Liam Jan 1, 2023

The thing about the concept of a very rich man ‘losing’ $200bn is that if this sum can be ‘lost’ rather than spent, transferred, or stolen, it really calls into question its existence in the first place, and from there you start to wonder about the reality of large sums of money at all.

That is one of the qualities of money, that small amounts are extremely tangible (that $20 in your wallet, those coins in the tray with your keys), but the larger the quantity the more intangible and subject to weird philosophical ideas it is

Show threadBigRBJan 2, 2023

@liamvhogan

I’m not sure the analogy holds. The $200bn was lost in the same way as if I bought a plastic bucket from you for $20 while everyone else buys the same bucket from Bunnings for $5. Now I have "lost" $15.

In the case you are referring to, the rich man owns a tonne of buckets that people have been paying $20 for (the other bucket-holders ). Now, all of a sudden, nobody is paying $20 for a bucket anymore and so he, and the other owners of buckets, has/have "lost" money.

Show threadLiam Jan 2, 2023
@bigrb ahh, but see that’s why it’s so clear when it’s reduced to easily comprehensible sums and commodities—when it’s buckets and twenties, it’s easy to see the money was imaginary. Far less so when it’s many many zeroes and a huge number of complex holdings and promises and contingent loan arrangements
Show threadBigRB
@liamvhogan A good point well made.
Jan 2, 2023 at 12:17amWeb
Show threadLiam Jan 2, 2023
@bigrb it’s a thing that constantly surprises me about money. We can only really get it in the form of metaphor (the household metaphor, or think Marx and his textile-shirts, or fin bros and their equations representing trades) and those metaphors slip when the numbers are large; macroeconomics at some point ceases to be about money and turns into a study of the behaviour of the State
Show threadBigRBJan 2, 2023

@liamvhogan I have long believed that economics has nothing to do with money.

The world makes more sense to me when I frame economics as the psychology of value exchange and money is just the most frequently deployed tool for managing those exchanges.