What is money?

[Baruch]

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/

This should only count liquid assets.  I would not have included commercial real estate in the chart, since all other real estate isn't covered.  But otherwise it is a good chart.

So what is money ... depends.  And the GDP = money*velocity of money ... think of it as economic momentum.  You have liquidity, if the availability of money and the number of times it changes hands each year ... is equal to or greater than your GDP (however you define GDP).  Not enough money or not enough velocity ... and you have the crisis of 2008.  The newest form of money, has only existed for 15 years, and is the largest factor, and is an on-going experiment.  Who moved your cheese?

[Sal1981]

Obsolete is what.

About damn time we shifted over to an energy-based economy instead of fiat money.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Money is our way of keeping score.

[Baruch]

Obsolete is what.

About damn time we shifted over to an energy-based economy instead of fiat money.

We have been on the Petro-Dollar since 1971.  So already done.  Now if we could just shift to solar power units ;-)

[Baruch]

Money is our way of keeping score.

Also our way of cheating.  Never trust the player running the bank, when playing Monopoly ;-)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Also our way of cheating.  Never trust the player running the bank, when playing Monopoly ;-)

I'll just take the fifth on that one.

[PickelledEggs]

Money is time. Plain and simple.

It's a more universal way of bartering. Sometimes people don't want 3 chickens for that gallon of milk you need.
Edit: To add, I'm saying you are bartering you time. The time it takes to raise chickens, the time it takes to get milk from a cow, the time it takes to make the things you want, etc.

It would be much too difficult to exchange and barter in such a huge world full of so many various products and services. Currency is the best way.

[Baruch]

Except when I (government) can print money without backing it up (with chickens etc) then I am simply a crook.  Don't want to take the time to raise your own chickens?  Then get off my porch and go chew your belt while starving under the viaduct in your cardboard box.  Or be a sociopath who gets people to give you their money and things ... in return for your overly charming manner.  Works in both private and public sectors.

[PickelledEggs]

Except when I (government) can print money without backing it up (with chickens etc) then I am simply a crook.  Don't want to take the time to raise your own chickens?  Then get off my porch and go chew your belt while starving under the viaduct in your cardboard box.  Or be a sociopath who gets people to give you their money and things ... in return for your overly charming manner.  Works in both private and public sectors.

Yes. There are crooked people in the world, or at least people that simply could do a better job with the system we have.

The point is, we all have a service or product we provide. Sometimes it's running a farm, sometimes its running a computer company. Some people's time is "worth more"... but that's only because the consumer let it get that way.

[Brian37]

It is a word denoting an artificial construct of barter. Humans evolved to cooperate and money is a symbol of that exchange. But it really is an illusion once you know the age of the universe and have listened to Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech. Even Shakespeare knew all this was folly in the grand scope with Macbeth act 5 scene 5.

Rich and poor all die, and boarders come and go. And with all our current chase of things we are still far to stuck in the now, while science is ahead of the average layperson and average patriot and garden variety  ideologue. Money has no use to a cockroach or bacteria and if the dinosaurs had been funded by Trump they still would have gone extinct.

[Baruch]

Yes. There are crooked people in the world, or at least people that simply could do a better job with the system we have.

The point is, we all have a service or product we provide. Sometimes it's running a farm, sometimes its running a computer company. Some people's time is "worth more"... but that's only because the consumer let it get that way.

There are no consumers.  Just slave labor who is completely fooled.  No market established what Mr Trump was worth ... it was inside trading all the way ... and a little help from Dad.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  Just don't choose to be a sucker.

[PickelledEggs]

There are no consumers.  Just slave labor who is completely fooled.  No market established what Mr Trump was worth ... it was inside trading all the way ... and a little help from Dad.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  Just don't choose to be a sucker.

You've watched too much of the Zeitgeist Movement videos, haven't you?

[Baruch]

Way beyond that.  I have the the whole Weltanschauung ;-)

There are two kinds of people; those who get hit, and those who get it.

Congress has generously allowed itself to repeal the very temporary ban on insider trading by Congress-critters.  Lobbyists call voters ... road kill.

"the system we have" ... what is that?  Not some theoretical free market.  Study George Carlin.

[PickelledEggs]

Some questions:

1: What do you use during your day? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
2: How do you go about giving credit to the people that supply those services and items?
3: What do you do during your day to contribute to the community? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
4: How do you receive credit for those things?

For instance, I bought new pants today. My other pants are so worn out that my wallet falls out of the back pocket.
I produce artwork and can teach drawing. But I doubt that would be of use to the people supplying the pants I needed to get today, so I shelled out some cash. The people that run the store probably don't want to trade an india ink sketch for a couple pairs of pants.
Currency is the middle ground. It's something we all have to involuntarily agree on... even though it can be horribly flawed with inflation and whatnot.

[Baruch]

After people have read the original chart, and talked a bit about it ... we can get down to definitions ;-)

Currency isn't the same as money.  No nation uses money today, they all use currency.  And currency is not a bad thing ... but the fault doesn't lie in the tools (currency is a tool to do exactly what PickelleEggs said), but in the people using the tools.

Money is currency with one additional characteristic ... it is a store of value.  Currency allows different people to trade, without barter.  Otherwise we would all have to go to a flee market once a week (where there are lots of people with different goods/services ... think mall) and trade (without money as a tool).  A modern society with money/currency ... something we have had for 2500 years ... is much more efficient.  Now a form of intermediary barter, that is also a store of value ... is unnecessary, if you aren't keeping the intermediary in your pocket very long.  Commercial and consumer banking, with a small interest payment to the depositor, was the solution to the problem of currency not being a store of value.  But this has been failing since 1971.  We are now in a 44 year old banking crisis brought on by President Nixon.

So as stated before, the GDP is the product of the money supply and the velocity of money.  Relative to the pre-money system, both the money supply (there was pre-money) and the velocity is much greater.  Of course average prosperity is the GDP divided by the number of people involved.  From a financial POV ... the average prosperity is constantly going down, because there are more and more people.  If we represent the number of goods and services abstractly ... as the money supply ... and the leverage this money supply has ... as the velocity of money ... then prosperity above subsistence is only possible in a money economy ... and only if either the money supply is increasing or the velocity of money is increasing ro both ... at a rate greater than the population growth.  The problems the Roman Empire had ... was an inability to increase the money supply at a certain point, and the frequent crashes in the velocity of money (people hoarding money to protect against disasters and barbarians).  And aside from plagues ... the population was constantly increasing ... until the whole system collapsed.  This is a dialectical tension that the Roman economy ran under.  This could have been ameliorated with the widespread usage of paper money.  Romans did have bills of credit, but only on the commercial and governmental level, not on the consumer level.  In places like China ... which invented modern paper and modern printing ... this same problem caused the Chinese to have the first widespread use of paper money (at least at the local merchant level).  Coins were still available for the common people, most of the time.  This is not to ... denigrate the Main Street Economy aka what is happening outside of finance.