Money is a distributed counting system

Delong says we have to look to Steve Roth for the history of money. Steve tells us:

The main finding from all this: the earliest uses of money in recorded civilization were not coins, or anything like them. They were tallies of credits and debits (gives and takes), assets and liabilities (rights and responsibilities, ownership and obligations), quantified in numbers. Accounting. (In technical terms: sign-value notation.) Tally sticks go back twenty-five or thirty thousand years. More sophisticated systems emerged six to seven thousand years ago (Sumerian clay tablets and their strings-of-beads predecessors). The first coins weren’t minted until circa 700 BCE — thousands or tens of thousands of years after the invention of “money.”

These tally systems give us our first clue to the nature of this elusive “social construct” called money: it’s an accounting construct. The earliest human recording systems we know of — proto-writing — were all used for accounting.* So the need for social accounting may even explain the invention of writing.

 Tally sticks are a distributed counting system, I assume all exchangers keep them. The currency banker is really selling calculators, or accounting tools.  

Greeks to strip search each other, looking for euros

Enikonomia: Cash in chests beneath the mattress or value boxes of more than 15,000 euros and jewelry and precious stones worth over 30,000 euros will have to declare 2016 the Taxisnet obligated declaration 'assets (Occupying).

The above provides a Joint Ministerial Decision of the Ministers of Justice and Finance, which sets out the details of the new electronic reporting 'assets, which is essentially a "rehearsal" for periousiologio.

The decision describes the process and the type and content of the declaration of property status in which are reflected all property taxpayers and their minor children.

How did a bunch of delusionals manage to foul the Greek economy?

But Obama said they were kind gentle folk

Business Insider: A new report out Tuesday paints a bleak picture of ISIS infiltration in the US.

Researchers at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University investigated the presence of American ISIS supporters on social media and found that "ISIS-related mobilization in the United States has been unprecedented."

US authorities are reportedly aware of 250 Americans who have attempted to travel to Islamic State territory — some successfully, others not — in Syria and Iraq. And there are 900 active investigations against ISIS supporters in all 50 states, according to the report.

Omigod, deranged Arab, mohamed belt bombers!  This needs a cartoon.

This is the original deranged, muhamed belt bomber, as reproduced by historians.

Rahm never wastes good crisis

Now he intends to fire himself for being yet another bimbo mayor of Chicago;

CBS: The mayor said he also shares responsibility for the lack of public confidence in the police.

“I’m responsible. I don’t shirk that responsibility. I have taken certain steps prior to this date. I’m taking steps today. As I told you, this is a work in progress in finding a solution. It’s not the end of the problem. It’s a beginning of a solution towards the problem,”

The only Democrat hope is the typical idiocy of the Republican Communist Party. 

Our economy has been down casted

Atlanta Fed: The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2015 is 1.4 percent on December 1, down from 1.8 percent on November 25. The decline occurred this morning after the Manufacturing ISM Report On Business from the Institute of Supply Management and the construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Pelosi snookered the CEO of UnitedHealth

Bloomberg: UnitedHealth Group Inc. should have stayed out of Obamacare’s new individual markets longer, the chief executive officer of the biggest U.S. health insurer said Tuesday, after announcing last month that it will take hundreds of millions of dollars in losses related to the business.

Instead of expanding into Obamacare next year, the company should have kept waiting, UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor meeting in New York.

“It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley said. “I take accountability for sitting out the exchange market in year one so we could in theory observe, learn and see how the market experience would develop. This was a prudent going-in position. In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer.”

So many folks in the healthcare business were fooled by the promise of unlimited Obamacare taxes.  Instead we got an unsustainable health care shortages.  Neither DC nor the large public sector states can afford the medical inflation. It is spiral time, right when the Kanosians planned it.

Tim Cook and Apple Wallet

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Silicon Valley is obsessed with a particular part of the finance business that involves sending cash to friends using an app. That’s led to a flurry of options that often aren’t profitable because they charge little to no transaction fees. PayPal and its subsidiary, Venmo, are among the most popular, though they face a growing list of competitors, including Google, Facebook, and Square.

Apple plans to get in on the action, too. The world’s most valuable technology company has been talking with banks about introducing its own feature to Apple Pay that will allow users to send money to friends, a person familiar with the plans told Bloomberg last month. If Apple hopes to compete, it will also need to make its service free to use with debit cards, according to analysts.

Well, Tim, you told us that the Apple phones were unbreakable.  Why does Tim need banks to cover the peer to peer exchanges?   These exchanges should work just like handing over cash, no bank required. So  dufas apple engineers cannot figure out how to emulate ink and paper with their software.

 What do the Kanosians say?  Here is Greg Ip:

Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would bring about the most sweeping changes to the Federal Reserve since the 1930s. At the heart of the bill is a requirement that the Fed set interest rates according to a quantitative rule.

Like advocates of the gold standard, proponents of the bill blame many of the economy’s ills on the Fed exercising too much discretion because it succumbs to economic expediency or political pressure. Many see the Fed’s emergency lending during the crisis and its bond-buying since then as bailouts for big, reckless banks and a profligate federal government. They want rules to circumscribe such discretion.

But history shows that discretion is unavoidable no matter what sort of standard a central bank uses. “The practical difficulties of life cannot be met by very simple rules,” Walter Bagehot, an early editor of The Economist, wrote in “Lombard Street.” “Those dangers being complex and many, the rules for encountering them cannot well be single or simple. A uniform remedy for many diseases often ends by killing the patient.”

OK, so I am confused.  If Apple hires an engineer with an IQ greater than 100, then  we get pure cash, no central bank,   All this grand theorizing by Greg hangs on one prior, namely that Apple will get no clue.  A good assumption, but what about Facebook, they get clues all the time.

Mark Thoma, try looking at the chart and quit quoting recipes

Fiscal Times: 

Traditionally, macroeconomic policy has been divided into two distinct types. The first type, stabilization policy, attempts to keep output and employment as close to their full employment levels as possible. The idea behind these policies is to minimize, or even eliminate, short-term boom-bust cycles around the natural rates of output and employment caused by fluctuations in aggregate demand.
The second type of policy, growth policy, works on the supply-side and attempts to keep the long-term natural rates of output and employment growing as fast as possible. Thus, if the long-term natural growth rate of output is, say, 2.5 percent, supply-side policy would try to increase this rate, while demand-side stabilization would try to keep us from deviating from it, whatever it might be.

Now check the chart and ask where the recessions occur.  Your answer will be on presidential regime change.  There is only one explanation , DC  makes recessions, it does not prevent them.  Looking at the chart is something Kanosians need to learn.

Puerto Rico doing the Illinois cliff dive

Reuters: 
Puerto Rico faces a moment of truth on Tuesday, as the island owes a $355 million payment - a possible default which could trigger lawsuits, further spook investors and undermine the island's efforts to climb out of $72 billion in debt.

The payment on bonds issued by the U.S. commonwealth's financing arm, the Government Development Bank (GDB), are crucial as Puerto Rico tries to stretch its liquidity into 2016 to give itself more time to restructure debt. A default is seen as possible but not definite.

With 45 percent of its 3.5 million population in poverty, Puerto Rico is a meteorological paradise mired in economic purgatory. Years of over-spending and the expiration of corporate tax incentives stuck it with debt that gets harder to pay as residents increasingly emigrate to the U.S.

Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla wants to overhaul spending and restructure debt, but bondholders are resisting cuts to repayments, and restructuring discussions look to take months.

Of the payment owed on Tuesday, $273 million is protected by Puerto Rico's constitution - so-called general obligation, or GO, debt - so defaulting would likely trigger lawsuits.

Importing slaves to cover entitlements

Business Insider: Analysis of figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government’s independent forecasting body, has found that Britain’s finances would not be forecast to hit a budget surplus by 2019-20 without recent upward revisions to net migration numbers.

The OBR has raised its projections for inward migration twice this year. Eight months ago, its projection went from 105,000 people a year to 165,000. The figure was revised again to 185,000 as part of the OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook published alongside Osborne’s spending review and autumn statement last week.

As a result of the extra jobs and tax incomes, and changes to the composition of the UK’s working-age population, generated by the influx, the OBR has revised up the level of potential economic output for the UK by 0.9%.

So  all the British Kanosians are liars when they claim Brit entitlements are sustainable. This pretty much destroys the Kanosian liberal philosophy.