Do you understand the monetary system? If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
Do you understand the monetary system? If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
Talk to chatgpt about how a checking account works, and really understand what happens when you put some money in the bank, and when you transfer that money to another person at another bank, how it's accounted for, how the banks actually do that transfer.
That's 80% of the thing right there.
The banks and government go out of their way to make fraud difficult and prevent accountholders from being defrauded of their deposits.
Reply to the edit: the parent comment was making a joke (though maybe there is some depth to it) and your reply sounds like a rhetorical question by a spoilsport. Unfortunate!
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
Thanks!
MIT opencourseware has an intro to finance course that was taught as the financial crisis was unfolding. I highly recommend it.
> If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?
School! Teachers! Classes!
Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.
Going to school and reading up on how and why we got where we are...?
Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...
<< one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators
One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.
My intuition is saying: the system arose naturally and intelligently over a long period of time, and even with its flaws has a lot of "load bearing legacy code" that few people understand, and new "engineers" think they'll just rewrite the whole thing from scratch and delete the "junk DNA" to use another metaphor. A little time passes and the beautiful clean rewrite collapses because of "totally unforeseeable circumstances" and the "old broken legacy system" is used to save the day. Somewhere a senior "monetary engineer" rolls over in his grave...
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
I can't think of a specific episode relevant here, but this is a good economics podcast in general:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/
The entire financial system is a chaotic boundary between thieves and opportunists, and people who want to keep thievery and opportunism under enough control to keep the system nominally workable.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
If you want to quick primer to read tonight I suggest “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp by Radford”. Will be free download.
Watch Yanis Varoufakis videos on youtube.