Bernanke shocks the U.S.
April 1, 2010 2:32 AM   Subscribe

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."
posted by diwolf (27 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Onion's been done and done and done again around here, sorry. -- cortex



 
as he removed April 1st posts from his preview and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at them. Worthless."
posted by Dumsnill at 2:41 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


Please append (SLOP) to the end of this single-link Onion post.
posted by Spatch at 2:46 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


Fisrt!
posted by fixedgear at 2:47 AM on April 1, 2010


When did the Onion switch from being a spoof site to being a news site?
posted by salmacis at 2:58 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


Likewise, the real estate industry has all but vanished, with mortgage lenders seeing no reason to stop people from reclaiming their foreclosed-upon homes.

"I don't even know what we were thinking in the first place," said former banker Nathan Collins of Brandon, MS, as he jimmyed open a door to allow a single mother and her five children to move back into their house. "A bunch of people sign a bunch of papers, and now this family has no place to live? That's just plain ludicrous."


.
posted by mek at 3:05 AM on April 1, 2010 [5 favorites]


One 4/1 when I was a husband and a stepdad I set all the clocks ahead one hour. I'd practiced resetting the kid's alarm clock in the dark ahead of time so I wouldn't wake them when the date came. The alarm clock me and the wife shared was easy. There are a lot of clocks even in a 700 square foot duplex, stoves, microwaves, the vcr, the computer, the big one on the wall that served to remind us we were late, I reset them all.
The day came and the boy got it worst because the middle school started an hour earlier than the grade school the girl went to. I thought for sure they would notice the sun was in the wrong place but they didn't.
I was grinning inside as I told the boy to hurry up or he'd be late. The wife and daughter awoke and commenced with the morning yelling. I used to tell the daughter that as a 9 year old she had no right to be so grumpy in the morning. Satan would be scared to wake that child. As me and the wife and the daughter were ritually yelling ourselves awake the boy came home. It seems the school wasn't quite open yet when he got there.
13 year old boys know all the swear words. Watching a 13 year old boy struggle to not use them and seeing a smile of realization come across a nine year old girls face is a great thing.
posted by vapidave at 3:15 AM on April 1, 2010 [4 favorites]




Bloggers and web companies channel Jay Leno. Fill internet with tedious, unambitious "jokes"
posted by delmoi at 3:50 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]


diwolf, you should have tried talking Mutant into making this post for you.
posted by RichardP at 3:51 AM on April 1, 2010 [5 favorites]


> diwolf, you should have tried talking Mutant into making this post for you

That would have been epic.
posted by Decimask at 4:09 AM on April 1, 2010


Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged

"Plus strong encryption!" added Doctorow.

Excellent, thank you Omnomnom.
posted by Infinite Jest at 4:13 AM on April 1, 2010


When did the Onion switch from being a spoof site to being a news site?

January 17, 2001
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:14 AM on April 1, 2010 [5 favorites]


Kirth Gerson : January 17, 2001

Wow. That has to stand as the single most honest account of Bush's presidency ever written - And dating from the very start of his term, before 9/11, even.

Almost spooky, if he hadn't campaigned on a slightly less extreme version of those very issues. :(
posted by pla at 4:57 AM on April 1, 2010


Remember the Good Old Days when posting an Onion link as an FPP was a guaranteed deletion?

Good times, good times.
posted by briank at 4:58 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


Ok, this is probably a bad idea, attempting a serious post on April 1, but here goes anyway.

Money in general is a poor abstraction for wealth, since wealth can't be created at will to suit political whims. It has to be worked for, earned. Everything around you, everything you have, was made by someone. Modern money isn't wealth, it's a claim on wealth. Even commodity money is only a different kind of claim; it's a specific promise to give you a specific amount of a specific thing. How much economic value that thing has can vary from minute to minute. Someone starving to death is likely to value a can of tomatoes a lot more highly than a pound of silver. Someone with a pantry full is likely to go for the silver.

Ultimately, it's a poor abstraction of a complex thing, but the phantom stuff is a much poorer abstraction, because the signals it sends into the economy about scarcity and relative value can be hijacked by the central authority to suit political ends. We get constant short-term palliative responses that prevent true long-term adjustments. Price levels are a critical method by which the economy transmits information, but our monetary authority has price stability as its central mandate.

Major adjustments, ones that require major restructurings, are painful and deeply unpopular. People hate them, and want them to stop, but that's how the economy reorganizes into higher efficiencies and better production of energy, stuff, and knowledge, the real wealth of the world. Pain is how we get rid of bad ideas. For that to happen, the economy must first understand which ideas are bad, but we actively try to prevent that from happening. If one end of the economy starts yelling about pain, it's like the Federal Reserve is handing out earplugs to prevent the rest of the economy from hearing.

The big problem with pretend money is that there's no inbuilt limitations to what pretending can be done. As imbalances build up, entities that have become powerful from those imbalances want further interventions to heighten those structural advantages. And the economy gradually goes off the rails, shifting to serve the entities that create the wealth tokens, instead of the people that actually create the wealth.

One example is the huge brain drain of many of our best and brightest into finance; big money is most easily made by manipulating tokens, and thus wealth generated by others, instead of generating it oneself. Those brains aren't available to figure out new education methods or new basic research or new means of production; instead, they're tied up inventing arcane formulas to get the most tokens possible. There's certainly room and need for SOME of this, but nowhere near as much as we have.

And when a large enough section of the economy starts doing that, it starts running the show, as we saw with the bank bailouts. The US government is a captive interest of Wall Street. We are being looted, slowly bled to death, and this is a direct consequence of these meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them.

Note that the system just tried to get rid of a whole bunch of this nonsense, and we issued massive numbers of wealth tokens into the system to prevent any adjustment. We also took on public liabilities in excess of ten trillion dollars (via the AIG, FNM, and FRE takeovers) to actively prevent bad ideas from being eliminated.

We just heard the loudest shout of economic pain in the history of the country, probably greater than that preceding the Great Depression, and our policy response has been earplugs, morphine, and methamphetamine.
posted by Malor at 5:04 AM on April 1, 2010 [12 favorites]


From another angle, to put it in computer science terms: fiat money is a leaky abstraction; it does not correctly encapsulate the thing it purports to abstract, wealth. And the systemic bugs and outright errors from this bad abstraction are piling up. As we keep bandaiding in fix after fix after fix, the errors accumulate, they don't diminish.
posted by Malor at 5:10 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged

HA! That's hilarious. (and would have been a better FPP!!!) I wonder how Charlie feels about it. :D
posted by zarq at 5:15 AM on April 1, 2010


I didn't know Ron Paul wrote for the Onion.
posted by MegoSteve at 5:15 AM on April 1, 2010


HA! That's hilarious. (and would have been a better FPP!!!) I wonder how Charlie feels about it. :D

Hehe, glad you like it. I figured Mefites wouldn't like having their site spammed with fake April 1st FPPs, though, so just added the link here (where it doesn't really fit either, sorry diwolf).
posted by Omnomnom at 5:24 AM on April 1, 2010


Once again, the Onion is actually right.

When I took macro econ at college, my professor was explaining how there wasn't enough money in the world to cover all the debt in the world. I stopped him, and asked if he were really implying that money wasn't real, that it was a shared hallucination. He said that was exactly it. I asked him what would happen if folks realized this. He smiled happily, threw his fist in the air and shouted, "The revolution!"
posted by QIbHom at 5:43 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


Is this a non-modal draggable element or is it one of those dim-the-lights-and-dont-click things I've been hearing so much about lately?
posted by scalefree at 5:44 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]




Someone should update Chicago. I heard they're in the process of updating their graft program. You can only take so many hogs before you have more pigs than you know what to do with, and a politician gets into the business for the power plays, not to be a pig farmer, ya know? Maybe if they deal in trading the rights those pigs and corn, so the farmers keep farming, but it's really owned by someone else. Hmm, has the patent office closed, too? I should be writing this down somewhere.
posted by filthy light thief at 6:19 AM on April 1, 2010


Ok, this is probably a bad idea, attempting a serious post on April 1, but here goes anyway.

I was wondering when our very own gold-bug Cassandra would show up.
posted by atrazine at 6:25 AM on April 1, 2010


Then again... Cassandra's tragedy was that she was always right.
posted by atrazine at 6:25 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


The US Dollar is a real thing. Payment in dollars is required by US authorities to work and do business in America, and to avoid going to jail. The value of the dollar therefore represents, at a minimum, a fraction of the work done by US residents, as well as a fraction of their desire not to go to jail or lose their property. Those things are more widely relevant to human experience than any arbitrary commodity such as gold would be. And yes, wealth can be created at will, not by printing money but by doing work.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 6:29 AM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]


Malor: what of the trillions of wealth tokens destroyed by 'the system'? Do those not figure in to your philosophy?
posted by wierdo at 6:30 AM on April 1, 2010


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