This in particular sounds like a fantastic idea.
One of the more out-there leftist ideas I've heard proposed is a monetary system where everyone gets a basic income but all personal bank accounts have a negative interest rate, to disincentivize accumulating wealth for wealth's sake. This seems like a simpler and more reasonable version of that.
Anyone who tried to hold cash through COVID probably isn't going to do too crash hot either, there is a lot more money around now than there used to be.
The desire to tax accumulated wealth is equivalent to the desire to tax saving and deferred consumption. People like to dance around this point but it's difficult to avoid how abhorrent this is when it's properly framed.
I specifically mentioned paving roads as an example of productive investment, how can you possibly claim I'm "condemning it as speculation"?
Investing, in the sense that the company whose stock you are buying does absolutely nothing to justify the stock growth is absolutely horrifying.
However, the good news is that the person selling the stock now has money and that person should better figure out how to do the first type of investing or they end up suffering from inflation.
I don't think so. I think the idea they want the money to lose its value only if someone hoards it. If it's spent quickly enough, it retains its full value now and in the future. That's not how hyperinflation works.
If every human in the nation lost trust in the currency but there was enough production capacity to feed everyone then exports would rise until the currency appreciates to normal levels again. However, most nations suffering from hyperinflation don't have enough products to export in the first place.
This thread demonstrates vividly how little the average person understands about economics and finance, even in a place like HN.
Would you sell your gold for expiring money? The exchange rate would be much worse than the regular one.
Which is odd to consider, since the whole concept of money is 'storing' something in a fungible way, but still worth thinking about. To what extent does 'money' actually provide an improvement over 'commonly understood capacity to kick your head in', which is another sort of power a person or organization might have? Clearly if there's no money then there's the more immediate physical threat of force, or a more charming interaction like giving someone food or shiny rocks. Money permits an abstraction of this, so what is it incentivizing over the more primitive modes of interaction?
It also makes it the best possible time for 'pitch a wild idea that's going to be the next great business'. I still think that post-50s wealth created Silicon Valley: relative to how things are now, people were absolutely coddled and had tons of disposable income and spare time, which they used to pursue things like the Altair (a seemingly unproductive activity).
This became the democratization of something important, and it's taken this long for the power to swing back to capital holders.
Why just PERSONAL bank accounts? To disincentivize being a person?
Assuming we allow every citizen to borrow $1000 at -1% then the effect is very similar to helicopter money because the value of the debt is being eroded by inflation and you have to pay less back than you borrowed.
Unless you have so spotless opsec that you dare store a mortgage's worth of cash somewhere for decades (and you get that much cash in first place in negative rate environments - I doubt banks are giving you that without really good excuses), you need to invest the money somewhere. Bank accounts? Of course, you get even more negative rates there. Stocks? Well, it is not that different to positive rates, you take quite some risk there. Houses? Well, that's what mortgages are for. But assuming a 100k mortgage, is that really so fundamentally different if you need to gather 99k instead of 101k from somewhere in 10 year's time?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/aug/13/danish-bank-la...