Conversation

Realizing money is just another broken supply chain with no particular special properties. Just a lot more people interested in mystifying it
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You don’t need a separate “cantillon effect” type theory. That’s like arguments against the existence of god to debate theists. Only the economics religion deists believe it doesn’t matter where you inject money. That’s a prima facie ridiculous idea that should be ignored.
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Increasingly of the few that the financial side of the economic problem — fiscal/monetary intervention design and debt restructuring work — is neither that difficult, nor that important if viewed as a mass supply chain problem. It’s only a moral panic issue for rentiers.
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Example: toilet paper shortage is a simple matter of unbalanced supply chains pushing slightly different products (biz/commercial grade is different from consumer grade) coupled with mild stock out panic. Fixable with some rebalancing and consumption flexibility. Why is $ harder?
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It’s a “problem” because some people derive large rents from incumbent distribution of money. A new distribution pattern would work for everybody except them. It’s not pure rents, there’s function too. Money flows via banks for good reasons. But those reasons have unraveled.
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The good reasons are that under normal conditions, there’s often a lot more need to move money at concentrated scales. They serve the need for 10 moves of a billion $ rather than a billion moves of $10. But that picture has changed.
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The normal unit economics of money are: bespoke and robust at large unit size, standardized and fragile at small unit size. New supply chain spec: robust and bespoke at small unit size. Quickly get $10 -$1000 to anyone in *hours to days* based on processing of personalized data.
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Need to think about velocity of money in a 2d space of unit size and transaction costs (not “cost of capital” which is a separate, narrower thing). Money needs to get much smarter in the low-unit-size/high-velocity quadrant so it can move more flexibly.
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Analogy: we shop for consumer-grade money ay the level of 19th century pre-supermarket general stores. Very low volume, velocity, variety. We need the e-commerce equivalent of money. An amazon of money which can deliver personalized money lots to the last mile.
Replying to
Chamath’s viral CNBC rant on “don’t bail out the billionaires” is currently a moral argument. It needs to be a supply chain argument. Nothing against the billionaires. They are just not the priority. Preserving their rents is simply the wrong supply chain problem statement.
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