The real reasons for high house prices

[Captain Kirk]

Plus, the bubbles are the mechanism by which the governments and banks transfer wealth upwards from the poorest. If they stopped doing this, maybe people would have more money and more purchasing power to spend in the economy.

[North London Rent Girl]

9 hours ago, Errol said:

IMF currently circulating this:

 

Errol, that seriously freaked me out, went and downloaded it, haven't got far but how is this for downright sinister?

"Relying on the price system to create a negative paper currency interest rate reduces the administrative burdens and drastic changes in the way people or institutions transact that would accompany quantity restrictions on cash. Avoiding drastic changes in the way people transact avoids one possible source of political opposition."

[Tapori]

8 hours ago, North London Rent Girl said:

Errol, that seriously freaked me out, went and downloaded it, haven't got far but how is this for downright sinister?

"Relying on the price system to create a negative paper currency interest rate reduces the administrative burdens and drastic changes in the way people or institutions transact that would accompany quantity restrictions on cash. Avoiding drastic changes in the way people transact avoids one possible source of political opposition."

https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/

So for banks and economic blackmail

"Tails we win Heads you lose"

"When we mess up keep us (banks) flowing otherwise people won't like drastic changes; Pure Managerialism of the Economy = Success

Reckon Lagarde  ex IMF chief, is literally being put in charge of the ECB for prepping their banks for this tactic when it all gathers pace downwards?

 

Edited July 5, 2019 by Tapori

[Captain Kirk]

6 hours ago, Tapori said:

https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/

So for banks and economic blackmail

"Tails we win Heads you lose"

"When we mess up keep us (banks) flowing otherwise people won't like drastic changes; Pure Managerialism of the Economy = Success

Reckon Lagarde  ex IMF chief, is literally being put in charge of the ECB for prepping their banks for this tactic when it all gathers pace downwards?

 

Insane.

[PeanutButter]

This: 

Quote

There is always some demand for paper currency to keep secrets from the government or others. For example, paper currency is needed for tax evasion and other illegal activities.

WTF. No, this is not the only reason people like to hold paper. 

[Riedquat]

8 minutes ago, PeanutButter said:

This: 

WTF. No, this is not the only reason people like to hold paper. 

There's a rather disturbing attitude that seems to think you're rather weird if you just don't like everything you do being a matter of record. "If you've nothing to fear you've nothing to hide" is an attitude I really can't wrap my head around. For disagreeing with it you must be some sort of crank or up to something nefarious according to them, the attitude they appear to be unable to wrap their head around is that you can find the whole everything recorded approach thoroughly obnoxious in its own right.

And in my case I just hate high tech when low tech does the job perfectly well.

[stop_the_craziness]

1 minute ago, Riedquat said:

And in my case I just hate high tech when low tech does the job perfectly well.

+1

I know how much disposable income I have a month.  I take it out of the bank, put it in my handbag and then spend it on stuff.

I don't see why I need to complicate that process.  My bank are always offering to "help" me manage my finances better with text alerts and apps etc but if I look in my handbag and I've got £100 or £5 then I know where I'm at already, without their "help".

[PeanutButter]

3 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

There's a rather disturbing attitude that seems to think you're rather weird if you just don't like everything you do being a matter of record. "If you've nothing to fear you've nothing to hide" is an attitude I really can't wrap my head around. For disagreeing with it you must be some sort of crank or up to something nefarious according to them, the attitude they appear to be unable to wrap their head around is that you can find the whole everything recorded approach thoroughly obnoxious in its own right.

And in my case I just hate high tech when low tech does the job perfectly well.

I detest needless complexity because I only see the break points. That's just how my mind works.

Agree, I really don't like this concept that anyone not submitting themselves to complete transparency/private and state tracking is a future-crime perp. Very dystopian thinking. Some decent future-casting in this book to that effect: Sockpuppet

 

 

 

[Riedquat]

23 minutes ago, PeanutButter said:

I detest needless complexity because I only see the break points. That's just how my mind works.

I tend to reach a point where when I'm happy with how something works I find "improvements" to be at first amusing, then ridiculous, then obnoxious. I appear to take that much further than most people though, to the point of getting p1ssed off almost every time something is "improved" or "modernised" when most other people are lapping them up. Cars, trains, planes etc, they've been perfectly adequate in most ways since before I was born for example so I find most of the changes in them unappealing to say the least (the biggest car improvement I'd call one is that they don't turn into heaps of rust at the drop of a hat). Telecommunications - poking around the internet can be fun, but functionality wise the telephone when I was a kid did everything I actually need it to do. I really, really loathe stuffing electronics into absolutely everything, even when the motivation for doing so looks slightly better than "duh, more high tech is better innit?". Still waiting for decent space travel though.

I make an exception for things that are pretty much purely for entertainment (using the term rather loosely, i.e. why I'm here).

Edited July 5, 2019 by Riedquat

[Tapori]

On 05/07/2019 at 09:51, Captain Kirk said:

Insane.

As is their insane desire to literally make cash unusable

[GreenDevil]

On 05/07/2019 at 02:54, Tapori said:

https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/

So for banks and economic blackmail

"Tails we win Heads you lose"

"When we mess up keep us (banks) flowing otherwise people won't like drastic changes; Pure Managerialism of the Economy = Success

Reckon Lagarde  ex IMF chief, is literally being put in charge of the ECB for prepping their banks for this tactic when it all gathers pace downwards?

 

With shit like this being proposed by the crooks running monetary system, one can have confidence in bitcoin going to 1 million. 

[Locke]

On 02/07/2019 at 12:14, cnick said:

Yes ..... but why not just write off this 'debt'...... esp. as there's no injured party ...... (or is there???)

(doing the devil's advocate thing here)

The system as you know it is predicated upon the situation and will fail if or when the debt is written off.

An analogy would be a house of cards. Yes it's unsustainable, especially if you keep adding to it, but there's no way to sort it out without the whole thing collapsing and then you're left without a house.

On 02/07/2019 at 12:55, Kosmin said:

It's harder to borrow in the future if you don't repay your debts. If you can borrow, it will be at a higher interest rate.

Really, good. If high interest rates limit the State's capacity to borrow, we will all be better off.

[Kosmin]

1 hour ago, Locke said:

Really, good. If high interest rates limit the State's capacity to borrow, we will all be better off.

This is odd reasoning. I can see it may be appealing if you don't have any assets, but if you do, it probably entails some of your wealth being squandered by the government. That's bad even if it limits the extent to which the state can do so in the future.

[Locke]

21 minutes ago, Kosmin said:

it probably entails some of your wealth being squandered by the government

How so?

[Kosmin]

9 minutes ago, Locke said:

How so?

Direct or indirect ownership of government bonds. If the government defaults on bonds and you aren't affected by that, maybe you will be affected by the likely tax increases which follow. If you aren't affected indirectly or directly by the government defaulting, and you aren't affected secondarily by contagion in the financial system or a resulting depression and your taxes don't rise, I'm not sure how anything in the economy could affect you.

I take your point that government failure could be positive because it could force an unwilling country to change course, but in practice it's not likely. Basket-cases which have defaulted (e.g. Argentina) still borrow, whereas liberal market economy success stories (e.g. Singapore) are free to borrow and hence are more prone to socialist-interventionist failure.

Edited July 8, 2019 by Kosmin

[North London Rent Girl]

On 05/07/2019 at 02:54, Tapori said:

https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/

So for banks and economic blackmail

"Tails we win Heads you lose"

"When we mess up keep us (banks) flowing otherwise people won't like drastic changes; Pure Managerialism of the Economy = Success

Reckon Lagarde  ex IMF chief, is literally being put in charge of the ECB for prepping their banks for this tactic when it all gathers pace downwards?

 

That is hideous. I just took a look at the intro to the "proposal for central banks to make cash as costly as bank deposits with negative interest rates" that links to, it's called  NEGATIVE NOMINAL INTEREST RATES: THREE WAYS TO OVERCOME THE ZERO LOWER BOUND - the zero lower bound being the floor that cash imposes. It's by Willem H. Buiter (his email is on the doc, just saying).

"A number of economists have suggested that, using calculations based on variations of the Taylor rule (a rule that makes the official policy rate an increasing function of the output gap and of the excess of actual or expected inflation over target inflation) and ignoring
the zero lower bound, the official policy rate in the US early in 2009 should have been as low as minus 5 percent or even minus 7.5 percent. Whatever the merits of the Taylor rule and the specific calculations, there is a strong case that the zero lower bound has indeed, during the current downturn, been a binding constraint on central bank interest rate setting."

Given that phasing out cash is tricky, what else could they do? Put an expiry date on cash, tax it or do this with it, which I'm having trouble decipering at this early hour: "The third method decouples the numéraire function of currency from its means of payment/medium of exchange function and introduces a variable exchange rate between a unit of the one-period safe non-monetary security denominated in terms of the numéraire and the currency/means of payment. That exchange rate can either be set by the government or be market-determined. This permits the nominal interest rate in terms of the numéraire to be negative, even though the nominal interest rate in terms of the currency is subject to the zero lower bound."

I'm struck that what they're talking about is an anti-speculation approach that is generally only taken in wartime. As if saving money were these days an equivalent evil to speculation. It's so upside down, sigh, has been for a couple of decades, no point saying it.

Of these horrible three options, can we have the last one? Doesn't that mean at least we can keep cash?

But praps actually they can stuff all of the above, sod them.