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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me a little of how Europe (Spain, particularly) extracted enormous amounts of silver from South America and shipped it to China to trade for goods[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_1...

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China was not interested in European goods and only wanted to get paid in 'hard currency' for its own goods and commodities (China, silk, tea, etc).

The Spanish went with it but the English did not want to and decided to find something the Chinese would want. And they found opium, which they could conveniently produce in their Asia colonies. They also started producing tea in their own colonies to avoid having to buy it from China (this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai).

> China was not interested in European goods

The Chinese government wasn't interested, a lot of people in China were and were willing to trade with Europeans they just weren't allowed to do that freely. Of course, this is probably more relevant to the 1800s (and I'm not talking only about opium, it was just easier to transport/smuggle).

> this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai

Chai is just tea or is it not in India?

They're the same thing (besides how they're customarily served). What the parent is getting at is the linguistic aspect: most cultures which imported tea by land over the Silk Road, like India and Turkey, call it something that sounds like "cha". Cultures which imported it by sea, like most of Europe, call it something that sounds like "te".

Tea wasn't a common beverage throughout India before the British. It was known but mostly used as medicinal plant.

Commercial growing was initiated by the British.

The point I was making is that Indians drink tea, and have a tea industry, because of the British.

We imported it by sea (Portugal), and call it Chá.

Yes, but Portugal had colonies in India!

As did UK and Netherlands, and don't use Cha variants.

You might be interested in this: https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...

Cha is tea in Chinese. I assume this is Indian naming is mentioned as a carryover from Chinese.

Northern Chinese (Mandarin, etc) call it Cha which became chai etc.

Southern Chinese (Min Nan, etc) call it Teh which became tea etc.

You can see that coastal nations got their tea from the seafaring southern regions whereas much of Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe got it from the northerners via the Silk Road.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_...

In India this is sweetened tea with milk.

The point is that Indians did not reallu drink tea before the British.

Ironically, Spain failed to become wealthy from importing all that gold and silver. What they got was inflation instead.

It's the same reason we have inflation today. It's just that instead of looting gold from other places, the Fed just prints the "gold" and pretends to not know what causes inflation.

Well, I dont think the Fed "pretends not to know what causes inflation"... Everyone knows what causes inflation, its right there in the name

Evidently not, because otherwise people would realize by now that inflation has causes beyond simply an increase in M1. Banks lend more money? Inflation. Economy-wide supply shocks? Inflation. Population decrease? Inflation. Money has a market value, and it drifts with supply and demand.

Compare the increase in the money supply with the inflation rate. There's about a 13 month lag.

> Banks lend more money? Inflation.

People paying back loans? Deflation. It cancels out. Except the Fed loans out money and does not pay it back - inflation.

> Economy-wide supply shocks? Inflation.

Where does the extra money come from? And what about when the shocks end, why doesn't the price come back down?

> Population decrease? Inflation.

Reduction in demand means deflation.

The stack of derivatives is too big to fail

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