#i know why we 'can't' print more money because tHe EcOnOmY but come on

[comingsoon2aroadsideditchnearyou]

Why Capitalism Needs Infinite Growth to Survive

Or, 'Even The Goddamn Money Is Privately Owned '

So, you know how capitalism apologists always say that we need a high growth rate in order to ensure high standards of living? Didja ever notice how they don't actually give a shit and a half about the magnitude of resources people are able to access, only that the rate of change is positive? There's a structural reason for that. It's a dogshit one, but like, it's pretty influential.

It starts with Fractional Reserve Banking. Been around for a while, basically ever since paper money was invented. When a bank takes a savings deposit, it can lend most of that deposit back out to someone else. The person who takes out the loan will spend the money on something, and the person who receives the money will put it in their savings account, and the cycle repeats.

The reserve requirement in the US is 10%, which means that through this multiplier effect, the commercial banking system can expand the money supply printed by the government by up to a factor of 10x. In other words, ~90% of the money in circulation is privately owned, and crucially, it carries interest.

So, almost every dollar out there needs to get paid back to a lender, with some extra dollars sprinkled on top (as a treat). This is only possible if there is always more money in the future than there is in the present, in order to make up the missing difference.

This means capitalism is always operating in some mixture of three states:

1. The increased flow of money is spent on an increased flow of stuff, which is growth.

2. The increased flow of money is spent on the same amount of stuff, which is inflation.

3. The flow of money does not increase, so the loans cannot be repaid, so the banks crash and pull the plug on the money printer and now nobody has permission to do anything anymore and the entire system crashes and everything is terrible but it can probably be fixed with austerity guys, I promise, just one more public service cut, it'll fix everything this time, trust me bro

The State can come in and print a whole bunch of money to shift the economy from situation 3 to situation 2, but you can't print more resources. That requires pulling a bunch of energy and materials out of the ground. And so they pillage the Earth, and they lie about trying to cut back in the future, and they greenlight new fossil projects, and they pillage even faster, and they profit.

Capitalism can often feel insurmountable, but part of that is because, ever since World War 2, there have been easily extractable deposits of petroleum that have let the system constantly accelerate to insane levels of material throughput. That won't last forever. Fossil fuels and mineral deposits get harder to extract as time goes on. And every time the extraction system has even the slightest hiccup, capitalism reveals itself to be as fragile as a shark, choking to death as soon as it stops swimming.

PICTURED: How energy and mineral resource depletion built up to trigger the 2008 financial crisis, and radicalized an entire generation

#anti capitalism #climate change #economy #infinite growth #degrowth #eat the rich #if you squint real hard it looks like everybody in charge is a massive fucking clown #politics

[hella1975]

Why cant we just print more money

GRRRRRRRRRRRR BARK BARK BARK i hate this fucking question i hate everything but this is actually what im supposed to be doing RIGHT NOW while im on tumblr dot com so this will be good hopefully.

okay so for starters there's a lot of confusion with this over the lines between economic and political theory. to put simply (YES THIS IS ME SIMPLIFYING IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ECON AND YOU COME AT ME ABOUT WELFARE OR PRODUCTIVITY OR SOME SHIT RELEVANT TO EQUITY I WILL MAIM YOU) anyway to put simply; economics handles efficiency, politics handles equity, so basically what might be a perfectly sound economic theory (aka Do Not Print Loads Of Money) doesn't always correspond with political theory (aka People Need More Money), and i feel like that's a very basic foundation that a lot of people miss whenever this debate arises. like it reaches a point where it STOPS being an economic problem and people dont seem to realise that.

okay so basically central banks are out here regulating the supply of money in an economy right, and the thing about this question is that WE DO print more money. like all the time actually. it's called quantitative easing. if productivity is falling and/or unemployment is rising, central banks will print more money because it boosts both of those things. but the trade off to that is that 'too much' money in the money supply increases inflation (prices go up everywhere) and while inflation can actually be good sometimes (and even enforced sometimes), if inflation continues to rise aka if we just kept printing more money, you'd just completely devalue your currency until it literally meant nothing and your economy would crumble into a horrific recession (hi post-ww1 germany). which is like. not ideal. so it's about getting a balance. the thing with economics that is so so fucking annoying is that most if not everything has a trade-off like this. for example, you can't increase wages without increasing unemployment you can't decrease unemployment without increasing inflation etc etc. so it's like yeah we can print more money but we can only print it to an extent that it is more helpful than it is harmful

#the go to case study for this is what happened in germany after the war #they were in economic crisis due to borrowing and reparations and had to print more money bc they literally did not have enough #in the money supply to stay afloat #but this then led to HYPERinflation and the value of their currency dropped so ridiculously low #that you now have photos of children wheeling entire BARROWS of cash to bakeries just to afford a loaf of bread #so yeah it's fucking annoying bc you really should be able to just print more money and fix all our problems #but our problem actually isnt the money itself and actually the fact we made an economic system to begin with #we need to go back to commodity money folks i give u a little gemstone and u give me goods/services simple as #ask #hella goes to uni

[lucywrites02]

Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Heimdall?

Steve Rogers- what is one thing people say that you genuinely have never understood?

When someone tries to explain why we can't print more money.

Clint Barton- retiring in the city or countryside?

When I'm old I wanna live in a city because it's easier to live on your own in a city (transport, shops, hospitals, etc). I had been living in the countryside for 14 years of my life and unless I move into a cute cottage in the mountains with the love of my life and fast Internet I don't want it

Heimdall- dream job?

Tattoo artist or to have my own coffee shop

Mcu ask game

#i know why we 'can't' print more money because tHe EcOnOmY but come on #just change the rules my dude #economy is for people- people are not for the economy #it's that easy #and I'm already planning to open a coffe shop with one of my friends #with a little library inside #you know? #that would be so cool #thanks for the ask! #mcu ask game

[elzhebietta]

You know, I found myself thinking that without Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, it's even calmer now. At least I don't get stupid people's comments on political news. People who do not understand the geopolitical situation and do not want to understand it.

What is happening now in Ukraine is the first part of the very “third world war”, which was necessary to save the U.S. economy. And it was America that initiated it. Now there is a global redistribution of the world, and the first thing that must be divided is Europe. The U.S. needs Europe to dump its national debt on it, because the U.S. economy is in a crisis phase. Why? Because the states can print dollars without any control, they created a national debt that is physically impossible to pay.

How it happened, in as simple language as possible. The Federal Reserve is printing money. It is a private business, the purpose of which is to make a profit. When the U.S. needs to cover a budget deficit, it issues government bonds (“treasuries” - debt bonds). The Fed prints America a million dollars, and America prints a million treasuries and they change. The Fed's job is to make money, so it sells American debt on the stock markets. The nuance is that there is little demand for them globally. They remain on the Fed's balance sheet because no one wants to buy them. By printing every new dollar, the U.S. national debt is automatically increased. And the debt has to be serviced by paying interest. So it turns out that there are more debts in this system than there is money to pay them off, and it can't go on indefinitely, the U.S. dollar bubble will burst.

So, to somehow support its economy, the U.S. came up with the idea of selling its liquefied gas to Europe. But Europe has its own interest: it needs a lot and cheaply, so it buys gas from Russia. To displace Russian gas, it is necessary to stop its supplies, which go through Ukrainian territory. To do this, Russia and Ukraine need to split up, imputing to Ukraine that it no longer wants to be with Russia, and wants to be with Europe. It would be ideal for the United States if the Nazis destroyed our pipeline and America became the only supplier of liquefied gas to Europe. Plus, after WWII, fighting Nazism is in the Russians' blood, so the anti-Russian project in Ukraine opened up great prospects for the U.S. Moreover, Ukraine itself does not realize that it is just a pawn in the American game, neither the USA nor Europe needs it alive, and only we still feel sorry for it, and are waiting for the AFU front to disintegrate itself, so that there would be less blood and fewer wounds. But even if Zelensky finally comes to the point of making peace with Russia, he will not be allowed to do so, because Ukraine does not decide anything. It's America that decides, and it needs a war to the last Ukrainian. That's why they're handing out machine guns in the streets by the thousands and releasing prisoners from prisons.

Why didn't we liberate Ukraine from the Nazis sooner? We were not prepared for war. We were upgrading our military and technical capabilities, gaining experience in combat operations in Syria, looking for allies, and we found them, primarily in China.

America needed a third world war to bring its national debt to zero and convert the dollar. By the way, hoarding dollars is very rash, they can turn into paper overnight if Russia and China refuse to use them and switch to paying in national currencies. The problem is that China also has plenty of U.S. treasuries (the debt I wrote about above), so this is a last resort.

Why doesn't America go to war itself, but only turns on every possible sanction? Scary. If they get involved, we will activate our nuclear triad. Why risk it when you have an insane Ukraine that thinks the whole world is with it, when in fact its role is to become a victim.

The outcome of the special operation in Ukraine will determine who Europe chooses in the end. Right now it seems to be as hostile to us as possible, but a Russian victory will lead to the disintegration of the European Union, and each country will begin to determine for itself which center of power it wants to belong to.

Given that the economies of many key European countries need Russian resources, the choice is foreseeable. If Russia loses in the conflict with Ukraine, Europe will be completely cut off from our energy resources. Let me remind you that there is already a big problem with gas, fertilizers, and we are also an exporter of rare-earth metals, which are necessary for the creation of any electronics. America makes Russia the aggressor in order to destroy the stable transit route between us and Europe, in order to take advantage of Europe as much as possible and to postpone the explosion of the strained dollar bubble.

#current events #russia #russland #Ukraine #usa #america #dollar #ruble #Europe