Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates?

Re:Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates? by mindslight on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @12:53PM (#22739548)

I agree that is part of my argument. People certainly treat money as if it should be a time-independent measure of effort. Is there another objective metric that you can imagine money representing?

I do not think it makes sense to insist that money can only ever be subjective based on the possibility that transients can occur - eg a factory burning down does cause natural price inflation, but this is an exception rather than the rule.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates? by munificent on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @01:26PM (#22739940)

I don't think have the luxury of imagining a metric that we wish money to represent any more than we can say that "the number of rats in New York" means anything in any abstract sense. The value of money is an emergent property of what people do with it and if its numeric measure fails to track our selected "objective metric", it's the fault of our metric, not money itself.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates? by mindslight on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @02:31PM (#22740786)

Objective measures are necessary to independently judge the actions of the people in charge of the money supply. To write off objective standards is to hand them an enormous amount of unchecked power, power which will invariably be abused for their gain.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates? by Supermancho on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @02:06PM (#22740477)

That is both how it is viewed by the 90% and how it is treated by the entire system. This is the source of "Time is money".

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