Awash in a Sea of Money — Or — Unemployed Money is not a Good Sign

 

 

I got an offer in the mail to take out a 2^nd mortgage on my house yesterday.  I get offers to refinance at least once a week personally addressed to me, but the letters all have the same salutation” Dear Home Owner.  Combine these offers with the figures I hear being spent on elections, the profits banks made in the first quarter and all of the advertising for investment services and I conclude there must be one hell of a lot of money out there looking for a place to go to work.  Now for money to go to work, it simply has to earn a return, not actually do useful work mind you, but the language of money had settled on “money going to work.”

 

While I suppose it is nice to have the opportunity to increase my debt load, given the offer I received to take out a 2^nd mortgage, what this sea of money looking for work tells me the unemployment rate for the average dollar is rather high (and that does not count the ones I and little old ladies put under our mattresses because we grew up with parents who grew up during the Great Depression). Under the current regime of creating money, the unemployment rate of money has generally signaled boom which is followed by a bust.  Not the attractive kind of bust an artist might sculpt for museum placement, but the kind that leaves lives shattered.  Indeed, at the present time in the US alone we have more people on the verge of homelessness despite working two or more jobs and indenturing their children. (OK, I am dramatizing it by asserting the indenture of children, but am I?)

 

That offer I got to take out a 2^nd mortgage on my house is actually a desperate act by someone who holds more money than they know what to do with.  They have run out of creative ways to “put their money to work.”  So they are relying on complete strangers to think that increasing one’s debt burden is a good idea.  The simplistic economic wisdom behind putting money to work is the basis for trickle-down economics. Things will be OK if we give the rich enough money so that some of it comes our way.  Unfortunately, when it comes out way in the form of an increased burden of debt, it typically does not harm to us debtors than it helps.

 

So, by my way of thinking, it is more evidence that we need to change to way we create money.  Under the current system, we put money into the hands of those who already have it or the assets it can buy in hopes that they are greedy enough to invest some in productive activities (job creation) or that they are spoiled enough to actually buy something.  Well, it isn’t working.  So, time to put my plan into action and create money by giving it, yes, giving, to citizens just because they are citizens.  Us common citizens spend.  We get very little money, and we have had to learn to spend wisely.  However, if given a windfall, we will spend it.  Unlike the rich who insist on a return on their expenditures, we just go out and buy a beer, or a popsicle (depending upon our age and religion); to hell with the returns.