LET IT DIE: Rushkoff on the economy

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it's a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it's even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying--the corporatized model of commerce--has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn't meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

Chartered Corporations

Back in the good ol' days--I mean as far back as the late middle ages--people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he'd get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition--his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

(...)

he other big innovation of the early corporate era was monopoly currency. There used to be lots of different kinds of money. Local currencies, which helped regions reinvest in their own activities, and centralized currencies, for long distance transactions. Local currencies were earned into existence. A farmer would grow a bunch of grain, bring it to the grain store, and get receipts for how much grain he had deposited. The receipts could be used as money--even by people who didn't need grain at that particular moment. Everyone knew what it was worth.

The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today--an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.

Local currencies favored local transactions, and worked against the interests of large corporations working from far away. In order to secure their own position as well as that of their chartered monopolies, monarchs began to make local currencies illegal, and force locals to instead use "coin of the realm." These centralized currencies worked the opposite way. They were not earned into existence, they were lent into existence by a central bank. This meant any money issued to a person or business had to be paid back to the central bank, with interest.

What does that do to an economy? It bankrupts it. Think of it this way: A business borrows 1000 dollars from the bank to get started. In ten years, say, it is supposed to pay back 2000 to the bank. Where does the other 1000 come from? Some other business that has borrowed 1000 from the bank. For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt. That, or borrow yet another 1000, and so on.

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money--capital--is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

That table shows (and it is only dollar denominated debt) the cosmic scale - 150 trillion dollars - in which interest-bearing credit (aka money) was created by banks and and re-based on non-Bank/Investor capital -  the "off-balance sheet items" to which the table refers.

As for Jerome, thanks for the ArthurMag link. I really didn't see why you brought it up either until I back-clicked twice and found HACK MONEY, HACK BANKING. I used to read cyberpunk, you see. I already see signs of people going in the direction of the single-proprietor based businesses. My sister's thinking of starting a knitwear-for-babies business on the side for instance. Another sister talks about opening a bridal shop (the markups are enormous and the market's captive).

We're all going to need to sharpen our creative and entrepreneurship skills, evidently.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

I just hear talk about the economy in the same way scientists talk about how we're destroying the environment.

The economy isn't a natural entity but rather a system that only works when all parties agree to how it works.

Credit is made up, money is made up, it's all made up.

Then again, what do I know?

 

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the Black Flag, and begin to slit throats."- H.L. Mencken

That table shows (and it is only dollar denominated debt) the cosmic scale - 150 trillion dollars - in which interest-bearing credit (aka money) was created by banks and and re-based on non-Bank/Investor capital -  the "off-balance sheet items" to which the table refers.

...the Russians actually have a word for precisely the thing that has bewitched us, first accounting for an ever-increasing share of our gross domestic product, and is now responsible for our ever-larger financial black hole. That word is "фуфло" fufló when applied to a quantity of something, and "фуфел" fúfel when applied to a singular item. This word has the obscure English cognate "fuffle," which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to the early XVI century but fails to define adequately. I suspect that this word has been in circulation in many languages ever since some Protoindoeuropean simpleton showed up at some archaic fair and, being none too wise, bartered his meager trade goods in exchange for what thereafter became known as a fuffle....

A fuffle is an artful fake, an artifact specifically made to fool, beguile, seduce, or intimidate people into paying for it. Ideally, the initial transaction serves as the basis of a permanent arrangement, with the victim roped into an installment plan, which keeps the payments flowing even after the fuffle itself has crumbled into a pile of dust. An even better fuffle is one that grows over time. Since a fuffle is, in essence, a fake, its useful properties, should it have any, are largely irrelevant, and so its abstract (which is to say, financial) properties come forth as being the essential ones. The most important such property is, quite obviously, size, and indeed fuffles tend to get bigger and bigger over time....

Take, for example, suburban and exurban houses. For a time, people couldn't get enough of them, and at one point fully half of the US population was living in them. Their square footage had increased far past what even a large family might actually need, while at the same time their cost had exceeded what an average family could afford. In the final act of suburban expansion, these fuffled houses begat fuffled mortgages: fraudulent loans clearly not intended to be repayable over their entire term but quickly rolled over into some other fraudulent monstrosity. And fuffled mortgages begat fuffled equity-backed securities. And these begat fuffled government bailouts.

Another example is America's favorite fufflemobile: the SUV....

Or take the gigantic fuffle of guaranteed student loans, which enabled fuffle-like growth in college tuitions. Following a few years of flipping burgers or serving lattes the value of the diploma may be zero, and most of the knowledge it implied either forgotten or obsolete, but repayments continue, sometimes until the poor student's death....

My last example is private retirement based on IRA and 401k retirement funds. Unlike proper retirement systems, which transfer a percentage of earnings from working-age people directly to retirees, this fuffled scheme takes these earnings and invests them in some fuffles, expecting these fuffles to grow like they always do, making the retirees well off upon retirement....