, Tether will have to agree with them or stop working in jurisdictional territories,” notes Austin Campbell, adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.

The Future of USDT and Forecasts

The development of technologies and blockchain is changing not only the entire cryptocurrency market but also individual tokens. At the moment, the future of USDT, like other cryptocurrencies, is directly related to Bitcoin. Tether increased the volume of digital assets in Bitcoins to $5.4 billion in 2024. Moreover, the company is actively developing its own BTC mining to increase its own reserves and, as a result, strengthen its position in the stablecoin market. Thus, Tether has already launched its farms in El Salvador and Uruguay, investing more than $1 billion in them.

According to Forbes experts, the only truly serious threat to the successful development of Tether, both in old and new directions, may be the restriction of USDT circulation in different countries. The company is actively investing in innovations in the field of artificial intelligence, educational initiatives in the field of cryptocurrencies, as well as the development of technologies.

Investment company VanEck expects the stablecoin market to reach $200 billion in 2024. And Tether will have the leadership, which the company will only increase.

Stablecoins will continue to attract the interest of both investors and ordinary people. And as long as the cryptocurrency market continues to be characterized by high volatility, the future of USDT can be considered quite cloudless because there will always be a need for a stable digital currency.

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Love Is Not A Bank Loan: The Myths of Money And God

Most people refrain from delving too deeply into history. Some, especially the young, are too busy making their own history or trying to anyway. However, our lives are built on assumptions and often these are the assumptions of others who have gone before us. Yuval Harari calls them myths, the myths that we live by. There are myths which give our lives meaning – the myths of money and of God. Many of us work the live long day in the pursuit of money. Some of us believe in a supernatural, invisible entity that lies at the centre of our universe. What if both of these things have no real tangible substance and are, rather, myths that we live by? “In a similar vein, money is a fiction that depends on the trust that we collectively put in it. The fact that it is a ‘myth’ has not impeded its usefulness. It has become the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised, allowing the development of global trade networks and sophisticated modern capitalism.” (https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/yuval-noah-harari-on-the-myths-we-need-to-survive/)

Money’s Mythical Status In The Mind’s Of Many

Money, as some of us realise, no longer has a gold standard value. Money, today, is largely numbers on a digital screen. This belief in the value of money is based on trust in a system. An economic system, which involves governments, central banks, commercial banks, businesses, and consumers. Every now and then, things go seriously wrong with our capitalist system and we call these - economic crashes, depressions, and recessions. In those periods, there is a rude awakening for many of us who normally operate unquestioningly within the framework of our states and their structures. Suddenly, there are banks going bust and losing billions of dollars. Perhaps, billions of our money, which in turn causes governments and central banks to rush in and hopefully guarantee our deposits. During the last Global Financial Crisis (GFC) the Federal Reserve in America, their central bank, pumped in (without government approval) $29 trillion to prop up the entire capitalist system. Money, unlike resources, is not a finite thing within nations that have a sovereign currency. They can create as much as they like of the stuff. The only caveat being the inflationary nature of money creation and that is predicated on how that money supply is released into the economy. Quantitative Easing is the name of the game. Money, therefore, is a myth in that it is, in cash form, an IOU from the government that is accepted at most businesses within our nation. Our debit cards issued from commercial banks are even more widely accepted in the current era than cash. There are no pots of gold somewhere backing up this trust system, we all take digital finance on trust. We live our lives running around and working hard in pursuit of this intangible stuff, all based on trust in a story that we subscribe to.

God’s Representative’s Love Of Money

David Graeber, the late David Graeber, wrote an entire tome on money called Debt: The First 5, 000 Years. In that excellent book, Graeber reveals the close affinity between the myths of money and God. Religions historically had a great love of money and hoarded it. This did not always end well, especially during the Dark Ages when there were Vikings about. All that gold and silver in monasteries and churches was overwhelmingly attractive to raiders intent on taking home loads of wealth. Graeber makes the salient point in his big book that human beings have happily operated under debt arrangements between themselves for millennia. He debunks the whole barter system myth so beloved by economists since Adam Smith.  Graeber, as an anthropologist, states that there is no archaeological evidence to sustain the belief that barter was the widespread economic system prior to the development of our modern financial economies. Love Is Not A Bank Loan I was watching a mini series drama on the ABC recently, called the House of Gods. In this series about Iraqi’s living in Australia and their cultural/religious communities there was a powerful line spoken by one of the characters, which touched me. “Love is not a bank loan; you don’t have to pay it back!” This encapsulates an essential element within Graeber’s book. We have all become so economically defined in the 21C and economics has become our new religion in many ways. Graeber gives an example of an NGO lawyer working with refugees in the UK, who he met at a party, and a snippet from their conversation. He was somewhat stunned by her moralistic attitude toward poor nations and the imperative for them to always pay back loans from the IMF. This inspired him to write the Debt book to discover the roots of our beliefs and attitudes about money, credit and debt.

Primordial Debt Theory & Sin The role of religion in the emergence of money is shown. The language used within both frameworks with terms like ‘redemption’ and ‘salvation’. The fact that within the precepts of Christianity we are born into a state of sin – of owing God something straight away from birth. Then, in the Lord's prayer, it is written "forgive us of our debts as we forgive those of our debtors." Primordial Debt Theory infuses many religious traditions beyond just Christianity. You can see that many religious scriptures were written with an awareness of the market place and in those terms. It clearly reveals that the word of God is invariably that of human beings and their concerns. These are myths devised to motivate and manipulate certain behaviours. Money and religion have both been used over the journey to control populations of people. Think of the consumer credit rating systems in place around the world today, where scores are kept of your inclination and ability to borrow money and pay it back. “Primordial debt theory was initially expressed through religion, particularly early Sanskrit texts such as the Vedas and Brahmanas, which suggest that humans are born with a debt to society. This debt is repaid through means such as making sacrifices for the greater good, having children, and offering hospitality to strangers. Governments then assumed guardianship of the primordial debt owed to society for creating us. Debts to society were converted into money through systems of taxes, fines, fees, and penalties for wronging others in some way. In order to finance trade, temple administrators in ancient Mesopotamia invented interest-bearing loans. This led to the practice of giving loans to peasants who would become debt-peons if unable to repay. Debt-peons were forced into perpetual service in the lender’s household. Kings periodically declared amnesties to alleviate this social breakdown caused by indebtedness.” (https://instaread.co/insights/business-economics-reference/debt-book/lrtqessll3#:~:text=Theideaofprimordialdebt,indefenseofthenation.)

Forgiving Debts Not Popular With Republicans President Joe Biden has been trying to forgive billions in student debt in the United States but the Republicans keep blocking him by whatever means they can find. SCOTUS being the latest block to this attempt to alleviate such a heavy burden placed upon the young for the rest of their working lives. Americans financialize everything – higher education, health, and the list goes on. The Republicans want to apply this ‘for profit’ mechanism to every aspect of life – with social security firmly in their sights as the next target. More Americans go bankrupt because they cannot meet their medical bills than for any other single reason. Welfare is a dirty word in the mind’s of many conservative Americans, as they have been acculturated to associate this with socialism, weakness, and the evils of communism. In Australia we have universal health insurance provided by the government called Medicare. I do not think that this has proven to be the harbinger of communism or any other evil in our experience. It is a GOP furphy designed to help business make more money and profits out of human life. Money & Military Power Globally Economically, the United States rules the roost within the global community of nations. A large part of this is tied to the military might of the US. It spends some $877 billion annually on its military, as of 2022 figures. The power of the US dollar in global markets is without question. The US has military bases in key locations around the world. In Germany, in Japan, in Türkiye, in the UK, Spain, Bahrain, Greenland and 750 military bases in some 80 countries. Graeber has linked this world power domination with the old idea of lesser states paying tribute to more powerful states. Right now, we are seeing the rise of China both economically and militarily. Russia too is flexing its muscles around its borders, in Syria, and in Africa. The economic sanctions against Russia has seen a strengthening of BRIC, an alternative economic bloc involving Brazil, Russia, India and China. These nations want to do business with Russia and its cheaper fossil fuels for their own economic benefit, rather than kow tow to the US and Europe on matters of national security and the integrity of a nation’s borders. Money talks louder to these developing nations and rising powers than any US defined ideas about right and wrong.

A Mother’s Love Is Not A Commercial Exchange Love is not a bank loan: The myths of money and God. Graeber writes about how we interact with our nearest and dearest in a communistic style. Most of us do not charge interest on loans to family and close friends. Indeed, many of us give freely to these intimates in the spirit of love. Our economic adherence to the rules of finance often stop at the borders of our immediate family. Likewise we expect to receive in times of need in a less commercial manner from those within our most intimate circle. Mothers give unceasingly to their children to nurture them through to adulthood. Most do not expect to be repaid materially for their investment in raising their children. Giving is the theme here. There can be expectations held by parents as to the desired direction their offspring’s lives take but these are not bankable. Stories Determine Our Behaviours & Understanding Human beings love stories and most of them are fictional. Ancient historians doubt the veracity of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth. It is more likely that he is an invention by interested parties back in the day. There are no primary sources for what this Messiah had to say, as they are all secondary accounts written down long after he is purported to have lived and died. Filter this doubtful body of work, called the Gospels, through two millennia of interpretations, translations, and canonization – and what eventuates are works of invention and reinvention. You would not expect any thing or text to survive intact after such a lengthy and bumpy journey down through the ages. Everything gets recycled to reflect the concerns and interests of the day. It is a matter of how things work in life. Harari calls these things fictions, these myths we invent to make the wheels go around. Some harsher social observers have called them lies but this can be inflammatory.

Authorities Base Their Power On Myths & Fictions The history of money and economics are full of lies or fictions too. Vested interests simplify things to accentuate their desires and wishes. Most folk do not delve too deeply into the past and the history of things. Even the important things like money and God. 99% of the population accept the stuff they are fed. They believe the assumptions that the systems of control are based upon. Authorities within the state base their power upon the assumptions about what has gone before. The Christian religion in America via Christian Nationalists is flexing its secular muscles at the moment by banning abortions in conservative red states. Even IVF is coming under state scrutiny from Alabama supreme court judges threatening the wrath of God in 2024. Christians are never happy just policing their own bodies they invariably want to police everybody elses too. It is the nature of this religious beast. Roe vs Wade has been overturned by a conservative religious majority on the SCOTUS bench. The world used to look to America as the leading progressive democracy but not so much anymore. The myth of a wrathful God wagging His finger at us, above in the clouds, over our sinful behaviour in the bedroom, is an old fiction. Resurrection is an indelible element within the archetypal religious myth, however. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a backlash against science, particularly in the US, where they made vaccination and mask wearing ideological points of contention. Nearly a million Americans died from the Coronavirus in the richest nation on earth. This was wildly inconsistent with what happened in other Western nations like Australia. In the same way that a gun related mass murder happens every week or more in the US and the Republicans in office still refuse to tighten gun laws – there is a stubborn refusal to adhere to facts within this expression of the American psyche. It is like they see themselves as bigger than the truth. The myth of the power of the individual over his or her community reigns supreme in America to the detriment of the vulnerable. Often it is school children who are the victims of this horrific gun violence via AR-15 military style assault weapons, which are sold to members of the public. Why would a member of the public need a weapon like this in God’s name? Making money for American big business is more important and carries more weight than public safety in the US. If we do not question things, we are likely to live apathetic lives. If we do not take the time to delve into what has gone before, we are condemning ourselves to a life of unknowing. Those in charge want more folk who do what they are told. Freedoms only exist if you test them. Investigate your world, rather than complacently acquiescing to everything. Explore the fictions that underpin your life by digging down beyond the superficially accepted stuff. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom ©WordsForWeb

Read the full article

[listentoourheart]

I would not say "inflation is good!" However, sometimes it's necessary to artificially induce Inflation to avoid *Deflation* happening—that is basically the worst case scenario.

Deflation would be money losing its value. It leads to high unemployment, unaffordable debt repayment, and businesses going under. It leads to events like the Great Depression and post-WW1 Germany where a loaf of bread cost 160 Marks in 1922 and then cost 200,000,000,000 Marks by end of 1923. People had to pay with literal wheelbarrows of money! This happened in a year!

Deflation can plummet rapidly and quickly cascade. It's why the Federal Reserve is so obsessive about keeping track of inflation rates and interest rates. A few weeks without stable prices and the whole economy can collapse that quickly. Once deflation starts, there is near-zero time to turn that shit around! Much safer and less-risking-the-whole-country-oh-god to instead maintain a steady approx 2% inflation rate (that's the goal, anyway. Sometimes the Federal Reserve's predictions are off and the inflation rate ends up being a bit >2%. )

It sucks that a large bag of chips that used to cost $1 is $3 now because of inflation. But standard-of-living-wise, better $2 inflation than currency losing its value and needing to pay $100 because the dollar plummeted and suddenly $100=2euros

Inflation still sucks when it happens though, I completely agree. It's just better than the other option and sometimes people conflate "better than" with "good"

I remember my 10th great history teacher explaining the basics of economics to us and him saying that “inflation is good for the economy” and me just sitting there thinking about how the recent recession (this was early 2010’s) and the inflation that went with it meant we could barely afford the basics for food, and had to budget on anything even remotely “fun”. I remember thinking about how even with my parents well paying jobs, affording even a candy bar at the grocery store was a luxury

And then looking back at my teacher and thinking “in the what world is inflation for for anyone”

And that’s about when I realized that the “economy” did not have the people’s best interests at heart

[zvaigzdelasas]

In 1971, the USA unilaterally decided to abandon the gold standard and move to fiat currency in response to high inflation and their trade deficit. By 1974, the US struck a deal with OPEC to make the US Dollar the standard currency for global trade in oil. This gave rise to what is now known as the petrodollar, as global oil transactions helped prop up the value and stability of the US Dollar despite the USA’s own yawning trade deficit. This also gave the US power to print large amounts of its currency to prop up financial markets while outsourcing manufacturing.[...]

Sri Lanka today is in a crisis that is dollar-denominated. As a former plantation economy, Sri Lanka specializes in the production of a handful of agricultural products. Deteriorating terms of trade in the 1950-60s are the origins of the country’s trade deficit, which in turn pushed the country into to external debt. While the Covid-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine have certainly exacerbated the problem through losses in tourism revenue, and soaring prices of grain, energy and logistics, these external shocks have only revealed pre-existing weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s still woefully unindustrialized economy.

With de-dollarization gaining momentum, one could ask why Sri Lanka needs US Dollars at all. Why can’t we simply switch to Yuan? Why can’t we find a rupee-ruble mechanism to buy oil at a discount from Russia? Indeed, Sri Lanka has strong diplomatic ties with the de-dollarizing bloc. The former Soviet Union provided much of the hardware that set up Sri Lanka’s heavy industry in the 1950s and 1960s. China has financed and built much of Sri Lanka’s contemporary road, port and energy infrastructure. Sri Lanka’s biggest import origins are China and India. The problem lies, not in where Sri Lanka imports are from, but where it exports to.

Sri Lanka’s largest export markets are the USA and the EU. This is partly because the country’s only significant manufacture – garments – was developed through the Multifiber Agreement, making it uncompetitive and dependent on Western markets. This garment sector, while being a major foreign-currency earner, also represents a geopolitical weakness for Sri Lanka, as the country cannot maintain strategic autonomy without the threat of losing perks such as the GSP+ which keeps it locked into Western markets and the US Dollar.

Sri Lanka’s exports to the likes of Russia and China are still predominantly agricultural products, such as tea and coconut. To diversify its reserve currency basket, Sri Lanka would have to first diversify its export manufactures, which in turn requires a progressive industrial policy to develop its domestic manufacturing. Sri Lanka must boost two-way trade within Eurasia, for de-dollarization to be a serious option. Failing which, the country risks losing an opportunity to be an innovative first mover in the growing international trend of de-dollarization that is likely to drive the next business cycle.

[giftofshewbread]

Apocalypse Approaching

 By Daymond Duck    Published on: March 20, 2021

The Bible clearly teaches that the Antichrist and False Prophet will be active on earth at the same time (during the Tribulation Period).

If we are close to a world government run by the Antichrist, we are close to a world religion run by the False Prophet.

If we are close to a world government and world religion, we are close to a new economic system that the Antichrist and False Prophet will use to control people.

Put another way, when the Tribulation Period arrives, there will be three global systems on earth at the same time: a global political system (world government), a global religious system (world religion), and a global economic system (world control of buying and selling).

On Sept. 25, 2015, the UN approved a document called “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Supporters called it a “New Universal Agenda” (a phrase comes from the Preamble of the document itself).

The document calls for a world government, world religion, and a world economic system to be established by 2030.

This is what globalism (creating regional groups of nations), the pope’s visit to Iraq (merging, Christianity, Judaism and Islam), and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset (creation of a new economic system) are all about.

The fact that these three global systems are coming on the scene simultaneously in our generation is solid evidence that we are the terminal generation, and the Rapture is close.

Here are some prophecy-related events that recently made the news:

One, Michael Snyder, author and highly read publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, posted articles about the U.S. economy two days in a row.

Snyder’s Mar. 11, 2021 article titled “So This Is How the U.S. Dollar Dies” reminds us that America’s national debt is approaching 30 trillion dollars and America has “now entered an era of hyperinflation,” which, in my opinion, is what the rider on the Black Horse is about in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 6:5-6).

Snyder believes “a major trigger event could crash the (stock) market at any time,” and I believe some globalists would deliberately do that if they thought it would result in a world government.

This is more than my opinion.

As incredible as it sounds, articles are appearing suggesting that there may be a deliberate effort to collapse the U.S. and global economy.

Snyder’s Mar. 12, 2021 article titled “Brace Yourselves for the Most Dramatic Shift in the Standard of Living in All of U.S. History” points out that prices of some products (gasoline, lumber, agricultural products, etc.) are soaring as “the U.S. dollar is being transformed into toilet paper money.”

Snyder believes world leaders will soon realize that the world needs to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and he says the word “collapse” is “not nearly strong enough to describe what is eventually going to happen to us.”

I believe Snyder is totally correct about America’s economic situation and the coming collapse, but I believe the Church will be raptured before the worst of it hits in the Tribulation Period.

It looks like “Make America Great Again” is dying, and “The Fundamental Transformation of America” is coming on strong.

Two, many prophecy teachers have long taught that the U.S. must lose its position as a world’s superpower in order to bring in a world government.

On Mar. 9, 2021, Sen. Lindsey Graham warned that terrorists can enter the U.S. through America’s open border with Mexico.

The Biden administration has thrown the border wide open, is using free bus tickets to spread Covid-positive immigrants all over the country, drugs and terrorists are pouring across the border, human trafficking is up dramatically, and the Democrats are pushing legislation to disarm America’s citizens.

On Mar. 11, 2021, Biden said, “We may have to reinstate the lockdown restrictions.”

Why not lock down the border and let the American people go back to work?

On Mar. 13, 2021, it was reported that Congressman Steve Scalise said Congress is making gun ownership harder for American citizens and easier for illegal immigrants.

The reprobate thinking in Washington DC makes it easy to see the fall of America and rise of a world government on the horizon.

Three, concerning hyper-inflation, economic collapse, and famine: on Mar. 10, 2021, it was reported that some of the major banks are investing in agribusiness because they are expecting an increase in the world’s population, an increased demand for food, and the price of food to soar.

Four, Vatican News has just released a new book called God and the World to Come that is based on an interview with Pope Francis.

In the book, Pope Francis expresses support for the Great Reset (a new economic system designed to control everyone on earth), the New World Order (world government), and an “end to short-sighted nationalism” (an end to the sovereignty of nations).

He expressed support for businesses and industries that support the green agenda (world government) and opposition to those that don’t support it.

He called for changing the world and said, “We cannot waste any more time.”

Five, concerning Israel’s rebuilt Temple, Saudi Arabia recently conducted a Twitter campaign to emphasize the importance of Mecca and Medina as Muslim holy sites and de-emphasize the importance of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The campaign triggered a tsunami of tweets, and the Saudis responded by acknowledging that Jerusalem is “the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”

The Saudis are afraid that the UN, EU, U.S. and others will let Iran get nuclear weapons, and they want Israel to help them do something about it.

They appear to have decided that a better relationship with Israel is more important than supporting the PA claim to the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem.

The Saudi effort to befriend Israel could open the door to a rebuilt Temple, and all serious prophecy teachers know that the Bible says that will happen (some, including this writer, believe the Temple will be rebuilt very early in the Tribulation Period).

Six, concerning a potential Middle East peace treaty: on Mar. 10, 2021, Pres. Biden’s Sec. of State, Antony Blinken, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee he thinks the Trump administration did a very good thing by getting some nations to normalize relations with Israel and “it is something we want to build on.”

There will eventually be a worthless treaty that will be confirmed by the Antichrist and begin the Tribulation Period.

Seven, on Mar. 14, 2021, it was reported that Kosovo, a Muslim-majority nation in the EU, is the third nation to open an embassy in Jerusalem (the U.S. opened the first one, and Guatemala opened the second one).

Finally, if you want to go to heaven, you must be born again (John 3:3). God loves you, and if you have not done so, sincerely admit that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus is the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was buried, and raised from the dead; ask Him to forgive your sins, cleanse you, come into your heart and be your Saviour; then tell someone that you have done this.

[goldsikkalimited]

Does It Still Pay to Invest in Gold?

Some argue that gold is a barbaric relic that no longer holds the monetary qualities of the past. In a modern economic environment, paper currency is the money of choice. They contend that gold's only benefit is the fact that it is a material that is used in jewelry. On the other end of the spectrum are those that assert gold is an asset with various intrinsic qualities that make it unique and necessary for investors to hold in their portfolios.📷

Points to Note :

Gold bugs have often encouraged investors to own the precious metal as part of a diversified long term investment portfolio.

Gold is seen as a hedge against inflation and a store of value through thick and through thin.

Holding gold, however, comes with unique costs and risks, and the data show that historically gold has disappointed on several of its purported virtues.

A Brief History of Gold

In order to fully understand the purpose of gold, one must look back to the start of the gold market. While gold's history began in 2000 B.C, when the ancient Egyptians started forming jewelry, it wasn't until 560 B.C. that gold started to act as a currency. At that time, merchants wanted to create a standardized and easily transferable form of money that would simplify trade. The creation of a gold coin stamped with a seal seemed to be the answer, as gold jewelry was already widely accepted and recognized throughout various corners of the earth.

Following the advent of gold as money, its importance continued to grow throughout Europe and the U.K., with relics from the Greek and Roman empires prominently displayed in museums around the world.

Gold in the Modern Economy

Even though gold no longer backs the U.S. dollar (or other worldwide currencies for that matter), it still carries importance in today's society. It is still important to the global economy. To validate this point, there is no need to look further than the balance sheets of central banks and other financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund. Presently, these organizations are responsible for holding almost one-fifth of the world's supply of above-ground gold. In addition, several central banks have added to their present gold reserves, reflecting concerns about the long-term global economy.

Gold Preserves Wealth

The reasons for gold's importance in the modern economy centers on the fact that it has successfully preserved wealth throughout thousands of generations. The same, however, cannot be said about paper-denominated currencies. To put things into perspective, if you had an ounce of gold today and converted it for today's prices, it would still be enough to buy a brand new suit, but the same cannot be said for the $35. In short, you would have lost a substantial amount of your wealth if you decided to hold the $35 as opposed to the one ounce of gold because the value of gold has increased, while the value of a dollar has been eroded by inflation.

Gold As a Hedge Against the Dollar

The idea that gold preserves wealth is even more important in an economic environment where investors are faced with a declining U.S. dollar and rising inflation. Historically, gold has served as a hedge against both of these scenarios. With rising inflation, gold typically appreciates. When investors realize that their money is losing value, they will start positioning their investments in a hard asset that has traditionally maintained its value. The reason gold benefits from a declining U.S. dollar is because gold is priced in U.S. dollars globally.

Gold as a Safe Haven

Whether it is the tensions in the Middle East, Africa or elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly obvious that political and economic uncertainty is another reality of our modern economic environment. For this reason, investors typically look at gold as a safe haven during times of political and economic uncertainty. Why is this? Well, history is full of collapsing empires, political coups, and the collapse of currencies. During such times, investors who held gold were able to successfully protect their wealth and, in some cases, even use the commodity to escape from all the turmoil. Consequently, whenever there are news events that hint at some type of global economic uncertainty, investors will often buy gold as a safe haven.

Gold as a Diversifying Investment

In general, gold is seen as a diversifying investment. It is clear that gold has historically served as an investment that can add a diversifying component to your portfolio, regardless of whether you are worried about inflation, a declining U.S. dollar, or even protecting your wealth. If your focus is simply diversification, gold is not correlated to stocks, bonds, and real estate.

Gold as a Dividend-Paying Asset

Gold stocks are typically more appealing to growth investors than to income investors. Gold stocks generally rise and fall with the price of gold, but there are well-managed mining companies that are profitable even when the price of gold is down. Increases in the price of gold are often magnified in gold-stock prices. A relatively small increase in the price of gold can lead to significant gains in the best gold stocks, and owners of gold stocks typically obtain a much higher return on investment (ROI) than owners of physical gold.

Even those investors focused primarily on growth rather than steady income can benefit from choosing gold stocks that demonstrate historically strong dividend performance. Stocks that pay dividends tend to show higher gains when the sector is rising and fare better – on average, nearly twice as well – than non-dividend-paying stocks when the overall sector is in a downturn.

Different Ways of Owning Gold

One of the main differences between investing in gold several hundred years ago and today is that there are many more investment options, such as:

Gold Futures

Gold Coins

Gold Companies

Gold ETFs

Gold Mutual Funds

Gold Bullion

Gold Jewelry

The Bottom Line

There are both advantages and disadvantages to every investment. If you are opposed to holding physical gold, buying shares in a gold mining company may be a safer alternative. If you believe gold could be a safe bet against inflation, investing in coins, bullion, or jewelry are paths that you can take to gold-based prosperity. Lastly, if your primary interest is in using leverage to profit from rising gold prices, the futures market might be your answer, but note that there is a fair amount of risk associated with any leverage-based holdings but when it comes to gold it has a side of advantage.

[unpluggedfinancial]

Bitcoin: The Rising Hedge Against Inflation

With inflation rising and uncertainty becoming the new normal, more and more people are questioning the value of their savings. Traditionally, gold has been the safe haven asset of choice, a hedge against the eroding value of fiat currencies. But a new contender is on the scene: Bitcoin. And it’s proving to be much more than just a buzzword.

The world is facing the highest inflation rates seen in decades, with prices rising faster than wages and central banks struggling to contain the crisis. In times like these, savers are looking for assets that hold their value, and Bitcoin has emerged as a serious alternative. Unlike fiat money, which can be printed at will by governments and central banks, Bitcoin’s supply is fixed. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins—a feature that gives it a unique advantage against inflation.

Gold has served as a hedge for centuries, but Bitcoin offers something gold cannot: true portability, instant global transfer, and an undeniably finite supply that can be verified by anyone. While gold's value is based largely on trust and historical precedent, Bitcoin's value comes from its decentralized nature and the absolute scarcity embedded in its code. With institutional players like MicroStrategy doubling down on their Bitcoin strategy and even considering it a reserve asset, it’s clear that Bitcoin is not just an investment—it’s a store of value that fits perfectly into a digital age.

Why Bitcoin's Supply Matters

One of Bitcoin's most powerful features is its scarcity. Unlike fiat currencies, where central banks can decide to print more money, Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins. This built-in scarcity is what drives its value, especially in times when the dollar or other fiat currencies are rapidly losing purchasing power. People are beginning to realize that when their savings are in cash, they are essentially losing value every single day due to inflation. Bitcoin, on the other hand, provides an opportunity to park wealth in something that cannot be debased.

Consider the inflation rate in the United States alone, which recently hit levels not seen since the 1980s. This has made it increasingly challenging for people to maintain their standard of living, as the cost of goods and services continues to rise. In this environment, Bitcoin serves as a lifeboat—an asset that not only holds value but has the potential to grow significantly over time. Historical data has shown that despite its volatility, Bitcoin's value has appreciated dramatically over the past decade, providing an average annual return far exceeding that of traditional inflation hedges like gold or bonds.

The Portability and Accessibility of Bitcoin

Gold has undeniable value, but it also has limitations. Transporting gold is cumbersome, and storing it securely is costly. Bitcoin, on the other hand, can be transferred across the globe within minutes, and you can store any amount of it securely in something as simple as a hardware wallet. This level of portability makes Bitcoin not only a hedge against inflation but also a practical tool for financial freedom. Imagine being able to move your wealth without relying on banks or paying high fees to intermediaries—this is something only Bitcoin can offer.

Furthermore, Bitcoin is borderless. Unlike traditional assets that are often tied to the jurisdiction of a particular country, Bitcoin exists independently of governments and borders. This makes it particularly appealing to those in countries experiencing hyperinflation or political instability. In nations like Venezuela and Argentina, Bitcoin has become a vital asset for those seeking to protect their wealth and maintain some level of financial sovereignty amidst economic turmoil.

Institutional Adoption and Future Outlook

The growing interest from institutions cannot be ignored. Major players like Tesla, Square, and MicroStrategy have added Bitcoin to their balance sheets, signaling a shift in how corporations view digital assets. These moves lend credibility to Bitcoin's role as a legitimate store of value. Moreover, the recent launch of Bitcoin ETFs has made it easier for traditional investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin without needing to manage wallets or private keys. This institutional adoption is laying the groundwork for Bitcoin to become a mainstream financial asset, and as demand continues to grow, its finite supply will only add upward pressure on its value.

Even central banks have begun to acknowledge Bitcoin's role in the global economy. While some remain skeptical, others are starting to explore how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can coexist with traditional financial systems. The conversation is shifting from whether Bitcoin has value to how it can be effectively integrated into the broader financial landscape.

The Average Person's Role in Bitcoin Adoption

But what does this mean for the average person? Simply put, Bitcoin allows you to opt out of a system where your money loses value every year. Where the purchasing power of your savings is no longer eaten away by inflation caused by reckless monetary policies. It's not just about profits—it's about preserving what you've worked hard for.

Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) Into Bitcoin

For those looking to get involved with Bitcoin without worrying about its notorious price swings, Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) is a practical strategy. DCA involves buying a fixed dollar amount of Bitcoin at regular intervals, regardless of its price. This approach reduces the impact of volatility since you’re buying both when the price is high and when it's low, effectively averaging out your cost over time. DCA makes Bitcoin accessible to everyone, even those who can only afford to put away a small amount each week or month.

By consistently allocating a portion of your income to Bitcoin, you are building a position in what could be the most promising store of value for the future. DCA takes the emotion out of investing, preventing you from trying to time the market—a notoriously difficult endeavor. Instead, it encourages discipline and long-term thinking, both of which are essential for benefiting from Bitcoin's potential as an inflation hedge.

Many people have found that DCA is an excellent way to slowly accumulate Bitcoin while mitigating the risk of buying during market peaks. Whether the market is bullish or bearish, DCA ensures you are steadily building your savings in a currency that is immune to inflationary pressures. In a world where financial uncertainty is increasingly common, DCA into Bitcoin provides a simple, effective way to protect your purchasing power and participate in the growing digital economy.

Conclusion: Bitcoin as the Modern Hedge

So, whether you're stacking sats or just learning, one thing is clear: in a world where inflation is eroding everything else, Bitcoin is standing firm as a hedge against uncertainty, with a promise for the future that gold never quite had. As the digital age progresses, Bitcoin's unique combination of scarcity, portability, and resilience positions it as a vital tool for those looking to safeguard their financial future.

The era of questioning whether Bitcoin is a legitimate hedge is coming to an end. Instead, the conversation is shifting to how individuals, institutions, and even governments can best leverage this digital asset to navigate the uncertain waters ahead. Bitcoin represents a new paradigm—one that empowers people to take control of their financial destiny in a way that was never possible before.

Take Action Towards Financial Independence

If this article has sparked your interest in the transformative potential of Bitcoin, there's so much more to explore! Dive deeper into the world of financial independence and revolutionize your understanding of money by following my blog and subscribing to my YouTube channel.

🌐 Blog: Unplugged Financial Blog Stay updated with insightful articles, detailed analyses, and practical advice on navigating the evolving financial landscape. Learn about the history of money, the flaws in our current financial systems, and how Bitcoin can offer a path to a more secure and independent financial future.

📺 YouTube Channel: Unplugged Financial Subscribe to our YouTube channel for engaging video content that breaks down complex financial topics into easy-to-understand segments. From in-depth discussions on monetary policies to the latest trends in cryptocurrency, our videos will equip you with the knowledge you need to make informed financial decisions.

👍 Like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated with our latest content. Whether you're a seasoned investor, a curious newcomer, or someone concerned about the future of your financial health, our community is here to support you on your journey to financial independence.

Support the Cause

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Donate Bitcoin: bc1qpn98s4gtlvy686jne0sr8ccvfaxz646kk2tl8lu38zz4dvyyvflqgddylk

[fundamentallyco]

Secret Real Estate Syndicated Funds - A Passive Way to Commit to Real Estate

In today's economy, one thing is guaranteed. The world is certainly attempting to ditch the US dollar as the reserve currency plus keeping your money in CDs and money market company accounts is straight forward unsafe. For decades savers and investors discovered it safe to keep their money parked with their banking institutions however the current near zero rates of interest and volatility of your U. S. dollar are justified reasons that persuade more folks to find better investment strategies for their dollars. That's why many investors start looking for investments which match inflation (real estate, gold/silver, commodities, and certain foreign exchange and stocks. ) If piermont grand investing has been in your concerns but aren't sure where to invest, how to find the best discounts or how to properly evaluate one, you may want to explore the way of a passive way to invest in a Syndicated Real Estate Fund. A genuine estate syndicate is simply a group of investors who pool the money to purchase real estate. By pooling their money together with each other these investors are able to purchase larger real estate properties with or perhaps without bank financing. This method of real estate investing is a huge popular method of financing the purchase and sale in commercial properties such as shopping centers, office buildings and warehouses. Private Real Estate syndicates raise funds through a private positioning which is a security - an ownership interest in a company who owns and operates investment real estate. Unlike the REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), these investment vehicles usually are not publicly traded and are not priced to market on a daily basis. Even while REITs may have high dividend returns their publicly exchanged shares are subject to a significant degree of price volatility, opertation less likely to occur with private syndicated funds. Many properties syndicates are offered as private placements, so it is important for you to definitely understand the process and risk factors related to private positions. One of the most common risk is that the underlying investment is without a doubt real estate, as a result these investments may be less liquid compared with shares in a REIT; when time comes the provide for may be unable to sell the real property at a high ample price to generate the expected profits; or outside things such as a further deterioration of the economy might negate the extra worthiness added through rehabilitation work. Then, there is that chaos of unforeseen future expenses, taxes, and liability, that being typical real estate issues that seasoned investors are familiar with. The recommendation is that you thoroughly evaluate the risks directly out of your private placement memorandum. Syndicated real estate funds are mindfully crafted by using the expertise of attorneys, accountants, contractors, funding bankers, mortgage bankers, and real estate brokers. They are structured throughout form of a partnership agreement or limited liability enterprise (LLC), whose code of ethics requires full disclosure of all material facts. To further determine whether this kind of expenditure of money is for you, you'll want to find out the experience and accomplishments of most directors and managers, the minimum required investment, typically the time-frame of your investment, and the potential annual return as well as capital gains on your money. What I found enticing will be fact that one can invest in a private real estate syndicate by using the retirement account (IRA). A self-directed IRA is a one of a kind hybrid tool that uses a self-directed IRA custodian along with a specialized legal structure. Investments made with a self-directed IRA may grow untaxed provided the income generated will be passive income. Some other potential benefits associated with investments through these funds are: * Gaining net cash flow through a passive investment. Owning real estate individually requires skills on assessing property values, negotiating purchase agreements, financing, fighting leases and managing the property. An investor in such a fill has access to a group that has proven knowledge and feel to deal with all aspects of real estate. * Achieving a higher produce by investing in larger and more profitable properties. By pooling the funds of a number of investors, real estate syndicates is capable of overall better returns when compared to many individual investors. * Taking advantage of the distressed commercial real estate market by using the expertise regarding vulture investors. * Hedging against Inflation. Because inflation erodes the value of hard-earned money and reduces your specific purchasing power, investment diversification in tangible assets will probably potentially represent a more desirable way to maintain your current located standard. * Potential profit from property appreciation. Commercial realty value is determined by its level of stabilization. High occupancy quotes, stable revenues, carefully assessed expenses, and experienced place managers overall largely contribute to the increase in worth. * Favorable tax treatment. Check with your tax advisor regarding tax savings on private real estate syndicates which may not be available when investing in a public company. * A number of Investment Positions. As an investor, you can choose from a variety of rankings that best suits your investment requirements. Overall When i still think it's a smart move to diversify your investment decision portfolio with a hard asset such as real estate. But it doesn't matter what you invest in keep in mind that a "healthy investment" is the style that... * generates substantial revenues for you during fun and bad times; * is made out of real properties and assets that don't vanish; * does not lose its cash flow potential with time; * maintains its capital value; * keeps up with inflation; * is made out of sources that satisfy one or more human needs (housing, food, energy); * can be passed on to your heirs and generate unaggressive income for them. Finally, if you're seriously considering placing the chunk of your money into such a fund don't forget to consult the hard questions such as if the managers and administrators are investing their own money in the fund; how can you authenticate that the company is real and not a hoax; the things could go wrong and if it does what happens to your investment. Utilize common sense and your own instinct, learn as much as you can, produce decisions, and act on them quickly so that when the market dust finally settles, your egg nest will still be right now there, intact and unharmed.

[incomeb2-blog]

Your salary doesn't make you wealthy, Your investment will.

IncomeB

Economists always imply that you don't ever have only one source of income, this can be even more applicable in a recession. There are always good reasons for you to have multiple streams of income. Records of fiscal both crypto and traditional financial documents reveal an unpleasant outcome for people who rely on just one source of income instead of learning several ways to make money online.

online investment

With IncomeB, everyone now has a very reliable source of secondary income relating to money investment that can help them during economic meltdowns or perhaps catastrophic recessions.

Our Independent Project

We are focusing on innovative strategies aimed at handling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) with the implementation of artificial intelligence and Big Data. The largest threat to humankind today is antimicrobial immunity which claims millions of lives in an annual basis and also the statistics keep increasing.

By taking advantage of attributes like profound learning, big information, and machine learning from our study efforts, we could come up with many promising programs from the evaluation of medicinal chemicals to predicting how effective a drug can be. Artificial intelligence and big data help a lot in reducing the typical R & D cycle period, optimizes precision, and also reduces overall costs of operation.

IncomeB is just one of those members of this well-respected AMR Industry Alliance that was established in 2016 to combat antimicrobial resistance. This is the largest private-sector alliance of its own kind.

Why Pharma Remains Particular

When economy booms, procyclical businesses post remarkable results. On the other hand, in a recession, it's the counter-cyclical companies that do well. Some companies aren't affected by these economic cycles and they are known as acyclical businesses, one is the pharmaceutical industry.

As savings enter recessions repeatedly, the pharma sector has been able to demonstrate uncommon resilience. The pharma sector by nature doesn't rely on the requirements from customers and this is only because purchasing medicines isn't the same as buying a car.

WHO WE ARE

We're a Bio-Pharma Start-Up

Our main work is the supply of development and research support to prominent pharma businesses. Revenue generation with this particular pharma investment is through the creation of new medications and testing through all of the trial periods then onward earnings to the Big Pharma enterprises.

How are we relevant to Big Pharma?

Without mincing words concerning pharma investing, start-ups like us are 500% more effective when it concerns the growth of research and development than the major Pharma companies. Because of this, Big Pharma has tactically withdrawn itself from doing some other pharma invest in this market for the past 15 decades. Relatively smaller ventures like ours are now the winners when it comes to the first development of new medications and we assist those interested in optimizing their passive income sources.

What's more, Big Pharma companies are not flexible. Every measure is laced with a single bureaucratic barrier or another and it's more than bothersome for pharma investors. From innumerable red tapes into office politics and constant changes in internal policies to aversion for risks and endless witch-hunting by government agencies or even rivals, large pharmaceutical companies aren't in the best position to focus properly on the early growth of drugs. For these reasons, they're shifting their attention on other regions that may certainly please their investors improved.

Therefore, Big Pharma manufacturers have opted to enter into collaborations with and investments in startups and licensing technology to meet their requirements. At IncomeBwe work with some of these Big Pharma companies in addition to offering our development and research services to fulfill their needs as far as passive income ideas are involved.

Major Pharma brands are also about earning profits and by working with ventures like us, they can minimize dangers and in the long run, get to maximize all the profit. Big Pharma companies are also able to avoid the complicated tasks of the premature development of medication since all that is done by startup enterprises like us.

How It Works When You Purchase

Everyone Wins

Our theory is the introduction of a dependable and sustainable secondary source of earnings for the investors. But not only the investors gain, as we're also able to finance research also. As a consequence of our understanding, we've been able to design the conventions and rules so stakeholders can invest money with no stress. Even though we're not promising impossible rates, you can be sure of getting consistent and regular returns . Now is the time to become wealthy with passive income and also with us, you are going to learn all on how to invest.

Simple Plan

Virtually anybody can decide to invest with as low as $50 and receive a daily yield of 1.25% for 365 days. Investors may also get a 10% bonus each time they refer an investor .

The Future of IncomeB

There are ambitious plans set up for this particular project. In the second portion of 2020, we will release our Ethereum-powered smart token. This will be along with other major announcements but the tentative token will be priced at 0.0025 USD together with the launching date adjusted for November 2020.

By taking advantage of an Ethereum-powered smart token, several benefits and advantages come with it. To begin with, there's no centralization of the electronic currency, unlike traditional fiat currency. Additionally, by taking advantage of a nominal powered by Ethereum, all stakeholders can make use of what is known as a wise contract, a type of transaction where everyone can observe and follow all activities involved in the offer.

Another significant advantage of this kind of money is security. Because the money is digital and digital, it is very safe to use and cannot be compromised, unlike other regular fiat currencies. The security that includes the smart token is just one of its best selling points -- and for obvious reasons.

Token

A superb service or product is the one that links the customers to the future.

Even though a lot of controversies are hovering around the state and nature of cryptocurrencies, what's incontrovertible is they will ascertain the future of financial transactions.

For those familiar with history, reserve currencies shifted in the golden standard to the buck in place now and it'll still change. A major financial crisis will erode the power of the United States dollar and other fiat currencies meaning there will be a demand to get a replacement. Many analysts and financial experts have the solid opinion that cryptocurrencies are already in the best position to become another world reserve currency.

Hence, to prepare our clients with this particular much-expected future and also allow them to enjoy all of the benefits of cryptocurrencies, we are thinking up our cryptocurrency predicated on Ethereum blockchain technologies that's famous for being secure and resourceful.

The plan in place would be to set our cryptocurrency towards the end of 2020, specifically around November when the window is going to be opened for everyone to earn money and crypto invest. It is going to also be released with our white paper which is visible on the roadmap. Stakeholders can get free tokens by taking part in the investment program, see more information in the How It Works section. Extra details about the token will be published soon on this site so please watch out.

We're taking time to come out with a correct token and it is because we are coming up with a strong digital token that we have placed the launch time to be around the end of 2020. We aren't rushing to provide a less-than-perfect cryptocurrency however we need something that will last and give us exactly the value we want.

Those with goals make it in life because they know exactly where their destination is and they also produce and design on how best to achieve those aims. Also, every venture on how to purchase and where to spend has its own goal and vision, which can only be reached by implementing a strategy. Like other investment firms, there is a road map in place to guide at every stage.

Our roadmap is a well thought out plan and a compass which guides us directly towards our goal. This roadmap helps us to identify what to concentrate on, as nothing can be achieved without focus. With this roadmap, we never lose focus, and eventually, we could achieve all of the goals that have been outlined.

Various people have different outcomes when it comes to the world of investments. Some have been in a position to make huge gains in regards to investing here and there. Then others ended up with nothing but massive losses. There are all sorts of investment firms but not everyone knows where to make investments.

If it comes to income , one has to make really smart choices. Knowing the strategies of investing or using the finance invest become positive once you are receiving the results in terms of gains and returns that swell your account.

The distinction between an effective investment and one which is not is only the sort of roadmap that was used and put in place. In IncomeB, we make use of nothing but the best and time consuming roadmap. Henceour investors are certain of getting very impressive returns using their investments with us. Why is an investment value it isn't just the one-time yields but steady returns over time. With your investment at IncomeB, you receive all these and just far more.

Wealth Management

There's most likely no era or time period when one ought to have a second income than now. You have to seriously learn how to spend money and make huge profits in the form of secondary income and a very good return on investment. For those who are asking themselves where do I invest my money or people who aren't certain of which investment plans 2020 to execute, IncomeB will be the best bargain for them all.

Although now we can't name these on our management group, our status as a good stealth startup is undamaged. We're adopting this manner so that we could carefully implement the very best principles of wealth direction.

One of the secrets of the wealthy people, compared with the poor, is the former can afford money a lot better than the bad. Wealth and its direction are why some are rich and others are in poverty. Making money is one thing but being in a position to handle and grow those monetary assets is another thing completely.

What's a Stealth Start-Up?

To describe it in the simplest of terms, a stealth startup is a kind of startup company that deliberately shies away from all kinds of marketing -- for various reasons.

As hinted before from the home page of the site, we're best defined as a biopharma startup and we are largely into early-stage research and development (better called R&D) of pharmaceuticals. Our clients are primarily Big Pharma companies. Working at the stealth mode is common in the pharma sector, especially for those from the research and development part. Instead of making noise throughout the place, they gently focus on their research work, softly enter into partnerships and wait until a perfect product is prepared prior to going public with it.

[taylorscottbarnett]

“10 ominous and risky trend”

Nah. First you only list nine. One is basically listed twice.

Ok so this is my issue with this analysis, we have the attention grabber: “Called the 2008 Crash” however some form of recession usually hits every decade or so. Let us take a look at the predictions that didn’t pan out (and still haven't):

He predicted that foreign investors would stop financing the fiscal and current-account deficit and abandon the dollar, wreaking havoc on the economy. He said that these problems, which he called the “twin financial train wrecks,” might manifest themselves in 2005 or, at the latest, 2006. “You have been warned here first,” he wrote ominously on his blog. But by the end of 2006, the train wrecks hadn’t occurred.

Note, the economy may have crashed, but it had zero to do with foreign investors not financing debt. Throughout the economic crisis and the decade that followed, countries bought up US Debt like it was hand sanitizer and paper towels at the start of the COVID crisis.  The world has also weathered the Greek debt crisis as well as the Italy’s issues, and Brexit with not much crisis to show for it, and what did happen was mostly temporary for the world economy. People have been issuing warnings about the aging crisis for decades, but it is not as hard to solve (for the US) as people assume. Yes social security, and medicare taxes and increasing intensives for companies and people to invest in saving for the future need to be increased. However, America’s aging workforce has two silver bullets: One, automation. In some estimates nearly have of all jobs can be automated in the next decade -- while that has it’s own set of issues, a worker shortage isn’t one of them. Secondly, as I’ve stated before, immigration reform would go a long way towards shoring up the US’ older workforce. The later comes with new workers contributing social security and medicare taxes to public coffers. The former can be taxed the same, just with new tax systems.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues he has declared the reason we are all doomed:

A third issue is the growing risk of deflation. In addition to causing a deep recession, the crisis is also creating a massive slack in goods (unused machines and capacity) and labour markets (mass unemployment), as well as driving a price collapse in commodities such as oil and industrial metals. That makes debt deflation likely, increasing the risk of insolvency.

Hey look while Republicans supposedly feared inflation when we were fighting the 2007-2008 financial crisis (one that I’ll remind you never occurred) and economists stated wouldn’t occur. Paul Krugman spent years warning about over-hyped inflation worries by policy makers.:

Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008. And boy, are they discouraging reading. ... The economy was plunging, yet all many people at the Fed wanted to talk about was inflation. ... 

As I suggested, we used to marvel at the wrongheadedness of policy makers during the Great Depression. But when the Great Recession struck, and we were given a chance to do better, we ended up repeating all the same mistakes.

But Republicans were up in arms, warning that the Fed’s policies would lead to runaway inflation. A Congressman named Mike Pence introduced a bill that would prohibit the Fed from even considering the state of the labor market in its actions. A who’s who of Republicans signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke demanding that he stop his monetary efforts, which they claimed would “risk currency debasement and inflation.”

Bernanke, Fed economists, and Keynesians in general were proved right: printing money isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy.

Needless to say, those warnings proved totally wrong. Soaring inflation never materialized. Job creation was sluggish at first, but more recently has accelerated dramatically.

K so let us move on to other issues shall we?

A fifth issue is the broader digital disruption of the economy. With millions of people losing their jobs or working and earning less, the income and wealth gaps of the 21st-century economy will widen further. To guard against future supply-chain shocks, companies in advanced economies will re-shore production from low-cost regions to higher-cost domestic markets. But rather than helping workers at home, this trend will accelerate the pace of automation, putting downward pressure on wages and further fanning the flames of populism, nationalism, and xenophobia.

Again, Automation is inevitable, and as I said earlier, a benefit and solution to an ageing workforce. One should also note this crisis has also been talked about for decades. It still never happened. Although many jobs have been automated, more jobs tend to come in and take the place of those lost jobs. Sectors of the economy die all the time. They get replaced. Automation isn’t going to necessarily be the death of the American worker -- if anything working less wouldn’t hurt us. There is a valid argument if you look at many of our peers, the American worker is overworked already.

This points to the sixth major factor: deglobalisation. The pandemic is accelerating trends toward balkanisation and fragmentation that were already well underway. The US and China will decouple faster, and most countries will respond by adopting still more protectionist policies to shield domestic firms and workers from global disruptions. The post-pandemic world will be marked by tighter restrictions on the movement of goods, services, capital, labour, technology, data, and information. This is already happening in the pharmaceutical, medical-equipment, and food sectors, where governments are imposing export restrictions and other protectionist measures in response to the crisis. 

True, at the moment populism has had a nice multi-year run. de-globalization has been a goal of Donald Trump for his entire presidency. Trump will not be president forever. As our current COVID crisis has illustrated, he really is a carnival barker, and if anything has increased the odds of Biden becoming president and they were already pretty damn likely.

Under conditions of heightened economic insecurity, there will be a strong impulse to scapegoat foreigners for the crisis. Blue-collar workers and broad cohorts of the middle class will become more susceptible to populist rhetoric, particularly proposals to restrict migration and trade.

Again, this already happened with the election of Donald Trump. But take a look at just how close many of those state elections came: Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania --  A flu (and this would have been an illness far less destructive than COVID) could have affected the outcomes of those states -- and the election. A few thousand votes in a country that cast 138,884,643 ballots and had another  92,671,979 that could have voted but didn't won Trump the election.

This points to an eighth factor: the geostrategic standoff between the US and China. With the Trump administration making every effort to blame China for the pandemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime will double down on its claim that the US is conspiring to prevent China’s peaceful rise. The Sino-American decoupling in trade, technology, investment, data, and monetary arrangements will intensify.

Re-read my above two responses.

A final risk that cannot be ignored is environmental disruption, which, as the Covid-19 crisis has shown, can wreak far more economic havoc than a financial crisis. Recurring epidemics (HIV since the 1980s, Sars in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, Mers in 2011, Ebola in 2014-16) are, like climate change, essentially manmade disasters, born of poor health and sanitary standards, the abuse of natural systems, and the growing interconnectivity of a globalised world. Pandemics and the many morbid symptoms of climate change will become more frequent, severe, and costly in the years ahead. 

Arguably COVID closings around the world and shelter-at-home orders have if anything given the world a chance to take a breath. Also if you are arguing a globalized world is a direct reason a pandemic like this will “become more frequent, severe, and costly” then wouldn’t it stand to reason de-globalization (that you claim will happen as a result of this pandemic) would make these event’s less likely to happen in the future? Which is it? It cannot be both.

Also am I missing something or do I not find a “seventh factor” in your post at all?

[herringbookshelf]

Grateful to have gotten my degree in economics at Bard College where this was standard training among the institutionalist economists I studied under including Pavlina Tcherneva, mentioned here.

Modern Monetary Theory says the world still hasn’t come to terms with the death of the gold standard in 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared that the dollar was no longer convertible into gold. In the modern era of “fiat” currency, MMT says, the U.S. and other big economies no longer need to worry about having enough gold to back their paper money, so they’re free to print however much they need.

MMT claims to be the legitimate heir to the theories of Britain’s John Maynard Keynes, who created the field of macroeconomics during the Great Depression. Keynes coined the term “paradox of thrift.” His insight was that while any single household can dig itself out of a hole by cutting spending when its income falls, the economy as a whole cannot. One household’s spending is another’s income, so if everybody cuts back, no one gets paid. What you get then is a depression—a situation only government can fix because, unlike the private sector, it can afford to spend freely, putting money in people’s pockets and thus getting the economy back on track.

In MMT’s reckoning, Keynesianism was gutted in the following decades by successors such as Paul Samuelson, who unrealistically tried to make economics like physics, playing down the role of fundamental uncertainty. MMTers haven’t endeared themselves to the mainstream by referring to that school of thought as “bastard Keynesianism,” a coinage of the late British economist Joan Robinson.

MMT also draws on the “functional finance” work of the Russian-born British economist Abba Lerner, who wrote in the 1940s that government should spend what’s required to achieve its goals, deficits be damned. Later, Britain’s Wynne Godley developed the concept of sectoral balances, which focuses on the accounting truth that when the government runs a deficit, the nongovernment sector must run a surplus, and vice versa.

MMT rejects the modern consensus that economies should be steered primarily by the raising and lowering of interest rates. MMTers believe that the natural rate of interest in a world of fiat money is zero and that pegging it higher is a giveaway to the investor class. They say tweaking interest rates is ineffectual because businesses make investment decisions based on prospects for growth, not the cost of money.

MMTers argue that economies should be guided by fiscal policy—government spending and taxation. They want a nation’s central bank to do the bidding of its treasury. So when the treasury needs money, the central bank accommodates it with a keystroke—creating base money from thin air by crediting the treasury’s checking account. The new textbook says that today, governments “tend to run unduly restrictive fiscal policy stances so as not to contradict the monetary policy stance.”

MMT says that, contrary to appearances, banks don’t make loans out of deposits. Rather, they make loans based on the demand for borrowing, then the borrowers stash the proceeds in the bank. Anyone they write a check to simply makes a deposit in another bank. The bottom line is that loans create deposits rather than deposits creating loans. This is one aspect of MMT that even some conservative central bankers—including those at Germany’s Bundesbank—agree with.

To stabilize employment, MMT would add a federally funded, locally administered job guarantee. Government would employ more people in slumps than in booms. Pavlina Tcherneva of Bard College’s Levy Economics Institute is refining the plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from the Bronx who’s in her first term in Congress, supports the job guarantee and says MMT should be “a larger part of our conversation.”MMT challenges a core principle of conventional economics, which is that an increase in budget deficits will tend to raise interest rates, all else equal. Just the opposite, it says, sounding a bit like the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland. When the government spends more, the private sector gets the money and puts it in the banking system. With more money in the system and no increase in demand for it, interest rates will tend to fall, not rise, MMT says. That is, unless the government chooses to soak up reserves by selling bonds, which it doesn’t have to do.

The reason the government doesn’t need to sell treasury securities, or levy taxes, to spend money is that the central bank, under the control of the treasury, can pay for everything by conjuring up electronic money. In MMT’s ideal world there would still be taxes, but their main purpose, aside from lessening inequality, would be as “offsets” to keep inflation under control. Taxes would drain just enough money from consumers and businesses so total spending in the economy won’t be excessive.

The Critics and Practicing MMT

With that formula, it’s no wonder that MMT has loud critics on Wall Street, where it’s sometimes derided as Magic Money Tree. What’s more surprising is how much flak the school of thought is taking from liberal economists who’d appear to be natural allies, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president. Summers has been making the case that wealthy nations are suffering from “secular stagnation” and require permanently high levels of stimulative deficit spending by governments to keep them out of recession, which is similar to what MMT argues. Yet in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Summers called MMT “fallacious at multiple levels.”

Summers and others may be worried that MMT will give a bad name to their more conventionally dovish views on deficits. “As long as they’re out there claiming that standard macroeconomics is all wrong, I guess we need to respond,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who is a professor at City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote on his New York Times blog.

MMT’s critics argue that trying to use fiscal policy to steer the economy is a proven failure because Congress and the president rarely act quickly enough to respond to a downturn. And they say politicians can’t be relied upon to impose pain on the public through higher taxes or lower spending to squelch rising inflation. MMTers respond that they also oppose fine-tuning and instead want to use automatic stabilizers—including the jobs guarantee—to keep the economy on track.

MMT’s detractors are skeptical of the idea that the treasury and central bank should work in concert. The Federal Reserve did the Treasury Department’s bidding during World War II, but that “overdraft” privilege was used spottily thereafter and permanently ended in 1981—precisely because economists warned that a subservient central bank would allow inflation to race out of control. They’re also dubious of the jobs guarantee, arguing that if the government’s wage for guaranteed jobs is too low it won’t do much to help unemployed workers or the economy, while if it’s too high it will undermine private employment. Tcherneva’s plan calls for $15 an hour. MMT envisions that government-employed workers would move back into the private sector when the economy strengthened, but that means some government functions would no longer be performed. In an email, Wray said the cyclical fluctuations in government employment are manageable.

Critics of MMT reject its reassurance that a country with its own currency doesn’t need to worry about deficits. After all, it’s been proven that a nation that loses the confidence of the world’s investors will see its currency plummet. As recently as 1976, the U.K. was forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund to stabilize the value of sterling. Wray said the U.K.’s mistake was trying to peg its currency to the dollar and the crisis eased when it allowed the pound to float.

Other disagreements are harder for laypeople to parse. There are complicated arguments over how interest rates are determined and whether the government and private sectors compete for savings, for example. Mainstream economists argue that the correct parts of MMT aren’t new and the new parts aren’t correct. But MMTers point out that the establishment hasn’t covered itself in glory in recent years—largely failing to foresee the global financial crisis a decade ago, for instance. Paul McCulley, the former chief economist of bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co., says that though he’s “not a card-carrying MMTer,” he believes it offers a “robust architecture for a fiat currency world.”

In any case, the new textbook gives MMT a good slingshot. Samuelson, in the preface to the 1990 edition of his best-selling principles book, wrote, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.” Stephanie Kelton, an MMTer who was the economic adviser on Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016 and is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, sees the tide turning. In presentations, the Stony Brook University economist likes to flash up a quote that says, essentially: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. Then you win.

[antoine-roquentin]

Paul Ryan's greatest contribution to America's economy was purely accidental.

The outgoing House speaker made his name predicting disaster from Obama-era deficits. He sold himself as a policy wonk and deficit hawk. But it's clear he didn't mean any of it. Deficits have increased by nearly 80 percent on his watch.

The irony of Ryan's deceit is that it also revitalized the supply of U.S. Treasuries — and may well have made the American economy safer in the process.

Just to review: The deficit is the annual gap between the government's spending and its tax revenue, and thus how much it needs to borrow for that year. The debt is the total load of the government's borrowing — all its previous deficits added up.

Ask pretty much any major politician in Washington, or any mainstream journalist or policy expert, and they'll tell you that in an ideal world we'd eliminate future deficits and eventually pay off the country's debt load. That America never actually pulls this off is lamented as an embarrassing and dangerous failure.

Yet U.S. deficits are also the source of all U.S. Treasury bonds, the financial instruments by which the government actually borrows money. Ask anyone with even passing knowledge of economics or finance, and they'll tell you that U.S. Treasuries lay at the absolute foundation of all financial markets, both in America and around the world. They are the gold standard for safe investment; barring the arrival of the zombie apocalypse, if you invest your money in U.S. Treasuries, you're going to get it back.

If we finally balanced the U.S. federal budget, we would stop adding U.S. Treasuries to the economy. If we paid off the U.S. federal debt, we would eliminate all Treasuries from existence.

There's a fundamental tension here. Doing this seemingly sensible thing — paying off America's debt — would actually thrust the world into a new, unprecedented, and quite possibly catastrophically destabilizing economic situation.

You might recall how, back in the late 1990s, the U.S. briefly ran a budget surplus. It was paying down its debt, and projections showed that, if the trend continued, all U.S. debt would be eliminated within a few decades. The Clinton administration wanted to trumpet this accomplishment, and told some of its economists to write a chapter on "Life Without Debt" for the president's annual economic report. But once the economists began digging into the issue, they realized it wasn't a straightforward win: Investors and banks would be deprived of their go-to instrument for hedging against risk and balancing portfolios; the Federal Reserve would lose its primary tool for conducting standard monetary policy; countries around the world would have to find a new way to build up currency reserves. The cognitive dissonance was so great that the White House ultimately buried the whole chapter and never published it. We only know it exists because NPR dug it up with a FOIA request.

Of course, the Clinton surpluses are now long dead. These days we're in no danger of running out of U.S. Treasuries.

But we are in danger of not having enough for the economy's needs.

That might seem remarkable, given the federal debt load is around $20 trillion. But it's all relative. If enough surplus money is sloshing around the global economy, looking for somewhere to land, even $20 trillion in U.S. debt won't be enough to soak it all up. And that's exactly the situation we're in. When economists like Ben Bernanke or Lawrence Summers discuss the "global savings glut," that's what they're talking about.

Not having enough U.S. Treasuries out there to match all that money causes several problems.

First off, when they're deprived of their premiere safe asset, investors go looking for alternatives. And they can be deceived. In the 2000s, fancy financial engineering by Wall Street convinced global markets that mortgage backed securities and related instruments were AAA-rated safe investments. Trillions of dollars from around the world promptly poured into the U.S. housing market.

That ended very badly. But if there'd been enough U.S. Treasuries in the global financial system, it's conceivable we could've avoided, or at least significantly shrunk, the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Looking forward, if we want to prevent investors from inflating another bubble — say, in bad corporate debt — we should give them an alternative safe asset.

More broadly, if demand for safe assets outstrips supply, the price of those assets will rise. That will drive interest rates down. And lower interest rates make it harder for monetary policy to boost the economy out of recessions or to add fuel to recoveries. Thus a chronic undersupply of U.S. Treasuries can leave the economy stuck in a kind of permanent semi-slump.

Lo and behold, that's exactly what's happened.

There are downsides, of course. These gluts of surplus money are caused by rising inequality — rich people having more cash than they know what to do with. Giving them U.S. Treasuries to invest in may prevent riskier ventures, but it also adds to inequality by giving the rich a steady stream of interest payments. On top of that, a big part of how Ryan and the Republicans increased deficits was by giving the wealthy a massive tax cut. They alleviated the safe asset problem while inflaming the inequality problem.

Still, by ballooning deficits, Ryan inadvertently helped to inject hundreds of billions of new U.S. Treasuries into the system. That's made the American economy at least somewhat safer from the next financial crisis, and added some fuel to the post-2008 recovery.

it’s weird how republicans keep stumbling into policies that greatly benefit american imperialism

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What is cryptocurrency? AKA Crypto

It is essential to recognize digital forms of money and blockchain innovation. Not all digital currencies work on a blockchain, and not all blockchains use cryptographic forms of money as a component of their plan.

A digital currency is a type of advanced money that is made, kept up, and verified with solid cryptography. This makes its exchanges very hard to hack or control. Dissimilar to different types of advanced assets– like the gold exchanged on trades, cash utilized in web based recreations, or remarkable virtual resources like organization oversaw devotion focuses – a digital money is regularly restriction opposition since it isn't constrained by a focal specialist. This reverses the old cash worldview, whereby money was made and issued by government fiscal specialists and constrained by national banks, for example, the United States Federal Reserve.

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Digital currency versus Traditional Currency

Conventional types of money are known as fiat cash, since they are bolstered exclusively by the specialist of its issuing government rather than ware cash which is supported by physical resources, for example, gold.

Governments that issue cash without the sponsorship of any physical resource do as such by fiat, and on the off chance that they are unfit to help their national money by military or monetary may, those monetary forms can lose much or the majority of their characteristic esteem.

For instance, Zimbabwe endeavored to battle interior financial issues in the early piece of the twentieth century by printing a greater amount of its national fiat cash. Be that as it may, since the nation came up short on the ability to authorize its cash esteems inside or on the worldwide stage, the printed notes rapidly turned into everything except useless. Zimbabwe was in the end compelled to surrender its money and has adequately lost the capacity to issue or control the estimation of its own banknotes. Its residents currently utilize a few outside monetary standards, including the U.S. dollar and the Chinese yuan, as lawful delicate.

Generally, most governments have tied the estimation of their issued monetary standards to a specific measure of gold, which was known as the highest quality level. The best quality level dropped out of shape amid the Great Depression as nations got themselves hamstrung in their endeavors to battle monetary decrease by the measure of gold in their stores. The highest quality level was deserted worldwide during the 1970s after U.S. President Richard Nixon finished a strategy that enabled different nations to change over their provisions of U.S. dollars to gold.

Digital forms of money and Bitcoin

Bitcoin is commonly viewed as the main present day cryptographic money since it was the principal advanced cash intended to work in a completely decentralized way without the requirement for a focal specialist. Prior endeavors at making cryptographic forms of money bombed because of absence of open trust and deficient innovation to guarantee appropriate activity. It was basically impractical to make a viable and utilitarian dispersed digital currency with the innovation and association velocities of the 1990s.

Bitcoin's creation likewise delivered the world's first useful blockchain.

The Value of Cryptocurrencies

Present day digital forms of money are frequently comprehensively interchangeable for fiat monetary standards, especially if the cryptographic money appreciates far reaching acknowledgment and can be purchased or sold on a cryptographic money trade. They may have free-gliding esteems that are determined, also to share costs on the financial exchange, as a component of their relative free market activity at some random time. Some digital forms of money endeavor to "peg," or connection, their qualities to the benefit of something different, as Bitcoin or the U.S. dollar.

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Use Cases and Applications for Cryptocurrencies

A digital money may fill in as a store of significant worth that individuals spare fully expecting more expensive rates or better trade rates later on. Some cryptographic forms of money may even be utilized as installment to procure products and ventures, which makes them a mode of trade. Like fiat monetary standards, some digital currencies are considerably more viable in these jobs than different cryptographic forms of money.

the unit of one.