Conversation
Notices
-
Embed this notice
Hume's price–specie flow mechanism seems like bullshit to me
-
Embed this notice
it sort of applies in the Opium Wars because China was hoarding all the silver, and the only way it could be reduced was breaking in and dumping opium in exchange for it, but it's not like they wanted to do that. they would've happily hoarded it all if they could have.
-
Embed this notice
People seem to admit here that it doesn't really work, but it's a nice theoretical idea.
-
Embed this notice
@augustus The concept of a trans-national money, whether fiat or crypto or gold, sounds nice on paper but always causes more trouble than benefits.
If I'm in the US and I want to trade with China I should buy stuff with dollars here, ship it over to China and sell it for yuan, then use those yuan to buy stuff in China and ship it back here to sell for dollars.
All global trade could be performed in this fashion without any need for an international reserve currency of any kind, but of course that would force forex traders to stop gambling with the world economy and get real jobs instead which would basically be another shoah.
-
Embed this notice
@augustus it's a trade balance issue, same as today where china and vietnam makes everything and the west is reduced to "services"
if the world wasn't on fiat the west would have ran out of money even faster
-
Embed this notice
@shaunh @augustus >If I'm in the US and I want to trade with China I should buy stuff with dollars here
but what if you have nothing that the chinese really wants at a volume equal with what you're importing
-
Embed this notice
@hakui @shaunh then smuggle opium into that bitch like my boy Palmerston
-
Embed this notice
@augustus I think the point of specie-flow-mechanism is that it is a natural fail-safe mechanism in the gold standard, so even if the banks and speculators did nothing to bring the real world gold/currency exchange rate back to the peg, the act of physically moving the gold around would. Of course that is expensive, so people rather used different mechanisms, like short selling, to quickly restore the peg. But that doesn't mean that the specie-flow mechanism doesn't work, it's still the ultimate cause for the other mechanisms were preferred in real life.
-
Embed this notice
@shaunh @augustus I don't think there's anything special about US/China that makes it important to have a different currency. Why should Minnesota and Iowa have the same currency? Or for that matter, Walmart and Amazon?
-
Embed this notice
@lain @shaunh Facts.
The learning lesson on this is Early Texas. How the economy did with the various failures they attempted. It was only when they got USD it stopped being the patriots state of failure. Remember they remember their failures as their achievements. That’s Texas. Proud of you! Not proud of being born there.