I don't get the 4% for 30 years. That's nuts. There won't even be a US$ in 30 years and even if there is, it'll be a pale shadow of its former self in a minor byway of 7 billion people doing transactions at the speed of light in cyberspace, shrivelled by the ravages of time and pixelation processes, by a greedy electorate wanting more and more from their century-old money tree, sucking the last juices out of it.
At 4% a year, less tax, less inflation, it'll take a good part of a century just to get the money back, even if nothing goes wrong. What are the chances of the world still looking similar enough to today that holders of US$ will be collecting 4% of anything that bears a passing resemblance to what they holding today?
The US$ isn't like gold, which still can't be produced in great quantity, though I'm working on a system for bumping a proton out of a mercury and popping it into a lead to get gold. The US$ can be pixelated by the petabillion if Uncle Al's successors wish to. It can be shrivelled up by warp speed financial relativity theory and that process is well underway. Competitors will make it irrelevant, like an olde timer telecom monopoly with twisted pair barriers to entry being side-stepped by phragmented photon CDMA cyberphones.
Okay, it's true I happen to be holding some tranche-strength US$, so I should take my own advice [and should have done 4 years ago when I was within a cent of bailing out and waited for another drop down which didn't happen - instead, the NZ$ disappeared into the distance]. But I certainly don't plan on holding them in 5 years, or 10 years, let alone 20 years or 30 years.
Mqurice |
