Wall Street-Bullshit All the Way Down
A professor was giving a lecture on astronomy when he was refuted by a woman in the audience. She claimed that the earth was situated not in space but on the back of a large turtle. When the professor asked what that turtle was standing on, she said it was another turtle. Let me assure you the woman continued; it is “turtles all the way down.”
The turtle story gets at a vexing philosophical problem with the fancy title of Infinite Regress. It encapsulates the idea of how we know what is true, what does it rest on? With physics, the foundation is atoms, with religious people it is God. But then what are atoms made from or who created God? Grappling with what supports your beliefs can lead you to an existential crisis. You can realize that perhaps your belief system doesn’t have as solid of a foundation as you might hope.
Wall Street, and I am using that catchphrase for our financial system, is utterly broken. It doesn’t rest on anything. It has become a closed system where the players increasingly trade with each other without any real ties to the exterior world where real things happen.
The elite guild who are the beneficiaries of the corrupt pack our government has made with Wall Street have become disconnected from the rest of us. They are handsomely paid for producing nothing. They chant in what seems to me a language that can’t be distinguished from ancient priests. In Rome, there was a class called haruspex. They were trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. This is a random sentence from a Wall Street report “The likely culprit is increasingly inelastic bond/equity relationships, driven by the prevalence of systematic "model" portfolios like target date funds. These portfolios have fixed allocations that are insensitive to changing yield conditions, essentially freezing asset allocations.” It’s bullshit all the way down.
This lack of being tethered to reality is caused by the Federal Reserve. They do not create value out of work, rather they simply create money out of nothing. They manipulate the equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet and bam, money is created. This money-for-nothing act is then systematically multiplied by the banks in our fractional reserve system.
This depravity of free money for the insiders corrupts those who are drinking from its firehouse. This has been documented and described as the Cantillon effect. Those in power, closest to the money creation will benefit most from money creation. Think of Wall Street and multi-millionaire politicians. They are just examples of the Cantillon effect.
Bitcoin is different. Fiat money is not backed by anything, leading us to the situation above where money creation is just a game run by insiders. Bitcoin is backed by energy. Those who attack the “wasteful” energy usage of Bitcoin mining are missing the point, it is a feature, not a bug. If you were to do away with the ability of the network to be secured, permanently, via mining and energy, you would be left with politics.