Howdy Keith, welcome back... On Tue, 07 Oct 2008, Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The only other alternative is that a world currency could be > adopted. This would stop currency speculation for one thing, prevent > differential national inflations for another, and ensure that interest > rates in this or that region were truly appropriate to the local > circumstances and not guess-fixed by central banks for political > reasons. > > And here we have two pointers which could make this politically > feasible. Firstly, we have a World Bank already. Secondly, the idea of > a transnational electronically-based currency is also firmly on the > agenda. We already have PayPal and several other systems which aspire > to do this. Hmmm. First, I'm not convinced that things are so dire as to require such radical measures. And second, though I agree that currency speculation is an external force which can exert unnecessary hardship on a region, I would say that a universal currency accompanied by universal interest rates and borrowing practices (the inevitable consequence) will exert hardships of their own, and I'm not sure which would be worse. Here in Canada we get to see the effects of a universal currency and borrowing regime spread out over a widely disparate population in vastly different geographic and economic circumstances, and it can lead to hardships which seem near impossible to overcome, even with the benefit of mutual goodwill, common language, etc. Some parts of the country become "depressed areas" which are stubbornly difficult to bring along to the economic health of the rest of the country, due apparently to the combination of lack of obvious business development prospects combined with relative geographic inconvenience. I would suggest that on a world scale, the economic violence done by such a regime would be orders of magnitude worse. The obvious fix would be to impose a regional variation in interest rates, but in this country, this has never been done (to my knowledge, anyway, since the advent of national banks), whether because of the perceived impossibility of policing the system, hidebound resistance or lack of imagination, or insufficient daring. Your comment "This would...ensure that interest rates in this or that region were truly appropriate to the local circumstances and not guess-fixed by central banks" seems to imply regional variable interest rates on the universal currency, so I'm interested to hear how you believe this can be done. -Pete V _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
