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Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by jevgeni on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:38AM (#34706802)
The banking system IS well researched. STEM fields also have lack of consensus on different topics.
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by throwaway290 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:43AM (#34706836)
Whataboutism. It's not about STEM a lot of which is abstract and of no direct consequence (especially where there is no consensus) but about something that can impact society and livelihoods directly in unknown ways.
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by orwin on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @09:15AM (#34708259)
I don't think that's exactly what GP meant.

The banking system and the way money really works started being researched quite recently (late 2000s). They are some specialists, but a lot of economists (and especially those you can find on TV or read in the generalist press, but not only) are still stuck on the pre-2000 vision where the money banks lend is from deposits.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @09:31AM (#34708495)
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:13AM (#34709128)
How is fraud in a commercial index relevant to our understanding of money and central banking? Did the Enron scandal undermine our understanding of steam turbines?
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:30AM (#34709385)
How is the interbank interest rate being defined on the fly in-mente relevant to our understanding of some large central banks determining their total credit supply by punching some numbers into a computer ex nihilo?

Seems similar enough to me. That's how.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:35AM (#34709467)
> the interbank interest rate being defined on the fly

Practically all prices are determined on the fly. Libor wasn’t the interbank rate, it was one commercial offering, albeit a powerful one. The Fed Funds rate always was and now SOFR are transactionally derived, which is fundamentally different from Libor, which was never anything more than a survey.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:44AM (#34709618)
There is a finite amount of energy in this universe and yet here we are at "Practically all prices are determined on the fly".

This is mere bankster handwaving in lieu of calculating physically intrinsic value for a sufficient number of commodities.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:54AM (#34709803)
> a finite amount of energy in this universe and yet here we are at "Practically all prices are determined on the fly"

This is a silly comparison. Stars don’t model their fusion output. Particles interact on the fly. There is also no model relating entropy to overnight collateralised borrowing rates.

> calculating physically intrinsic value for a sufficient number of commodities

Interbank funds aren’t a finite commodity.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:24AM (#34710345)
>Stars don’t model their fusion output.

The sum total positive energy contained in the universe can be calculated and predicted.

>Interbank funds aren’t a finite commodity.

This statement is obviously false and can run into brick walls in practice.

The comparison isn't silly in the slightest. Currencies must be coupled to a finite resource to function; Lest agent A buy all of agent B's gold using practically nothing but chutzpah.

That you think the comparison is "silly" shows limited/magical thinking on the subject.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:29AM (#34710448)
> statement is obviously false

No, it isn’t, though misunderstanding it isn’t even fundamental to the flaw in your thinking. A couple of banks can create and destroy an infinite amount of money among them with no real effect. JPMorgan credits UBS a trillion trillion trillion dollars at the latter’s JPMorgan account at the same time UBS credits JPMorgan at its UBS account, and then they both undo it a moment later. No real effect. Hell, JPMorgan could create the money with no counterbalance so they could look at it how pretty it is for an indefinite amount of time. Same deal. Regulators won’t be happy, but that’s because of the potential effects of UBS trying to buy the Fed’s balance sheet.

It’s when the interbank market interacts with broader markets that anything real happens.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:32PM (#34711518)
Again more bankster handwaving.

What need do banks have for that capability where the capability shouldn't clearly be criminalised?

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:41PM (#34718038)
> What need do banks have for that capability where the capability shouldn't clearly be criminalised?

Banks don't legally have that capability.

The point wasn't that banks do this. It's that it would have the same-real world effect (again, outside regulatory action and law enforcement) as me writing you a trillion-dollar IOU.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by jevgeni on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:02AM (#34709942)
What's the physically intrinsic value of a paper clip?
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:26AM (#34710380)
Number of joules that can be extracted from the atoms composing the molecules composing the steel wire it's made of.

...How can you not see this?

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:27AM (#34710412)
> joules that can be extracted from the atoms composing the molecules composing the steel wire it's made of

By this measure, the paper clips I have on my table have zero value to me. I cannot extract energy from them. Same for my phone and computer.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by jevgeni on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:49AM (#34710781)
What's the physically intrinsic value of an energy extractor then?
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by LukeB42 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:24PM (#34715409)
The value of its atoms and the electrons orbiting those atoms (give or take labour costs for transforming those atoms) in joules or watts.
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by jevgeni on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:07AM (#34721860)
What if there's only one energy extractor in the world?
Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by kasey_junk on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:55AM (#34723228)
You screwed up the answer here in this classic Uber-commodity based economy (which no actual economist has ever proposed outside of thought experiments).

The traditional answer when people go down this path is “what ever the producer and consumer agree the price is based on a currency denominated in joules that can be extracted from an atom”.

By doing so you’ve eliminated all forms of value adding capabilities from your economic system. The paper clip is no more valuable than its unprocessed atomic components, which is clearly not how real value is derived (or your currency is completely divorced from value).

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by jevgeni on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:59AM (#34709889)
> Seems similar enough to me.

That's a bad criteria if you don't know exactly what you are talking about.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by throwaway290 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:00PM (#34710969)
> Did the Enron scandal undermine our understanding of steam turbines?

If you know anything about it, you probably are aware it's accounting related rather than technology related.

Re:The digital pound: A new form of money for households and... by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:04PM (#34711026)
> it's accounting related rather than technology related

Precisely. The accounting scandal has as much to do with the underlying technology as the Libor scandal does with our understanding of the mechanics of banking. Nobody informed walked away from the Libor scandal rethinking the fundamentals of banking in the same way chickens didn’t get bioengineered in response to chicken Libor.