[benreesman]

I’m just a nerd whose nerd hobbies came to encompass finance when I moved to Manhattan. I was also a party monster back then (please don’t read the book) which for a childless bachelor is a pretty reasonable way to get the most knowledge NYC has to give in a year.

If you have particular questions about the monetary system, I know enough to either answer or know that I don’t know and refer you to someone who does.

[dspillett]

> If you have particular questions

There were four fairly direct questions in the post you replied to, to which you might like to give a response:

>> [what do you] mean [by] the "printing press to furnace" analogy of the economy

>> what you mean by 1971

>> or the gold bug

>> or the 50 year transistor

The first of those I'm pretty sure I understand what you are meaning, though if I'm right about that I don't think it is a good analogy, but the others I have no context for.

[benreesman]

1971 (and/or 1973) is a year people often point to as when we “went off the gold standard”. Neither year is particularly great as a signal example of the collapse of what is loosely called the “Bretton Woods” monetary system, but either is a pretty good nickname for it.

By “printing press” I mean the set of mechanisms in which fractional reserve deficit spending creates the money supply to notionally value future growth, and by “furnace” I mean the set of mechanisms by which we prevent arbitrary inflation as a result. You can measure the money supply in plenty of ways, but for someone who needs a glossary on my original comment, TLDR you want a number called “M2”.

A “gold bug” is someone who either does or advocates the strategy of holding “precious” metals as a uniquely good asset class (no one turns down a free pile of gold, many of us think the market is pricing gold as well as we are), in particular an asset class uniquely resistant to inflation and/or the “government”. I can assure you from painful experience that “the government” gives no fucks if you have gold in your back yard when they make a clerical error.

50 years is roughly the period of time it took for at least two separate inventions of “the transistor” by a bunch of Bell Labs people, but overwhelmingly associated to a guy called Shockley, to culminate in a useful computer that a middle class person could afford to have in their living room. I learned to code on an IBM PC my distinctly middle-class grandfather owned, and it is a substantially better computer than no computer, a harder claim to make about the Apple I for example.