On Money

Money, money, money that’s all people care about these days. I feel like our whole society is going into a downward spiral of mental degradation because we choose to be slaves to money, people let it control them instead of controlling it. Over the years people have described money as the root of evil and still others have described it as doer of all good,  what is it then? good or bad?; well I think that money is neutral and it is made bad or good based on the motives of the people who use it, so it can cause great harm if used in a bad way or great good if used in a good way, but do the people today driven by these motives truly know about this thing they want so much? I don’t know, but I could bet that most of them don’t.

Lets ask ourselves, what is even money? well money can be divided into two things one is the paper notes that everyone knows to well which is federal money,  the central bank prints the notes and they then go into circulation throughout the country, a country’s basic economy and growth is based on this kind of money. The cyclic nature that drives an economy fascinates me, it all starts with a basic transaction when one person exchanges money for goods or services from another person, this money becomes the other persons income and the more he innovates and sells the more income he has this increases his purchasing power and so he buys more from another seller hence giving more money to that seller and this cycle of progress continues on and on, if i were to plot this on a graph it would be a straight line which keeps on ascending in a steep slope, it is the progress line, and I hope for our sake it keeps rising.

The human race as it is, cannot be satisfied by just this steady pace. A person needs to do more that what he is capable of hence the creation of a second form of currency which has no actual physical form it is simply termed as credit. Banks exist for this sole purpose, when a person goes to a bank and opts to take a loan, the bank pays him a certain amount of money in expectations that he repays it and voila! credit is created. It helps people get things they cannot afford, they basically make a bet on their future selves to pay of the debt that they owe the lender. Credit is truly one of the most misunderstood forms of payment in today’s world, it could be incredibly good or disastrously bad. When you consider the economy as a whole credit creation is done by banks and is regulated by the central bank of the country, people borrow money and pay something extra which is known as interest which is essentially profit for banks, the central bank regulates credit in the economy by increasing and decreasing credit rates. So here’s where the cause and effect relationship comes in again when the interest rates are reasonable people borrow more and when people borrow more they have more spending power and so they buy more the money that they spend then becomes another persons income and here’s the thing, when the other person gets this income which was at first the first persons debt, he gets this money without any debt so his income increases and so does his creditworthiness. This creates a chain reaction and many people’s purchasing power as well as income increases, the producers respond to this by increasing the prices of commodities that they sell this is called inflation; now this can’t go on. Too much inflation is always bad so the central bank increases interest rates causing people to shy away from taking more loans and again as a result incomes fall which causes a deflation and decrease in economic activity, at this point the central bank is sure that inflation is no more a threat and so it will once again reduced interest rates and so the cycle continues. Yes! it’s a cycle, a time of prosperity where people are borrowing loads and spending loads and everything seems so fine, a period of boom has set in. I don’t think I should explain what the disastrous  implications of credit are in this particular post or I’ll just go on forever but lets just say it’s not all sunshine and rainbows from here on.

So, If you’re still reading and you haven’t been bored by my constantly deviating into tangents and I do so love doing; I would say that much of the money that we think that exists today actually doesn’t (the US has 2 trillion in paper money and 14 trillion in credit) and when I considered this I began to resent credit solely on a micro scale like for me as an individual. I believe that I cannot truly progress financially in life if I rely on credit too much, to hell with credit cards! who needs them, not me. People paying 12% on their credit cards will never make any real financial progress in their lives. This being said, you cannot have no credit but you should try your best to minimize it.

So for now, goodbye.

Related articles

• Eleven steps to a financial crisis (cyprus-mail.com)

The great depression

A long time ago back in the 1930’s  the stock market fell, and everyone thought that the golden age was over, a lot of rich people lost their money, but that wasn’t the cause of the great depression. In economics when something good or bad happens it is always because of some cause and effect relationship much of which I’m going to skip over because it is honestly, a bit boring; something drastically bad must have occurred for it to reach a point where people had to scavenge the trash for food. This is an excerpt from the diary of a woman when the depression was at its worst

”We sit looking at the floor. No one dares think of the coming winter. There are only a few more days of summer. Everyone is anxious to get work to lay up something for that long siege of bitter cold. But there is no work. Sitting in the room we all know it. That is why we don’t talk much. We look at the floor dreading to see that knowledge in each other’s eyes. There is a kind of humiliation in it. We look away from each other. We look at the floor. It’s too terrible to see this animal terror in each other’s eyes.”

The economy was going through a depression. We can think of the economy at that time like as if it were a depressed teenager, it no longer saw the point of being alive and just wanted to cut. It wasn’t very productive because it lacked the motivation to do anything and so it just sat around all day and basically didn’t give a shit about what the implications of its actions were(were not talking about a person here). This economy needed serious rehab, it got that from the government help. The first office Herbert Hoover held was president of the united states, so you could imagine how hard it may have been for him to get  what he wanted in the house of representatives and he couldn’t be president at a worse r time. President Hoover tried to quell the madness by encouraging the private sector to do more in hopes stimulating the economy; it wasn’t enough. This economy’s problems were to deep-rooted. Different schemes to aid the starving poor were introduced and different systems put in place so they could earn minimum wage, for example thousands of unemployed poor were encouraged to work on construction projects in exchange for food and some wage; one of the greatest bridges in history was built-in this way : The golden gate.

There was only one way of saving the economy, and that was to hand the economy over to the government completely. So yes the depression did eventually end after many mishaps and struggles under FDR the depression did end, with a final major never before seen investment by the government that involved millions, known as world war two; which is ironic considering the fact that some critics think that it was world war one that had initially started the depression.

What could this imply? That war has the potential to start as well as end a drastic economic crisis? Well that may be so, and it may happen again. If anyone has read my article “the history of us” in it I say that we are still in the period of wars, even today we still have problems with banking reforms and we’re unsure about the future; we are yet to reach a period of civilization, the economy at a time such as that will be a perfect one.

Related articles

• The Great Depression V. The Great Recession (jhss11zohairshirwani.wordpress.com)
• ‘We’re in worse shape than we were going into the Great Depression’ (marketsanity.com)

Progress and teenagers.

When I look at the entire life of a human being, I look at how efficiently a person can adapt to change in his surroundings and how well the people around him help him do that. Progress, can be measured by how far our race has come in a given period of time and we haven’t come as far as we thought we would; I mean we expected to be flying around in cars by 2013. We have realized it would take a really long time for any major change to happen. For now, we must concentrate on current progress and develop new ways in making it more efficient because efficiency results in work done quicker.

Now as I was saying, when I look at the life of a person it can be clearly seen that he is most vulnerable during the transition period when he finishes school and is still to young to start working properly; the other stages of life are reasonably less mentally problematic no matter what the divorced fat man living with his dog tells me, his transition years may not have been as great as say an ivy-league pass out, hence his poor living condition, but you can’t blame him for not going to Harvard. Without addressing the large amount of underprivileged, almost all the middle class families have to pay outrageous amounts to go to college (except Germany where education is free, but you’re still paying for it through increased taxes)  and this is really bad because this may be the most important period of a person’s life and most people look at it as a challenge to get through, we cannot allow that.

Everyone has dreams; I work at a career counselling firm and every day I see people who walk in with big dreams of going abroad and studying, and they’re all teenagers; lets define a teenager : A naive individual who’s usually unsure about what he wants to do with his life and since he doesn’t know what he wants, he usually ends up having to accept what he gets. Now lets address why he’s unsure, well there are several factors which he considers when he thinks about what he wants to do next, the first is exactly that, and the second is the cost of doing it. The U.S. in my opinion has the best educational system in the world, because it provides scholarships to worthy applicants and also is more application oriented in terms of learning, while it is easy for people living in the US to gain access to this, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world.

Now I view this business of paying tons or working incredibly hard to attain a scholarship as barriers to education. Progress, in the past was achieved through globalization; I think it would be safe to view today’s educational structure as the world as it was, before globalization. Globalization resulted in removing excessive tariff barriers and allowing direct foreign investment and has allowed the economies of the world could improve a great deal and has resulted in a lot of the progress we see in the world today. This could be done for education; precisely for the age group aforementioned because of the said reasons; undergraduate education should be free worldwide.

Of course, this is no small feat to achieve and as always no one would dare accept it at first, but it would greatly improve every individual. I would call it the globalization of human ability, and it would be a tremendous move if anyone were to attempt to do in it because it wouldn’t just be investing for a cause, it would be investing in the future.

On Beer and Economics

Oktoberfest is a festival celebrated every year in Germany ever since 1810 when king Ludwig married princess Theresa and all the peasants were called to the celebration, what kind of festival you may ask? Well, for those who don’t know in the world today it is basically a beer drinking festival; a time when local German folk drink till they’re wasted, the Germans consider beer to be a staple like how the Americans consider beef… let’s just says its their liquid bread, exaggeration? I think not especially since they start the festivities with a twelve gun salute and ceremoniously opening the first keg of beer with a cry of ” O’Zapft is!” (” its tapped!” In the Austro-Bavarian dialect)

Now you may be wondering why I’m rambling on about how much the Germans love their festival so much. Well, during this years festival about 7 million beer drinkers gathered together to down about 15 million letters of beer, had they been sober enough they would have noticed that their largers, ales and stouts cost more than they did last year in fact your average beer at this years festival costs $13 which is 3.9% more than it did last year, inflation in Germany is currently at 1.5%.

Any normal person would be outraged at this drastic increase in beer price, not the Germans though, oh no, they keep buying the stuff no matter what the price. As a commerce student I know that there is one major factor determining the demand for a consumer product such as beer( non-essential good) and that is its price, when the price of the product increases its demand falls and when the price is reduced, demand rises; this theory goes out the window as far as Oktoberfest and the Germans are concerned. When there is a 1% increase in beer prices there is an astounding .3% increase in the demand for beer, this kind of thing falls under the category of what economists like to call the Griffin-paradox. It is a paradox because no one understands why people would demand more of a non-essential good when its price increases.

It wasn’t always like this, in 1810 it was celebrated because the people were invited to the celebrations of a marriage  while now its a beer drinkers mecca and economic wonder, and I think it is safe to say that until beer drinkers stop celebrating price hikes, Oktoberfest will continue pouring them on, so until then

Auf Wiedersehen

Related articles

• SOULed Out at Octoberfest! (shashasekharan.wordpress.com)
• Oktoberfest hangover – invasion of rowdy tourist drinkers spoils beer festival for the locals (independent.co.uk)

The debt-limit game

Since there is so much of hate going around about the events transpiring in Washington regarding the shut down and John Boehner,as most people do, instead of considering it shear idiocy and banging my head against a wall, I would rather consider it a game, the debt-limit game.

There are many games currently being played in Washington one of them and the most dangerous by far is the debt-limit game, for one thing it has never been attempted before and no one knows what’s going to happen if the US defaults on its payment to its creditors, the main country who the US owed money is China and Japan coming in close second if it defaults this could be a great loss in terms of credit worthiness.

Let us consider a  game of brinksmanship, it usually involves one person threatening to do something really bad to another person in order to get his way for example two people on a boat one threatens the other to row or he’ll sink them both, now the other man will call bullshit on this proposal, but once the man starts to shake the boat a bit tilting it this way and that he will more impressed.

This is no new game to the republican party no, in fact they’ve been playing for quite and while now and for the majority of the time it has worked. They have been able to prevent many of the laws that had been previously present in the bush regime from expiring and since they have been able to get away with most of these things, Obama and the democratic party have realized that always accepting their terms is playing a losers game. They have realized that when they accept the republican terms after a few months they come back demanding more. So this time they won’t budge even if it means great harm to the country and in my opinion they’re doing the right thing, Obama care is a perfect reason to risk the country’s credit worthiness.

It all rests on the shoulders of John Boehner who admits that he is aware of the implications, so whatever happens for better or for worse one thing is for sure this whole thing has been completely pointless, it is a child’s game and playtime is over.

P.S. the current deal is temporary

On uneventful days and boredom

Today was an uneventful day I woke up as usual and went to work as usual and then I remembered that I had started a blog two days ago, I decided to start a personal blog, and I would define a personal blog as a daily on going commentary of ones life; I wondered what I should post for today, I decided to write something at the end of the day in hopes that something eventful may happen during the day which was note worthy but as it turned out nothing happened.

When the time came to actually write something I wondered if it would be safe to write about doing nothing or boredom rather,boredom is a strange feeling… I am at a loss of words to place the feeling it feels particularly dry, take how the text on this blog post is written for example it the same monotonous text that repeats itself over and over which induces a sense of boredom in people.

It is not a bad feeling oh no, it is rather sublime everything that we as people have done may have been because we were bored the brains urge to find new stimulus has resulted in some of our greatest achievements. It is a feeling that has been felt since ancient times

According to the laws of nature mere existence should sustain us and make us feel complete, but the fact that we get bored shows the unquenchable nature of the human spirit… it’s as though it is greater than the entire universe, and will not be sustained until it has done everything that it’s capable of doing, and that will be our legacy.

Related articles

• Boredom (brodiekemara1.wordpress.com)
• The Importance Of Rediscovering The Lost Beauty of Boredom (graduateyourmind.wordpress.com)

Book Fair

 “What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.” — Anne Lamott

I’ve lived in Dubai, a speck of what you would call a proper big city in the middle of vast expansions of dessert  since I was three years old, but not until I was 14 did I develop a need to to read, yes read, why do people find that strange?( I finished a 600 paged book in a week.. yes it was that bad). I usually got my books from school, but I had heard tales of a bigger source from which one could get books, a source that’s better than most public libraries out there… a large gathering of readers coming together to buy lots of books of all sorts for cheap prices, I was finally able to visit one… well, somewhat. The fair I went to was called the ”pink book fair”. People donated their old books that they didn’t have anymore use for and then this organisation sold them at low costs to the general public and the proceeds went to a breast cancer trust fund.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to properly savor it, I arrived five minutes before it closed. Yes, there I was standing in front of hundreds and hundreds of books with a little more than five minutes to spare, well if it was anything it was  a MAD DASH.

I immediately took to analyzing their spines (gosh that sounds weird) some were aged and some were new. From an outsiders point of view it would have looked like a crazed 18 year old running from one stall to another searching his eyes out like as if he was trying to find the meaning of life in a few minutes, and it just so happened to lay in a bunch of books at some random fair . Yes I was desperate, but which crazed book enthusiast wouldn’t be? it is not everyday that someone happens upon intact books which were selling for next to nothing. As I went from book to book I began to wonder about them each one was second hand which means they were once read with great care by someone who truly valued them or they were just given to someone as a gift and they had never bothered to read them, each book had a story to tell. I wondered that if I read a book that maybe I could uncover its story and I mean its actual story not just the story that’s written on its pages (facepalm)

So when the tired looking man at the stall shouted ” ONE MINUTE LEFT” I looked at the bag they provided to put the books you want in, sadly it appeared to be empty so I cursed fate in the worst oath I could think of, overreaction? I think not.

I sighed deeply, reluctantly letting the thought of  violently grabbing a bunch of books and running of into the night like a madman.

I looked at the books again wondering about them… So I asked the man behind the desk ”So uh.. what’s going to happen to all of the books?” he smiled and gave me an odd look (maybe the look was because he saw me running around so much) and said ”oh their all going to be locked up until the people who organized this decide to do it again”

Oh no! what if they decide to never do it again! the books will get lonely with no one to read them ( I can tell no one that that went through my mind)

I then slowly walked passed the isles not looking back walking back where I came from.

Related articles

• Getting Ready for a Book Fair (thethingsthatcatchmyeye.wordpress.com)

History of us.

Historians have classified our history into different ages, well I am here to say otherwise. Our history is basically divided into two parts, the first part stretches from the earliest recorded history and goes on past the wars and even more wars and is actually still going on I would like to call this part as the ‘period of conflict’ a horrible era where mankind cannot achieve progress in it true for just illusions of it. The second part is yet to come and i have great hope in humanity that it can achieve this era which I’d like to call ‘civilized man’ even today we have not achieved proper civilization there are still wars going on and there are still people dying and the world is bathed in blood. In order to achieve this second era there would be a need for an entirely  new breed of human being, this type of human will have utter dedication and perseverance to act and be civilized, this sort of man can only come into existence  after centuries of essentially, killing our need for destruction. This ancient gene that is within each of us now to conquer and oppress; it must go and when it does mankind will truly enter a golden age. I hope that in my lifetime I would be able to see at least  the beginning of such a time…

Related articles

• The Common Run of Mankind (freibetrachtet.wordpress.com)
• THE TIME IS NOW FOR HUMANITY TO CHOOSE OUR FATE: A Message for Contact from Humanity’s distant and unknown Star Family Members. (ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com)