I have a theory about interest rates and I'd like to know what those who know more about economics than I do think about it.
When it comes to economic forecasting the generally accepted beliefs that an economy's population has is all important, and it doesn't even matter if that belief is true. So on the day it becomes generally accepted that the AI singularity is near and a very drastic increase in productivity is imminent I believe there will be a BIG increase in interest rates, because a dollar in your pocket right now will be more important to you than a million dollars will be in 20 years, even if you manage to survive the singularity which you very will might not. And if you don't survive then the value of a dollar to you will be precisely zero, so you might as well spend it today and have a little fun and not loan it out. So regardless of if you believe you will survive the singularity or not, for you to be willing to loan me a dollar today if you were a logical you would demand that I give you many many more dollars tomorrow as repayment. Put it another way, in a few years a dollar will enable you to buy far more stuff than it can today, so you'd want to save your money and not lend it out unless you were given a very big reason to do so, such as an astronomically high interest-rate. If I'm right about this then that would mean those who think they are being conservative and safe by investing in low interest government or corporate bonds will be disappointed because the value of all low interest investments that are supposed to be safe will crash. But that leads to another question that I don't have a clear answer to, even if I decide to save my money and not loan it out, how am I supposed to safely do that? I'm sure some will immediately say "gold" but I have no reason to believe that in a post singularity world that particular metal will be significantly more valuable than iron. Iron is much more common than gold but iron is also much more useful than gold. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 6bx -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0koN_ZNCan_FCo4MzyA_MtNnmpXc_6_yKjdcu94dB6kw%40mail.gmail.com.
