Tag Archives: system

How do you feel about money?

October 27, 2017   Auto Loans

The recession is teaching us all some hard new lessons about respecting money.

We all know that the love of money is the root of all evil. Yet we think of it as unclean:
o We call it filthy lucre,
o Too much of it means you are stinking rich
o Too little and you are dirt poor.

We don’t talk about money openly and we treat it as if it is a vulgar subject. We routinely ask strangers what they do for a living, but would never dream of asking how much they earn. And that applies equally to family and close friends.

It’s not always like that
Some cultures feel differently about money. When I tell people that I write about money for a living, it evokes little interest and they don’t pursue the conversation. I wonder if it would be the same if I said I was a sports or travel or food writer.

Now there’s a change
The recession has brought the subject of money out into the open and is making us love the stuff more than we did before. Most of us now believe that money is more important than it was prior to the recession. This thinking is also reducing how we value possessions. Money is a great tool and also a measure of value and a form of exchange. It buys food and clothes for us and our families; it keeps a roof over our heads, pays our bills and if we’re lucky, buys a few treats as well. So why is it so notoriously hard to earn and unbelievably easy to spend?

A lesson from the recession
Along comes a recession and changes our attitudes towards money. It teaches us to look after it and how to use it and invest it wisely. If we weren’t caught by the recession or by investing in one of the huge money frauds, we know how lucky or clever we were compared to others.

Charity keeps going
Surprisingly, research shows that people are maintaining their charitable donations and are helping family in these difficult times. It is a fact that charitable donations in the US doubled after the 1930s Great Depression because people witnessed the trauma of poverty.

More money lessons
One of the tough lessons of the recession is that of staying out of debt. Moreover, it is teaching us that saving money is good, and borrowing too much is dangerous.

We will always feel funny about money but until somebody develops an entirely different social structure, or we return to a barter system, we just have to learn to live with money. We should learn to love it, not because it’s money but for what it can do for us if we use it properly.

One of these days, man should start work on evolving a new financial system. That’s probably got about the same chance of success as developing a substitute for water!

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Welcome to the Loan Age

October 14, 2017   Auto Loans

Earth’s Rotational Periods Cause Ice Ages, Warming and Change “Researchers have stopped the debate about the underlying mechanism that have caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years – they finally linked them to slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in the Earth’s rotation and axis.”

So is that what caused the Loan Age? The period 2007 to 2010, will forever be known on earth as “The Loan Age” when just about everyone went into financial stress. The earth has been through many ages in its four and a half billion year lifetime. Some eras were dramatic like the Jurassic Age, some were evolutionary like the Ice Age and some were progressive like the Bronze Age. The Loan Age was a time when everyone borrowed money in order to make it through another month. This era will not wipe out civilization as we know it; but it may feel like it!

The Loan Age The name we give to this age is not important as long as it has no permanent effect, like the Quaternary Age which occurred about 1.8 million years ago and which permanently wiped out many of the mammals. The Loan Age will bring dramatic changes to our world in many areas. Banking and money management will be very different as will all things related to finance, marketing, investments, the trading of stocks and many other things we take for granted and which have been in common use for centuries. It is not expected that institutions such as banking will become extinct. They will simply mutate to keep up with change.

The new operating system The earth is heading for a complete makeover, an improved operating system, let’s call it version 2.01. This is not another Microsoft product, rather one that is designed by its users, meaning us. It needs to be built from the ground up, and should include every possible variation and alternative that can be thought of. It will be very difficult to come along in 537 years time and say “we are issuing a patch to cover a loophole in the Money-Lending Law”.

Lay off the hardware And here is a warning – make sure the new operating system works with the existing hardware. You cannot force 6 or 7 billion people to change their hardware because it makes the operation faster or smoother. Our hardware is what we’ve got and this is what we are going to use until the next operating system is issued in another 2 million years or so. And make sure that those who come after us understand that the hardware we leave them has to last until a new operating system is issued.

Back to the Loan Age While the whole world sits and waits for the redesign to happen, we need a Band-Aid solution, one that will stop the blood pouring out of the wounded companies, industries, banks and governments. Would that be increased loans?

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