Commodities And Currency Quotes

They founded a society based not upon currency and commodities but on the elementary notion that if you failed to raise enough to eat, you would go hungry.

Our bodies are a commodity. Sex is our currency. Every day we fight for survival." Jeri Estes Stilettos and Steel

If The Dollar represents financialization, and The Dollar is dying, and we are moving towards currencies being backed by commodities, then The Future is REAL. BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Coin is backed by duck eggs.

To pin the future of blockchain on any one currency, let alone the initial one, means limiting blockchain potential; a potential that once scaled promises to have an unequaled impact on our day-to-day lives. And that really is the stuff of stars.

I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the medium of the most perfect exchange between us, henceforth and forever, the indestructible, the unchangeable, the universal currency of good will and peace, and this, my brothers and sisters, is a currency that is not interchangeable with silver and gold, it is a currency of the heart, of the good life, of the highest estate on the earth.

Well, let's consider the value of the dollar. Ultimately, logically, the dollar has no value at all. It's a piece of paper. It only has value because we say it has value, and because we agree on a system of bartering that maintains that value. Great care is taken to keep the value of the dollar strong. Smart guys in Washington and New York lose sleep over this. And we all watched what happend in Argentina a few years ago. We watched what happened when the value of currency declined rapidly. It's not a good thing. Sex is like that. God is concerned with the value of sex staying high. It's important to a person's health, a family's health, and a society's health. But like anything, sex can be cheapened in our minds, so we don't hold it in high esteem. God doesn't think this is a good thing. Stuff God doesn't think is good is called sin. "What happens when sex is cheaped?" somebody asked. A lot happens. The main thing is there is no sacred physical territory associated with commitment. There can still be emotional territory, but there isn't anything physical, experiential, that a man and a woman have only with each other. Sleeping around does something to the heart, to the mind. It leaves less commodity to spend on a sacred mate. But all of that sounds pretty fluffy. Let me break it down into practical stuff. Women saying no to men, not letting men have sex with them, causes men to step up. If, in order to have sex with them, women demanded you got a job and shaved every day and didn't dress like a dork or sit around playing video games, then all of us would do just that. We all want to have sex, right? ... And this in turn would be good for families, would be good for the communities.

the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.

When the thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their country. Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up by cunning knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the earth-quakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the crash of banks, the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the savings of self-denial, and trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life, and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums.

No one is alone in this world. No act is without consequences for others. It is a tenet of chaos theory that, in dynamical systems, the outcome of any process is sensitive to its starting point-or, in the famous cliche, the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas. I do not assert markets are chaotic, though my fractal geometry is one of the primary mathematical tools of "chaology." But clearly, the global economy is an unfathomably complicated machine. To all the complexity of the physical world of weather, crops, ores, and factories, you add the psychological complexity of men acting on their fleeting expectations of what may or may not happen-sheer phantasms. Companies and stock prices, trade flows and currency rates, crop yields and commodity futures-all are inter-related to one degree or another, in ways we have barely begun to understand. In such a world, it is common sense that events in the distant past continue to echo in the present.

My father used to say morality was a currency. The very poor sell it off quickly because it is the only thing of value they possess, and the very rich spend it frivolously because they’ve other commodities with which to replace its value.” “And the middle class?” “They’re stuck with it. They don’t want it, necessarily, but neither can they justify its expenditure.

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost.

In every reign there comes one night of greatest blackness, when a King must send away his court of flatterers and servants, and sit alone in the dark with the beast called truth. In the gloom of the grand hall, Slately could hear it breathe. Truth at court was treated as if it were a precious commodity. It was hoarded, coveted, bartered for. Certainly this analogy applied to lies; his courtiers accepted his lies as currency of the realm. He handed them lies in large denominations, and they returned him his change in small ones. Oh, but truth was something different. Something alive and immortal. By light of day it was only a little butterfly: pretty, elusive, easily crushed, and utterly unable to defend itself. Most nights, too, it slept harmlessly. One could wave it away for a very long time. But on the nights it did not sleep, neither did the King.

(BDO) October 22: The Dollar Squeeze A debt is a short cash position—i.e., a commitment to deliver cash that one doesn’t have. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and because of the dollar surplus recycling that has taken place over the past few years…lots of dollar denominated debt has been built up around the world. So, as dollar liquidity has become tight, there has been a dollar squeeze. This squeeze…is hitting dollar-indebted emerging markets (particularly those of commodity exporters) and is supporting the dollar. When this short squeeze ends, which will happen when either the debtors default or get the liquidity to prevent their default, the US dollar will decline. Until then, we expect to remain long the USD against the euro and emerging market currencies. The actual price of anything is always equal to the amount of spending on the item being exchanged divided by the quantity of the item being sold (i.e., P = $/Q), so a) knowing who is spending and who is selling what quantity (and ideally why) is the ideal way to get at the price at any time, and b) prices don’t always react to changes in fundamentals as they happen in the ways characterized by those who seek to explain price movements in connection with unfolding news. During this period, volatility remained extremely high for reasons that had nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with who was getting in and out of positions for various reasons—like being squeezed, no longer being squeezed, rebalancing portfolios, etc. For example, on Tuesday, October 28, the S&P gained more than 10 percent and the next day it fell by 1.1 percent when the Fed cut interest rates by another 50 basis points. Closing the month, the S&P was down 17 percent—the largest single-month drop since October 1987.

According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a 'credit balance of payments'. The confutation of this and related objections is implicit in the Quantity Theory and in Gresham's Law. The Quantity Theory shows that money can never permanently flow abroad from a country in which only metallic money is used (the 'purely metallic currency' of the Currency Principle). The tightness in the domestic market called forth by the efflux of part of the stock of money reduces the prices of commodities, and so restricts importation and encourages exportation, until there is once more enough money at home. The precious metals which perform the function of money are distributed among individuals, and consequently among separate countries, according to the extent and intensity of the demand of each for money. State intervention to assure to the community the necessary quantity of money by regulating its international nlovements is supererogatory.

For some years, Trieste was a murky exchange for the commodities most coveted in the deprived societies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. Jeans, for example, were then almost a currency of their own, so terrific was the demand on the other side of the line, and the trestle tables of the Ponterosso market groaned with blue denims of dubious origin ("Jeans Best for Hammering, Pressing and Screwing", said a label I noted on one pair). There was a thriving traffic in everything profitably resellable, smuggleable or black-marketable - currencies, stamps, electronics, gold. Not far from the Ponterosso market was Darwil's, a five-storey jewellers' shop famous among gold speculators throughout central Europe. Dazzling were its lights, deafening was its rock music, and through its blinding salons clutches of thick-set conspiratorial men muttered and wandered, inspecting lockets through eye-glasses, stashing away watches in suitcases, or coldly watching the weighing of gold chains in infinitesimal scales.

Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination. Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.

A penny for your thoughts? Many of us devalue the power of our thoughts. We fail to fully comprehend that our thoughts are highly influential things that have the power to shape our very lives. Our greatest and smallest achievements all begin with a simple thought. A thought can shape our minds, our emotions, our bodies and ultimately our circumstances. Our thoughts have a huge bearing on our health, our relationships, our spiritual well being, right along with our successes and failures. Our thoughts are valuable commodities that have spiritual influences that attract blessings as well as misfortune. As “mystical” as it may sound, the old adage “What we think about…We bring about!” is absolutely true. Negative thoughts spawn negative results, positive thoughts spawn positive results. Again, God’s Word gives us perfect advice on how we should think. Philippians 4:8 says “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” If we do I promise you…there will be no currency, on this earth, great enough to purchase our thoughts. ~Jason Versey

centuries-long debate over the nature of money can be reduced to two sides. One school sees money as merely a commodity, a preexisting thing, with its own inherent value. This group believes that societies chose certain commodities to become mutually recognized units of exchange in order to overcome the cumbersome business of barter. Exchanging sheep for bread was imprecise, so in our agrarian past traders agreed that a certain commodity, be it shells or rocks or gold, could be a stand-in for everything else. This “metallism” viewpoint, as it is known, encourages the notion that a currency should itself be, or at least be backed by, some tangible material. This orthodox view of currency is embraced by many gold bugs and hard-money advocates from the so-called Austrian school of economics, a group that has enjoyed a renaissance in the wake of the financial crisis with its critiques of expansionist central-bank policies and inflationary fiat currencies. They blame the asset bubble that led to the crisis on reckless monetary expansion by unfettered central banks. The other side of the argument belongs to the “chartalist” school, a group that looks past the thing of currency and focuses instead on the credit and trust relationships between the individual and society at large that currency embodies. This view, the one we subscribe to and which informs

The Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in 1913. Most people think that this bank is an American Federal Company. That is just as wrong as the conviction that the Bank of England belongs to the British Crown or to the whole of England. The Federal Reserve is in the hands of the Rothschilds and company. In his speech before the Senate, on December 15, 1987, Senator Jesse Helms said: “The principal instrument of the control over the American economy and money is the Federal Reserve System.” The Federal Reserve has a monopoly over the expenditure of the dollar as a world currency and determining the interest rate, and it disposes of a lot more monopolies. How does the Federal Reserve Bank operate? Suppose the United States government needs a couple of billion dollars for its expenses that cannot be paid with taxes income. At that moment it addresses the Federal Reserve Board. Then government bonds for the needed billion dollars are printed in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. After these bonds are handed over to the bankers of the Federal Reserve, the board grants a loan to the government in the amount of the bond issue. The Federal Reserve draws interest from the government from the day the bonds are delivered. From that day on the government is allowed to draw checks against the Federal Reserve for the amount of the bonds. What are the consequences of this incredible transaction? The government simply saddles the people with a billion dollar debt to the Federal Reserve Bank, apart from the interest on interest that also has to be paid by “ordinary people”. What does the Federal Reserve have to say about “their” money? “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities. Intrinsically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper, deposits merely book entries.”[76] When the Federal Reserve needs new, or more, currency to transact its business, it takes the bonds over to the United States Treasury for safekeeping and asks the Treasury Department for the billions of dollars of new currency it needs. The Bank is accommodated on condition that it will pay the printing bill. It only pays for the expenditure costs of the banknotes, which are no more than a mere 500 dollars for ink and paper!

After dinner Karamenaios would drop in. We had about fifty words with which to make lingual currency. We didn't even need that many, as I soon discovered. There are a thousand ways of talking and words don't help if the spirit is absent. Karamenaios and I were eager to talk. lt made little difference to me whether we talked about the war or about knives and forks. Sometimes we discovered that a word or phrase which we had been using for days, he in English or I in Greek, meant something entirely different than we had thought it to mean. It made no difference. We understood one another even with the wrong words. I could learn five new words in an evening and forget six or eight during my sleep. The important thing was the warm handclasp, the light in the eyes, the grapes which we devoured in common, the glass we raised to our lips in sign of friendship. Now and then I would get excited and, using a melange of English, Greek, German, French, Choctaw, Eskimo, Swahili or any other tongue I felt would serve the purpose, using the chair, the table, the spoon, the lamp, the bread knife, I would enact for him a fragment of my life in New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista, Canarsie, Hackensack or in some place I had never been or some place I had been in a dream or when lying asleep on the operating table. Sometimes I felt so good, so versatile and acrobatic, that I would stand on the table and sing in some unknown language or hop from the table to the commode and from the commode to the staircase or swing from the rafters, anything to entertain him, keep him amused, make him roll from side to side with laughter. I was considered an old man in the village because of my bald pate and fringe of white hair. Nobody had ever seen an old man cut up the way I did. "The old man is going for a swim," they would say. "The old man is taking the boat out." Always "the old man." If a storm came up and they knew I was out in the middle of the pond they would send someone out to see that "the old man" got in safely. If I decided to take a jaunt through the hills Karamenaios would offer to accompany me so that no harm would come to me. If I got stranded somewhere I had only to announce that I was an American and at once a dozen hands were ready to help me.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

There is no social stigma attached to the frenzy, no peer motivation to slow us down. Rather it is the opposite; busy is popular currency, traded among members of modern society like a precious commodity. Busy is the silkiest cloth at the emporium, the most well-travelled spice. Living with a full schedule speedily typed into a pinging, vibrating device is a highly valued state of being. And, as with any addiction, it becomes self-perpetuating. We feel a rush from being in a rush; we take pride in the breakneck pace at which we travel through our days.

Revelation Chapter 18 details the many goods which are sold through the Daughter of Babylon’s ports. The lengthy list appears in Revelation 18:11-13. Take any one of those goods listed by John two thousand years ago and ask this question: is any other nation the center for world trade in those commodities, except for the United States? Where else does one find exchanges as important as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and numerous other exchanges for currency, coffee, sugar, tea, cocoa, soybeans, oats, wheat, cattle, hogs, lumber, diamonds, iron, ivory, marble, spices, cosmetics, steel, tin, zinc, rubber, etc. Those exchanges, through which the world’s commerce is passed daily, are all located in one country. They’re not in Iraq, nor in Rome.

As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...] The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint.

Having too expensive a currency can cause severe economic problems, which has been the case in many sectors of the Australian economy: the Australian dollar, its strength boosted by COMMODITY wealth, was so highly valued that it devastated the country’s retail sector – it was so easy to buy stuff from abroad using super-charged Australian dollars that local shops found it near-impossible to compete.

Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a “thing” at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange.

I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.

Historically, cryptoassets have most commonly been referred to as cryptocurrencies, which we think confuses new users and constrains the conversation on the future of these assets. We would not classify the majority of cryptoassets as currencies, but rather most are either digital commodities (cryptocommodities), provisioning raw digital resources, or digital tokens (cryptotokens), provisioning finished digital goods and services.

Value at risk (VaR) is a widely used measure of the risk of loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets, expressed in terms of a probability of losing a given percentage of the value of a portfolio—in mark-to-market value—over a certain time. For example, if a portfolio of stocks has a one-day 5 percent VaR of $1 million, there is a 0.05 probability that the portfolio will fall in value by more than $1 million over a one-day period. Informally, a loss of $1 million or more on this portfolio is expected on one day in twenty. Typically, banks report the VaR by risk type (e.g., interest rates, equity prices, currency rates, and commodity prices).

Bitcoin is usually considered a currency, but some economists think it looks more like a commodity—a sort of digital gold. Like a commodity, it’s subject to wide swings in price based on speculators investing in the bitcoin market. And like gold, bitcoins are scarce. The Bitcoin protocol limits the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation each year.

Originality is a peculiarly modern obsession,” she said. “It’s a quantifiable aspect of art that can be asserted and disproved and debated by scholars and appraisers and collectors who treat art as a commodity or a currency. It would not have been a concern for Giotto. It is unrelated to beauty or truth, although it has become a substitute for those qualities. Thus, modern art.

Kindness that is fueled by guilt, pity, or colonialism is not kindness at all. Kindness is not currency or a commodity to be used to barter and bargain away the sins of our past or to alleviate our responsibility to be part of global recovery efforts in times of tragedy.

The most precious item travelling the route was silk, which was generated in Serica and packed on caravans in ever-increasing amounts destined for settlements far away—including the capital of the Romans. The silk-laden caravans were nothing new to the old guide; they had been journeying for hundreds of years across watersheds and snow-clad mountain passes of the Zagros and down past his residence. The caravans transporting silk into the Parthian regions in the form of annual tributes or trade were considered “untouchable,” and the repercussions would be murderous due to silk being one of Parthia’s main currencies. Silk was a commodity that knew no recession and held a value high enough that it could be traded for nearly anything. Crassus’s motivation to conquer Parthia was accordingly revealed: he wanted a monopoly on the Road of Silk!

Investing In Gold Not everyone would associate Ethereum with investing in gold, but that is exactly one of its uses. Using a process developed by Digix, users can use tokens to buy gold on the Ethereum blockchain. How does this work? Using the Digix app, you can exchange either Ether or fiat currency (real-life money) with gold tokens. This gold is linked to the Singaporean gold vault through a complex crypto-code. Whenever the user wants, they can switch their gold tokens for actual pieces of gold without needing to go through an intermediary or paying any large fees. This also opens up the possibility of creating similar processes for all sorts of commodities.

Being a landlocked nation without access to shipping ports is one kind of poverty trap; being stuck in a cycle of civil war is another. One of the most insidious of these is the resource curse, which goes like this: When a developing nation discovers a new natural resource, this causes its currency to rise against other currencies and has the downstream effect of making other exportable commodities uncompetitive.

Generally the causes of the top-reversal fall into a few categories: The income from selling goods and services to foreigners drops (e.g., the currency has risen to a point where it’s made the country’s exports expensive; commodity-exporting countries may suffer from a fall in commodity prices). The costs of items bought from abroad or the cost of borrowing rises. Declines in capital flows coming into the country (e.g., foreign investors reduce their net lending or net investment into the country). This occurs because: The unsustainable pace naturally slows, Something leads to greater worries about economic or political conditions, or A tightening of monetary policy in the local currency and/or in the currency those debts are denominated in (or in some cases, tightening abroad creates pressure for foreign capital to pull out of the country). A country’s own citizens or companies want to get their money out of their country/currency.

The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.

Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.

it is possible for carbon dioxide and water to “unburn”—plants do it all the time—but not “by itself.” Gibbs’s equation allows us to tot up all the entropy changes in different parts of the universe to reveal a marketplace—one in which one bit of the universe pays other bits of the universe for a highly desirable commodity—a local and temporary reduction in entropy. And it does so with a specific and well-defined currency—energy.

Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing products. It is created by manipulating the prices of currencies, stocks, and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

In the 1920s, Oswald Falk was Keynes’s main partner in moneymaking. They started speculating on currencies immediately after the war, and continued in commodities. Despite three major reverses – in 1920, 1928–9, and 1937–8 – Keynes increased his net assets from £16,315 in 1919 to £411,238 – £10m in today’s values – by the time he died. Over the interwar years, his investment philosophy shifted from currency and commodity speculation to investment in blue-chip companies in line with his changing economic theory. The failure of his ‘credit cycle’ investment theory to make him money led him to the ‘animal spirits’ theory of investment behaviour of The General Theory, and to a personal investment philosophy of ‘faithfulness’. (To counter investment volatility he urged that the relationship between an investor and his share should be like that of husband and wife.)

When I say that focus is a commodity, what I mean is that it is an actual currency that we are spending way too frivolously. Just like money, it is something we need to learn to manage.

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With the establishment of sound money, prices for most commodities quickly stabilized, then fell.  Without the drag of taxation, fiat currency, or the inflation they encouraged, wages rose.  Given the low prices and high wages, the economy began to stretch in unusual directions:

Financial options were systematically mispriced. The market often underestimated the likelihood of extreme moves in prices. The options market also tended to presuppose that the distant future would look more like the present than it usually did. Finally, the price of an option was a function of the volatility of the underlying stock or currency or commodity, and the options market tended to rely on the recent past to determine how volatile a stock or currency or commodity might be. When IBM stock was trading at $34 a share and had been hopping around madly for the past year, an option to buy it for $35 a share anytime soon was seldom underpriced. When gold had been trading around $650 an ounce for the past two years, an option to buy it for $2,000 an ounce anytime during the next ten years might well be badly underpriced. The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn’t use it.

In the marketplace of our discussions, the most valuable commodities are the pearls of wisdom we string together from the books we choose to embrace or cast aside.

The German inflation was a huge fraud which benefited the debtors and speculators at the expense of the large, prudent middle class. The following things happened in Germany: a. Bonds (including governments), real estate mortgages, life insurance, bank savings and all fixed value investments became worthless because they were redeemed by debtors with depreciated money. b. Common stocks of industrial concerns soared to fantastic heights and paid huge dividends. When stabilization came these stocks crashed and only the strongest companies survived. In spite of this common stocks proved to be the best investment. c. Real estate owners who paid off their mortgages with depreciated currency and held on to it until stabilization came, still had something of value. The same applied to purchasers of commodities such as diamonds, etc. d. Industries expanded, built huge additions to their plants and paid in worthless currency. Of all classes, the industrialists fared best. e. Professional men were badly off.

The big decline started in 1990 when the Soviet Union was breaking apart and Moscow dropped its “friendly rates” for exports to North Korea. Without subsidized fuel and other commodities, the economy creaked to a halt. There was no way for the government to keep the domestic fertilizer factories running, and no fuel for trucks to deliver imported fertilizer to farms. Crop yields dropped sharply. At the same time, Russia almost completely cut off food aid. China helped out for a few years, but it was also going through big changes and increasing its economic ties with capitalist countries—like South Korea and the United States—so it, too, cut off some of its subsidies and started demanding hard currency for exports. North Korea had already defaulted on its bank loans, so it couldn’t borrow a penny. By the time Kim Il Sung died in 1994, famine was already taking hold in the northern provinces. Government rations had been cut sharply, and sometimes they failed to arrive at all. Instead of changing its policies and reforming its programs, North Korea responded by ignoring the crisis.

And I’m not kidding when I say “craziness.” The University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, has come out with a study that compares traders with psychopaths. The study reviewed the results from an existing study comparing 24 psychopaths in German high-security hospitals with a control group of 27 “normal” people. The funny thing is, this control group of “normal” people turned out to be traders. Stock guys, currency and commodity traders, and derivative types happened to be the normal control group that was stacked up against the high-security, barbed-wire-enclosed psychopaths. In the end, the performance of the trading group was actually worse than that of the psychopaths. The study indicated that traders, “Have a penchant for immense destruction,” and that their mindset would lead them to the logical conclusion of “beating one of the neighbor’s expensive cars with a baseball bat with the sole objective of owning the most beautiful car in the neighborhood.” In other words, traders are nuts. Indeed if you look up the textbook definition of a psychopath, here are some of the tidbits you’ll uncover: antisocial behavior, poor judgment and failure to learn from experience, inability to see oneself as others do, inexplicable impulsiveness … sounds like a typical trader who is struggling against the market and can’t figure out why.

Gates’s implicit criticism of Gmail was that it was wasteful in its means of storing each email. Despite his currency with cutting-edge technologies, his mentality was anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved. He had written his first programs under a brutal imperative for brevity. And Microsoft’s web-based email service reflected that parsimony. The young people at Google had no such mental barriers.

I lead those to the Truth, becoming profound because i perfect myself in the art of expert findings, hidden messaging, crypt encodings, give ear & insight to these wordings. They monopolize the commodities having reign over the currency that's created by 'We The Peoples' credibility. It's those imaginable entities that we take as reality but to be real, it's not really those things which it be even though an entity is anything that has definite existency. How could it be? Look to God & you'll find Truth hidden behind the doors bolted down with lies and deceit.

commodities, currencies, interest rates, credit, and equities.1

12 instituted charters instituting a currency for commodity to barter as a medium of exchange. They ask "Am I a little deranged? Saying things a little too strange?" I laugh it off like if they only knew, they would be as sane and that's what I'm in; to be out would mean to be like the mass of these man.

Investing in a deriv account can be a great way to diversify your portfolio and reduce your risk when trading in the stock market. Deriv accounts are a type of investment account that allows you to buy and sell derivatives, such as options and futures contracts. These contracts are based on the performance of an underlying asset, such as a stock, currency, or commodity. Investing in a deriv account can help you diversify your portfolio, reduce your risk, and increase your potential return on investment. One of the primary benefits of investing in a deriv account is the ability to diversify your portfolio. By investing in derivatives, you can spread your risk across different markets, reducing your risk of losses in one particular market. You can also diversify your investments by buying different types of derivatives, such as options and futures. This helps to reduce your risk further, as derivatives are typically less volatile than stocks or mutual funds. Another benefit of investing in a deriv account is the potential to increase your return on investment. Derivatives can be used to leverage your investments, meaning you can make larger profits from smaller investments. This is because derivatives can be used to increase your exposure to the underlying asset, allowing you to potentially make more money than you would from a traditional investment. Finally, investing in a deriv account can help you to manage your risk. By investing in derivatives, you can limit losses when trading in the stock market. This is because derivatives are typically less volatile than stocks or mutual funds, and you can set a limit to the amount of money you can lose on a trade. This can be a great way to protect your finances and reduce your risk. Overall, investing in a deriv account can be a great way to diversify your portfolio, reduce your risk, and increase your potential return on investment. If you are looking to invest in the stock market, it is worth considering investing in a deriv account to take advantage of these benefits.

Mitchell-Innes was an exponent of what came to be known as the Credit Theory of money, a position that over the course of the nineteenth century had its most avid proponents not in Mitchell-Innes’s native Britain but in the two up-and-coming rival powers of the day, the United States and Germany. Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a “thing” at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange.9

Like Bitcoin, there is little stopping Ethereum from being an alternative currency to fiat and commodity currencies. You can conceivably trade anything using Ethereum, but this is not Ethereum’s strength in comparison to other cryptocurrencies (CCs) – they can all do this. It’s rather the computing language that allows the smart contracts to exist that makes Ethereum more valuable than BTC (in my opinion).

The evangelists for bitcoin, the much-hyped digital currency that is a strange mixture of the visionary and the fraudulent—are, in a sense, not imaginative enough. They are simply trying to reproduce in the electronic world a commodity—currency—that has long existed in the material world. The larger question is whether currency as we have known it is any longer necessary at all. I once joked with beginning students that money existed because when a pipe burst it took too long to find a plumber in need of economics lectures—but today it is possible to locate that plumber.