Coins last much longer than paper currency and are hard to counterfeit and less profitable to counterfeit. Nowadays only criminals use currency. Why not get rid of currency altogether? Use heavy duty stainless steel tungsten dimes and dollars that will last 1000 years. Most people can continue to use their debt/credit cards. Criminals who insist on selling drugs should have to lug heavy sacks of coins where they will be spotted and jailed. USA can set a deadline for depositing currency into the bank at which point the currency becomes worthless. This would cancel past illegal profits and punish countries overseas that have ruined their currencies and forced their citizens to use stable USA greenbacks for transactions.
Do you think a new war is coming? I keep hearing the liberal news media bad-mouthing Iran. Has Mitt Romney cut a deal to bomb Iran if he becomes president? If Obama is going to bomb Iran why has he not already done it? What is going on behind the scenes? Who is going to pay for the war?
Oil prices have gone up even though Libya war is over and more oil should be forthcoming. I am worried that a new Iran war will disrupt oil supplies again and cause $10 gasoline at the pump. This will ruin the USA economy. I am also hearing some talk about USA bailing out Greece and Italy because our banks are too exposed to Europe and a collapse in Europe will quickly spread here. How can USA afford a Euro bailout in addition to our wars, oils, and welfare programs? Why should Americans have to work until age 75 so that Greeks can retire at 50? USA is still deep in debt with continued deficits causing even more debt.
It would be nice to get off the grid with my own cow, garden, solar, windmill and water. And still have access to the big cities, universities, and professional activities. I would like to move to Texas but the drought may be ruining Texas as a place to live. It is getting increasingly hard to find any good place without some serious imminent problems — weather, financial, racial, wars, drugs, allergies, smog. I may be forced into Minneapolis Minnesota 40 degrees below zero. 2 founding faculty won the nobel prize. I was doing similar work in parallel with them back in the 1970s influenced by gossip about their work before it was published. I sat in Sargent’s Matlab class back in 1987 and studied out of his earlier text. He is basically a time-series engineer. Attached is a long term inflation graphic from his NYU website probably indicating inflation or default may be a way out of the USA predicament. People should study these ideas!
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/10/10/economics-nobel-thomas-sargent-christopher-sims/
Former U of Minnesota faculty win Nobel economics prize
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for research that sheds light on the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and policy instruments such as interest rates and government spending. Sargent and Sims - both 68 - carried out their research independently in the 1970s and ’80s. But it is highly relevant today as world governments and central banks seek ways to steer their economies away from another recession. “It is not an exaggeration to say that both Sargent’s and Sims’ methods are used daily … in all central banks that I know of in the developed world and at several finance departments too,” Both taught at the University of Minnesota; Sims was on the economics faculty from 1970 to 1990 while Sargent taught there from 1971 to 1987
University of California at Berkeley graduation speech Thomas J. Sargent May 16, 2007 I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words. Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.
1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.
3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.
6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.
