No way to have known this would happen.

What? My mother was a saint!

✨

Blasted.

Great. Get on it, then. Der’s gold in dem dar asteroids.

But asteroids are easy to mine?

More of this.

Morged.

Oh, okay.

Soft Cell — Tainted Love

Sounds like projection to me.

✨

He’s really not going to like what comes after “tax the rich,” then.

Perfect.

You would have fooled me if you’d have used more emojis.

If only there was a simple way to find out.

I’m not sure I agree that we have problematic debt or affordability issues — at least not ones that artificially constraining the money supply would solve.

There are short-term cost price inflation problems like the cost of eggs due to an avian cull after a bird flu outbreak. That’s not a problem caused by printing money.

Ditto oil shocks. An affordability crisis unrelated to money supply.

Then we get to long-term affordability problems like housing. Housing is expensive due to policies that constrain new construction (NIMBYs) like parking requirements, supposed environmental concerns (on dense urban infill construction?) and the like.

But what makes housing really expensive is the financialization of homeownership. 100 years ago, if you took a loan on a house, the term was typically five years. The concept of a mortgage then was more like the concept of a title loan today. There’s remnants of this idea today in the game Monopoly — you buy a home cash, and if you run out of cash you mortgage the property — get some quick cash but sign the income over to the bank until you pay off the mortgage.

Now with 30 year loans, you’re really just renting your house and the bank is the landlord. But the 30 year loans jacks up the sale price which benefits the seller, the realtor, the broker, the city/state/whatever that collects property tax and the bank that actually owns the home until you pay it off.

Again, not a problem of money supply.

I’d challenge anyone who thinks the gold standard is a solution to read any book on modern monetary theory (MMT) and tell me they still think so after. Stephanie Kelton is a great MMT theorist.

In a nutshell, MMT says that the only constraint on a fiat currency issuer’s ability to print money is their tolerance for inflation. Which I don’t think gold bugs would like but would be forced to agree with.

Glad we agree. 😄

How does tying the world’s economic productivity to the amount of shiny rocks currently unearthed help anything? There were constant financial panics under the gold standard.