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Originally Posted by roachboy
still kinda jammed up time-wise, but in order to block a wholesale slide to despair as to alternative ways of thinking about currency markets==assuming that the formal analogy between "fiat currency" and crises of speculation at more local levels holds as more than a formal analogy (i'm not convinced of this at all) there is the tobin tax initiative.
here is a global policy forum collection of links/information on the initiative:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/...rtax/index.htm
there's alot of material here to wade through, but a bit of time poking around will open up an entirely alternate way of thinking about international currency markets, their volatity, the relations between this volatility and political stability, and at least poses an alternative.
i used to do some work for attac a few years ago, and they were at one time a useful resource not only about this, but also for papers that debated, refined and extended this (and other) ideas...but the organization imploded a year or so ago and their archives have apparently disappeared from the web for now...the point is that this is not a new idea, it has been around and has been used for some time in the context of efforts to undermine neo-liberal hegemony.
funny that folk in the states dont seem to know about it.
kinda makes you wonder about the reactionary ideological bubble we move around in here, dont it?
i'll wait to see if anything happens from here before i post any of my views on this. |
I found attac archives here:
http://archive.attac.org/indexen/index.html
...there are no links to US or Canadian branches or participants. I had never heard of attac.
It came to me earlier today that the contrived system of stocks and realty "aasets" that can only go "up"in valuation, along with the underlying economies that support them, went into "hyperdrive" mode....intense governmental, central bank driven interference, beginning about the time that it began to sink in that technology had made the old stimulus, "World War" obsolete with the exhibition of the destruction wrought by atomic and then even more popular thermo-nuclear devices.
I will have to think about the international currency transaction tax. I trade millions of dollars in securities annually, using the same small pool of funds to enter and exit positions. I hold some positions for less than a minute and others for days or even weeks or months at a time. You are talking about taxing "churn", which is what "trading" anything, is about.
Finding a way to tax profits and allow deductions for losses is always preferred, and easier said than done, compared to a transaction tax, I know.
It took a Dow Index crash from a 393 pt. high in 1929, to a low at just 41 points above zero, on July 8, 1932, to create an interest and preference for social-democratic reform, 70 years ago. I came across this "Time" capsule when I was researching the HOLC mortgage bailout:
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...8554-5,00.html
Kansas Candidate
Monday, May. 18, 1936
....If Governor Landon is nominated at Cleveland, pious people who dislike the Roosevelt religious record will have a chance to vote for a Methodist who goes to church about as irregularly as the present President.
"Fox." Son of a well-to-do independent oil producer, Alf Landon belonged to Phi Gamma Delta at University of Kansas in 1904-08. Fraternity records show that he got the ice cream course eliminated from the house menu, tried and failed to have only one orchestra instead of two hired for the spring lawn party, outlawed gambling in the chapter house, opposed motions to install a stein rack and to discontinue "Dr. Wilbur's Bible lessons." No niggard, however, Alf Landon gave the fraternity a cuspidor. No "Christer," he downed his beer with other members of Theta Nu Epsilon, oldtime campus drinking society. In his one year of academic study and three years of law, Alf Landon's prime avocation was the workings of fraternity and campus politics, which he mastered so thoroughly that fellow students, nicknamed him "The Fox."
Back home in Independence, Alf Landon spent four years in a bank, then plunged into the oil business as an independent producer like his father. In that arduous and risky line—by enterprise, hard work, fair dealing and stiff bargaining—he made a fortune which is now estimated at from $250,000 to $2,000,000, invested chiefly in some 100 Kansas and Oklahoma wells he still owns. He also, in his comings & goings in search of oil, made friends all over Kansas. Shortly after his first wife died in 1918, Alf Landon volunteered for Army Service, was called in mid-September, commissioned a Lieutenant in the Chemical Warfare Division in October, month before the Armistice. Candidate Landon wears his American Legion button, does not talk much about his War record.
Available on request at Governor Landon's Kansas City headquarters are mimeographed copies of press puffs ballyhooing him as the Great Budget Balancer. Alf Landon is careful to say, however, that the credit for Kansas' fiscal soundness "Does not belong to any one political party or State administration."
Kansas finances rest on three main props: 1) the Tax Limitation Act, restricting local taxing bodies to a maximum levy for any one purpose and to a maximum total; 2) the Budget Law, requiring local governments to publish their budgets in advance, hold public hearings; 3) the Cash Basis Law which limits every locality to pay-as-you-go spending. The last is a Landon measure. The first two were initiated by Democratic Governor Woodring. Governor Landon has stuck to the law's letter. But the enormous myth which GOPartisans have made of his budget-balancing feat may be finally debunked by reflection on the probable state of Kansas' finances if the Federal budget had been balanced since 1933, thus depriving dust, drought and Depression-stricken Kansas of the $400,000,000 of Federal money which has poured in from such sources as RFC, HOLC and FCA loans, AAA checks and Relief.
Alf Landon has shrewdly avoided offering specific answers to national problems. His rare speeches to date have been to the effect that it would be nice to attain many New Deal goals without New Deal spending and experiment. "No reasonable citizen should ask us what to do," cried he in his second broadside at the New Deal last winter. "The American people propose to solve their problems under the American system."
In his well-rehearsed radio interview last week, Candidate Landon uttered his boldest words to date, took the following stands on issues of the day:
¶The Republican Campaign: The Republican Party must proceed along sound and progressive lines. . . . Progressive government . . . can succeed only when accompanied by careful preparation, competent administration and sound fiscal policies.
¶Labor and Agriculture: Where labor or agriculture are under disadvantages these must be removed.
¶Youth: What the young people of America really need and earnestly desire is not relief but opportunity.
¶Foreign Policy: It might repay all of us to read Washington's Farewell Address again.
¶Government & Business: There should be regulation wherever regulation keeps open opportunity and protects, not hampers, the people as a whole in the exercise of their rights. ... I believe we have got to attack the evils of monopoly frankly and resolutely. . . .
¶Social Security: I am for it but . . .
¶Relief: When we have the facts, we must provide an honest and effective system, administered so that the money will go to those who need it and deserve it, free from political restriction.
With these views, spoken in an honest, cracker-barrel voice which showed that Alf Landon's efforts to improve his strident, monotonous radio delivery have brought results, hardly a citizen, from President Roosevelt down, could well differ. Nor could they disagree with another remark of Governor Landon's in the course of his interview: "Good intentions are not enough."
Alf M. Landon has been an able Governor of Kansas. Honestly provincial, he is devouring stiff economic and social treatises, trying hard to push his mental horizon beyond Kansas plains. Of his capacity to fill the White House chair, his friend William Allen White devoutly declares: "If a man has any latent subconscious powers they are aroused by the overwhelming responsibility. ... I am inclined to believe that Landon would rise to it. I don't know. No man knows. I don't think he knows."
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Six months later, Roosevelt took every state, including Landon's Kansas, with the exceptions of Maine and Vermont...
I did not know until I read the above article and did some checking, that Alf's daughter, "Nancy Jo", was 20 year US senator from Kansas, Nancy Kassebaum Baker. She is currently married to former Tennessee Senator and former white house chief of staff, Howard Baker.
I read an article about medium of exchange on the mises.org site. Starting out with the desire for an exchange medium more convenient than a scenario where a man with an appetite for fresh fish acts upon his desire to have some on his table, by taking one of his most portable and valuable possessions, a telescope, down to the docks in search of a fisherman unloading a fresh catch from his boat who would be interested in owning said telescope.
As long as anyone wants to own something before they have all of the money to buy it, and as long as items rising in value are the most liquid items, further ing their attractiveness even more, and as long as people use money to "keep score" in a way similar to contests to see who has the biggest dick. instead of simply as a "store of value", and a "medium of exchange", there will be market bubbles and irrationality.
Housing valuations were much lower when mortgages were hard to come by and amounted to no more than 50 percent of total valuation of a property with repayment terms of five years. As terms loosened and lending ratios to total valuation dropped,and mortgage interest paid became deductible, more potential buyers could afford to bid on housing properties.
If the government central bank lowers it's key interest rate from six percent to one percent and relaxes lending terms and suspends oversight, and allows it's own GSE's like Fannie and Freddie to raise their lending limits to chase rising prices, is the government working to set housing prices higher?
How does a cental bank that has acted so irresponsibly pull back on it's subsidy and not "cream" those who bought at the top of a price "mountain" that the central bank itself, largely husbanded?
What is this "free" enterprise some of you speak of? I see enterprise driven by special interests and agendas, for the benefit of a few, at the expense of the many, but we don't talk about that in America.