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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (24110)	10/11/2002 10:22:47 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Don. That's what I used to argue - we only need the amount of money needed for the single biggest transaction possible to fund the total global transactions. Just have the money moving at the speed of light, as you say. Non-stop. But we don't really have that and money still moves slower than a aircraft, even when done electronically. If I move money from the USA to here [suddenly getting an urge right now], I can't do anything about it until Monday, when Prudential Securities would receive my 'wire' instructions. They would then trundle into gear and on their Monday [which is our Tuesday], they'd wire the funds to Noo Yawk, who would check their in-tray after a while and later in the day deliver said pixels to Wellington. After a while, they ship it to ASBBank in Auckland. Meanwhile, I'm phoning them saying where the hell is my money? They assure me things are in-hand [though the money never seems to be]. By next Thursday [our time], I might have the money, unless something goes wrong. In which case it slips to Friday our time [provided I'm on the case the whole time]. If it was a definite requirement with legal implications to have the money, I'd need to allow at least a full week and preferably two. We are nowhere near femtosecond cdma3000 money yet. I doubt that an ounce of gold per person is enough to act as a store of value, or even enough for transaction processing if there are zero glitches in money movement, let alone the usual banking sluggishness and blundering. Therefore gold remains inadequate as the foundation for money. It's becoming less adequate. Anyway, it's still true that digging something up at great expense, simply to hide it in another hole at Fort Knox or somewhere as a store of value, is a vast waste of effort. It's better to build factories and useful stuff to act as stores of value. Or, build political systems and issue fiat currencies. Political systems are as valid as physical entities as valued things, though they are very abstract compared with a solid 3D lump of gold or a factory. So goes my theory anyway. Mqurice