Here Comes the Internet of Money

Bloomberg – Money and payment systems, the underpinnings of all financial activity, are still traditional in one respect: They rely on central third parties — banks — to record and vouch for transactions.

Digital currencies dispense with this. They create a decentralized record — a “distributed ledger” — which allows buyers and sellers to interact directly. more> http://tinyurl.com/mx4unrg

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The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar, Part 2

BOOK REVIEW

Wealth of Nations, Author: Adam Smith.

Money, Gold, and History, Author: Lewis E. Lehrman.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Author: John Maynard Keynes.

By Ralph Benko – The mechanics of the reserve currency system preempt these funds’ ready availability for “the maintenance of industry.”

The mechanics of the dollar as a reserve asset, therefore, finance bigger government while insidiously preempting productivity, jobs, and equitable prosperity.

As Steve Forbes pithily puts it, “You’ve got to get the money right.” 

Time to lift the reserve currency curse. Time to fix the dollar. more> http://tinyurl.com/men5vk7

Related>

• The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar
• The Demonization Of American Capitalism, Jonathan Adelman, Forbes

The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of King Dollar

BOOK REVIEW

Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It, Authors: Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames.

The Money Trap, Author: Robert Pringle.

By Ralph Benko – We live in a world monetary system that makes the U.S. dollar its official reserve currency.

About 60%  of international central bank reserves are Yankee dollars. Some, both right and left, in America and abroad, consider the reserve currency status of the dollar a bug in the software of our world monetary system.

Getting this fixed is, in the opinion of some consequential thinkers, of capital importance for the generation of quality jobs, and equitable prosperity, in America and the world. more> http://tinyurl.com/kgmlxya

Ron Paul’s End the Fed Condenses a Lifetime of Wisdom and Experience

BOOK REVIEW

End the Fed, Author: Ron Paul.

By Nathan Lewis – “What the Fed and paper money have done for Congress is lead legislators to believe that there are no limits on what they can spend, on what they can propose, and what they can accomplish.”

Paul says the era of reckoning is upon us now, and indeed the Fed and other central banks are quite busy today either propping up sovereign bond markets that freely-acting investors had abandoned (Europe), or rather forthrightly engaging in printing-press finance (U.S. and especially Japan). more> http://tinyurl.com/mumzoyd

Money printing, search for yield and the mirage of financial stability

By Jeremy Warner – The search for yield is evident in renewed investor appetite for “payment in kind notes”, a form of credit that gives the borrower the option to repay lenders by issuing additional debt.

Roughly a third of those who issued such debt in the run-up to the crisis ended up defaulting, yet this has failed to act as a deterrent. New issuance of these instruments rose by a third in the first three quarters of this year.

Unconventional monetary policy is meant to work on the “hair of the dog that bit you” principle.

By fighting a crisis caused by too much money with yet more money, the central bank hopes to restore the economy to a “normally” functioning machine, at which point saner voices are meant to take over and a more sustainable form of growth establishes itself. more> http://tinyurl.com/kyfdaru

Related>

• How the Fed Let the World Blow Up in 2008, Matthew O’Brien, Atlantic

Eurozone crisis is just getting started

By Jeremy Warner – Virtually all successful currency unions start with political union, and then proceed through shared insurance, institutions, and fiscal arrangements to a common form of exchange.

Europe, it hardly needs saying, is trying to do it the other way round; it has forced monetary union on an unsuspecting public, and now, via the resulting financial crisis, hopes to bulldoze through the shared fiscal and political arrangements that might eventually make it work, culminating ultimately in a United States of Europe.

The arrogance of political leaders who think they know better may have been tolerable as long as Europe was growing. But today they deliver only economic ruin, making their position, and the legitimacy of the EU project, ever more vulnerable. more> http://tinyurl.com/k8lnfh4

Death by Finance

By Dani Rodrik – How quickly emerging markets’ fortunes have turned.

First, emerging-market hype is just that. Economic miracles rarely occur, and for good reason.

Governments that can intervene massively to restructure and diversify the economy, while preventing the state from becoming a mechanism of corruption and rent-seeking, are the exception.

Instead, emerging markets’ growth over the last two decades was based on a fortuitous (and temporary) set of external circumstances: high commodity prices, low interest rates, and seemingly endless buckets of foreign finance. more> http://tinyurl.com/qb23ydk

Related>

• What’s Next for the BRICS? Scheherazade Rehman, usnews.com
• Everything You Need to Know About the Emerging-Market Currency Collapse, Matthew O’Brien, Atlantic