4/30/2012

OCCUPY WALL STREET


Right now there are a great many dollars in the global economy that are no longer worth the same as any other dollar. Consider the trillions of dollars worth of essentially worthless real estate loans on the balance sheets of banks around the world. Governments allow banks to treat these as assets, but unless governments agree to take them, they can’t be exchanged for anything else, because nobody in his right mind would buy them for more than a tiny fraction of their theoretical value. Those dollars have the same sort of weird half-existence that horror fiction assigns to zombies and vampires; they’re undead money, lurking in the shadowy crypts of the world’s large banks like so many brides of Dracula, because the broad daylight of the market would kill them at once.

~John Michael Greer in The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered

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