If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087135.)
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
But you have a good point anyhow: moderation responses are tedious, repetitive, and mostly uninteresting, so in that sense there isn't a lot of substance in what I posted. However, at a meta level they're signals to the community (not just the commenter being replied to) about the kind of culture we want here, and in that way they're important.
In case it helps at all, moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Unfortunately, I don't know how to preserve this forum for its intended purpose without posting a lot of them. They're neither on topic nor interesting; rather, they're an out-of-band feedback mechanism without which the system would rapidly degrade (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). That's the theory, at least.
It's a pity that the system can't self-regulate. If we could get by with just community mechanisms (like upvotes and flagging) plus software, that would be awesome. Then I could just work on the code! Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way—there needs to be humans in the loop to jig the system out of its failure modes. So for better or worse you're stuck with this kind of thing.
And generally speaking you can’t honestly use those proxies to build financial skyhooks
VCs also use loans themselves from time to time, and their investors can use loans to invest in them.
Kind of like how Carl Icahn sat on the Hertz board, made Hertz take out a huge loan, used the credit to award a huge contract to one of his other businesses and then let Hertz go bankrupt. Citizens footed some of the bill by having their savings and salaries diluted (since Carl kept the proceeds of the loan and spent it into the economy; contributing towards inflation) and of course Hertz shareholders footed most of the bill. It's just theft.
Edit to add: You're right, I guess, that our government would probably take over everything and narrowly dodge mass starvation with mere mass poverty, but that doesn't sound great to me either. And mass starvation isn't so far fetched either, there have been multiple such occurrences globally within the last century.
I don't understand why the government would need to "take over everything" to avoid starvation. There's no technical reason that capitalism can't exist without usury. Again I'm not saying usury is good or bad, just that it doesn't 'need' to exist. I suspect it is good for society when well regulated (better use of capital), and horrible for society when allowed without limit (indentured servitude, instability e.g. GFC caused by immoral lending).
The question is which world are we living in? I'd argue the West is living in the latter world, the GFC is a symptom that shows that our financial system is causing more harm than good. In this case if the US had used the Islamic system, banks would have owned the assets they were "lending" for, and so would not be incentivized to make risky loans and sell them to unsuspecting investors. A bank isn't going to give a loan on an overvalued property if they know it will sit on their books until the losses are eventually realized.
If the non-starvation examples are all dictatorships, then what's your point here?
I agree that it's possible for capitalism to exist without "usury". Definitions of "usury" tend to define it as "unreasonably high interest rates". Interest rates right now are like 7%, which isn't particularly high and certainly isn't "unreasonably" high.
The GFC isn't relevant to what's going on here. This is an entirely different (indeed in many ways an opposite) set of problems.
that is what is prohibited in sharia, charging interest at all, not charging unreasonably high interest; at least in medieval interpretations of sharia and modern fundamentalist interpretations
plausibly the other commenter should avoid using such confusing terminology, but i found their meaning reasonably clear from context
Apologies for the terminology, the other commenter is right that I was using the original meaning. I don't think the rate of interest is relevant since the mechanisms that make debt dangerous still exist at 7% or 70%. Lending to a "No Income No Asset" person who has 0 chance of paying off the debt is immoral at any interest rate.
I'm interested why you think the GFC is the "opposite" problem. Immoral lending was central in that story.
I agree that lending to individuals without assets or income is immoral. That is a very small sliver of debt activity.
Lending to a business based on an analysis of their future earnings potential is not immoral. It is a risk, but that's the business banks are in.
Honestly in the light of the day I'm not sure what point I was trying to make about the GFC, so I'll give you that one :)
Businesses _in the west_ rely on lending. Islamic businesses _cannot_ morally or legally rely on lending, so they must have alternatives. And if you look at the alternatives you will realise that debt is not essential.
Sure, if all western governments banned lending tomorrow there would be crisis, but because any major change shocks an economy, not because economies _need_ debt.
Haha I knew you’d come around about the GFC, it’s definitely not a good example of the superiority of Western Financial system LOL
I've actually come back around on the GFC thing :) The way in which it's the opposite is that with the GFC we had low inflation and high unemployment and right now we have high inflation and low unemployment.
The GFC was caused by bad lending regardless of the levels of inflation and employment. Of course you are free to keep believing it's the "opposite." Doubling down on preconceived ideas is a pretty good strategy to never learn anything new. I'd prefer if you would provide a reason for your beliefs because I might learn something if your reasons contradict my own. Sorry if I sound harsh but it feels like I'm responding to an echo.
But to be serious, I'm not arguing that the Islamic system is "better", just that it removes certain risks that unrestricted lending cause. I don't think the solution is to ban lending but instead to be aware of the risks and make sure your regulation and enforcement is adequate.
I hate knee jerk dismissal of alternative policies, so I felt I needed to point out to the parent commenter that there are places where there is no debt, and no hunger.
When I think of poverty, I think of sub Saharan Africa. I believe debt is legal in most of those countries, so the odds are that banning debt is a small part of the poverty picture.
Mudarabah is for companies that want loans, either startups or existing companies that want to expand. The not-a-loan is structured as a joint venture with profit and loss sharing, often with a new holding company. The bank becomes a part-owner of the holding company in a way that entitles the bank to collect profits on the joint venture up to a certain percentage of the original not-a-loan. Again, functionally identical to interest, but officially not.
It is worth noting that conservative Islamic clerics have raised objections over these, but have been overruled everywhere that money rules.
i think this comment is the second most interesting one in the whole thread, following the one that pointed out that svb's stock fell 60% today (true: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SIVB/)
related links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murabaha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing#Mudara...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing#Mushar...
not "interest", but yea, pretty much interest
How would you provide loans to help get businesses started?
How would you provide loans to people to buy their first homes?
How would you provide loans so people can afford to go to school?
How would you provide loans to buy a vehicle so people can get to/from their job before they get a paycheck?
How would farmers afford to buy land, equipment and plant crops before they got paid for selling them?
Like it or not, credit has allowed a large portion of people to get lifted out of poverty.
Also, it’s not clear to me that credit has lifted people out of poverty; I’d argue that interest based lending has kept people in poverty, transferring wealth to those who already have it.
As for car loans and home loans... Similar thing. If people couldn't get loans for houses, real estate prices would have to come down to an affordable level that people could save for. If people couldn't get a loan for a car which they need as part of their small business, they could sell equity in their business to raise money for the car.
The question above are circular. How would people get loans if loans didn't exist? They wouldn't, we don't need them and society would be better off.
If your happy with going back to this that is your perogative but I would Be against your world view.
Salaries have not being keeping up with productivity gains as the economy has become anti-competitive by design. Every time money changes hands, it gets taxed maybe 30% on average... By the time $100 has changed hands 10 times, there is only $3 left out of it for the people (the rest went to the government). It centralizes everything around the government; money cannot flow too far from it. The modern economy is a giant social scheme with 0 merit. For many, it's hell on earth.
Damn it can someone please just give me free money so I don't have to be confronted with this reality and think about this stuff every day? Maybe if I could also benefit from it without having to work, it would be easier to just let it be. It's exhausting to get screwed every day and knowing exactly how I'm being screwed and yet having no power to do anything about it except whining online to random people hoping desperately that the system will improve just enough that I can get the tiniest opportunity. I've been working on side hustles for 10 years straight but I've never had the social connections to get traction regardless of how good the product is or how much users love it.
If I befriend Elon Musk and he makes one tweet about any of my existing projects, I'll be a millionaire within a year. 100% guaranteed. I wouldn't have to change anything or know anything more. Then I would have impostor syndrome instead.
It's easy to claim that anyone who doesn't receive any help suffers from Dunning-Kruger effect and someone who receives a lot of help and had it easy 'suffers' from impostor syndrome. I know how this works. Only those who really struggled can see both sides.
The system is constantly trying to rationalize and justify itself to its beneficiaries. It doesn't quite invest as much effort to rationalize itself to its victims; and also, it's just not as effective when victims have no financial incentive to believe it.
If intelligent people cannot separate the monetary system from capitalism, the average person won't either.
But sure, keep wishing we could go back to feudalism or whatever, great plan!
Only consuming what we can actually afford.
Investment with real skin in the game. If you have to take on much higher risk to get returns we will find ourselves being more careful about those returns actually happening.
some people on this website literally live on a different planet or don't actually have any understanding of...anything and just say things because it sounds smart
I'm not in a position to elaborate how their loans work but they do exist and I'm also pretty sure two million of our not-USD currency is not a prohibitive amount to loan to start a farm. It's a realistic investment people in rural areas can do.
Those savings are gonna grow at a pretty slow rate if you can't lend with interest.
So you're looking at this in terms of how you interact with money in the existing system. But all else being equal there would still be the same amount of value created & we can imagine ways that the value is distributed without the weirdness of banks & how we currently create money.
In tons of countries compound interest is a fairy tale found only in "Economy 101" books...
one of the things in the house is a nearly complete collection of national geographic magazines, going back before he was born; a treasury of knowledge about how people lived all over the world during that century-plus, as well as how they were seen from the point of view of the usa, ready to be perused and enjoyed at any moment without tracking cookies, broken links, images scanned at the wrong settings, or javascript incompatibilities. the images are mostly "retina display" resolution and famous for their beauty. preserving them for this century-plus has consumed very little resources
right now i'm listening to a song by rush recorded 40 years ago; every year there is a wider variety of recorded music available for me to listen to and compositions for me to sing, as long as we don't start losing it faster than it is recorded
last night i washed a shirt i got as a gift 17 years ago; if i can keep it from getting eaten by moths or sour sweat, it will surely last another 13 years
— ⁂ —
but these are mostly consumer goods, not capital goods like lathes and motorcycles; having more shirts, national geographics, or rush songs won't increase my economic productivity, which is what is needed for such savings to grow rather than shrink more slowly (though plausibly you can be more economically productive if you have a house big enough to set aside a space for sewing or grinding telescope mirrors or enlarging negatives). and for that it isn't necessary for the actual material good itself to survive for decades; it is only necessary for it to augment economic production by more than its own value during its lifetime, however short that lifetime may be
a car may have a lifetime of 10 years and, by enabling an uber driver to provide higher-value services than they otherwise could have, produce twice as much value as its inflation-adjusted cost of manufacture over that lifetime, 20% of the cost of manufacturing it every year. multiply that by the number of uber drivers in a society, and you have savings growing, in real terms, on a societal scale. and there are a thousand kinds of capital goods like this which continue to produce real value over a period of time once savings have been invested in them: house insulation, refrigerators, washing machines, olive trees, engine lathes, kitchen knives, electric drills, laptops, and so on. even factors of production that are consumed within a few months or a year can qualify, like knitting yarn
(however, a drill you buy, use once, and then leave in the garage and never use again does not; it may not be decaying very fast but it's not growing)
this is how a society can grow its savings in real terms on a societal scale, through accumulating capital goods and knowledge so that its productivity can increase over time
but money is not really a bottleneck or a resource; it's just a way to keep score
If I want returns I should seek an investment.
There are other ways. Like buying one brick at a time. It's a real thing in places where access to lending is less common.
I know guys who are literally growing the timber for their dream home while they live in a singlewide. Lifestyle inflation in the USA is caused in large part by access to this easy debt, and it routinely ruins people in the bottom half of the income distribution.
There's a reason that people don't save up the purchase price of a home in order to buy it. They are willing to pay a serious premium in terms of Interest so that they can have a home today instead of waiting 15 years for 30 years in order to purchase a property.
If you want a car to get to a job and make money, you want it now, and are willing to pay more later. Without the car, you wont be able to work and save.
congratulations, you've taken us back to Feudalism
Loans are just move the money around and create “business cycles” of booms and busts. Which in my opinion exacerbate wealth inequality as opposed to reduce it.
Access to inexpensive capital is a key driver of technological progress.
Robust capital markets allow for more efficient allocation of savings into business ventures, driving productivity forward
You can replace "want to start a business" with "want to buy a house" if you prefer.
That all said, I'm not trying to be a lending market lobbyist. I personally avoid borrowing whenever possible, and don't even have a credit card. My contention is simply that current lending practices are the cause a lot of societal issues, but if lending did not exist whatsoever things would be substantially worse.
Someone will always have money.
The system we have now may not be perfect but it a far far more egalitarian than the past when there were no loans
The history of the textile industry is but an instance of this historical pattern of behavior.
all I'm saying is that it's all part of the same 'power system' of government and order.
in the end, interests is comparable to imposing a rent on upon time usage. i.e. interest forces us to pay with money for the time we live (or time we spent), regardless of whether we are working or doing whatever, regardless of where we are as long as we are under the influence of money created through loans with interest.
that we must pay taxes on top of the interest exacted from all of us is just a cherry on top.
I'm having real trouble unpacking what you mean here. Machinery is expensive because... there's a worldwide cartel keeping prices up to keep out new players? Could it also be that making machines is hard and requires a lot of research/labor/material?