debased dollar: pay no attention
had a pretty good excuse for not knowing shit about economics before 2000; i wasn’t writing about it for a living. still, i at least smelled enough of a rat to look into it. i wonder what the pro flunkies are getting paid for, other than acting as the supposedly freelance branch of the ministry of information. this evening, AFP announces,
World millionaires’ club numbers 9.5 million: researchThe number of millionaires in the world increased by 8.3 percent in 2006, with about 9.5 million individuals now estimated to have more than a million dollars in financial assets, a report said Wednesday.
The survey by financial services group Capgemini and US investment bank Merrill Lynch said strong global economic growth and gains on the stock market explained the expansion of the exclusive club of “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWIs). [...]
which brings me to “global warming”. the knee jerk nazi socialists (i.e., violent control freak maniacs) get the slightest whiff of rising temperature trends, and they do the chicken little dance. “OMG!”
i’ll give ‘em one thing: they have the advantage of an objective measure; so far, thermometric scales aren’t fucked with regularly by organized criminal fiat, though the measurement of outdoor temperatures by the US criminal syndicate is notoriously shoddy. damned notable that one moron socialist after another’s turned into johnny “science” major over this warming hype, yet can’t be bothered to know the first thing about currency debasement via credit expansion. allowing minor blips for 1812 and lincoln’s war to prevent southern independence, the US dollar was stable through the entire 19th century, until… the federal reserve “stabilized” prices, beginning in ~1915.
so back to this increase in millionaires. what else do these professional stooges in the deficient press think is going to happen when in the span of 100 years the purchasing power of a dollar’s shrunk from $1.00 (100%) to 4 cents (4%)? go back and look at that article. search for the word “inflation”. search for “supply” or “credit” or “expansion”. you’ll find one hit:
[...] said strong global economic growth and gains on the stock market explained the expansion of the exclusive club of “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWIs).
wouldn’t have anything to do with a plummeting dollar value, this “expansion of the exclusive club of ‘High Net Worth Individuals’”? doesn’t deserve a mention as even a peripherally noteworthy item?
quick crazy hypothetical: let’s say that in 1906 there were a thousand millionaires, and 5 million individuals estimated to have between $44,000 and $999,999 in financial assets. without changing a damned thing except calculating/countering the real debasement of the currency in the next 100 years, those 5 million people are transformed into “millionaires”. big fucking deal. generally, their financial positions didn’t change; according to popularly accepted historical measurements, any 1906 person with $44,000 or more in assets is what would be called a millionaire today.
this shit is no different fundamentally from how cool i thought it was when i went to italy as a kid and saw that i could buy thousands of lire with my allowance. how about these pro flunkies write some article about how they flew a bunch of impoverished americans to another country, exchanged their dollars for some even more expanded junk, and turned them instantly into “millionaires”? eventually, the mass of american stupidity’s going to have no choice but to get hip to this. as i’ve written before, the gyrations of hollywood in this matter have gone beyond laughable. these same morons want to get up in your face about tenths of a degree celsius, while still pretending that Gone with the Wind dollars are the same as Spider-Man 2 dollars. population and other factors aside, that’s like comparing 100 to 7. same with the stock market, with all the brainless assholes chumping on the radio and TV about record numbers. record numbers of what?
but let’s sweat those tenths of a degree on a thermometer, al-gore-ithmic geniuses!
one’s the alleged survival of the planet and the other’s what? it’s only demonstrated slavery, happening now, assholes. better wake up and get it straight; they’re clipping coins on your ass — coins you’re forced at the point of a gun to accept — and you worship at their thieving feet. some kinda drug, that criminal syndicate mambo.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:16
Hi charley,
I remember doing a number of currency comparison calculations in some of my college econ courses in the past. One was the comparison of box office receipt totals, with the shocking revelation that Gone With The Wind made something like $1.3billion or something in todays dollars, meaning the Spider-Man movies weren’t even close (what is the deal with those movies? Inflated dollars or not, there’s still a busload of people turning out to watch what is not, arguably, necessarily going to end up being a classic).
You’d think the lesson would be “Holy SHIT! What the hell is being done to the currency?” but the way it’s taught, at least at the college I am attending, I think the lesson is, “Political group X is responsible, while Y would possibly manage it more responsibly” or at least “It’s an inevitable cost of our modern economy.”
That’s the dangerous thing, when an objective economic reality is spun into a subjective political responsibility. The idea that all it takes is the “right people” in power and suddenly it’ll all be better…
June 29th, 2007 at 12:22
taylor, if you’re into the box office scam analysis, check out this article i linked in another post: “How the Motion Picture Industry Miscalculates Box Office Receipts” (.doc)
they go further than the adjusted dollars, accounting for population:
Another concern is that inflation-adjusted grosses, don’t take into consideration the fact that the United States has added two more states and more than doubled its population in the past 70 years. This has resulted in a significantly larger market for the motion picture industry than what existed in the past.