> This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze.
Why is it a danger for the value of money to be correlated with major things happening in the real physical world.
If my house burns down, the value of my house changed.
If a bank gambles it's deposits on snake oil like Tesla or Ai Companies, and the market wakes up to the true value of those companies, the worth of that bank rightfully collapses.
Is the author arguing the value of money should be divorced from the physical world?
> If my house burns down, the value of my house changed.
If your house burns down, it's only your loss and possibly lower profits for your insurance company.
> Why is it a danger for the value of money to be correlated with major things happening in the real physical world.
If the financial system burns down it will be everyone's loss and there's no insurance. It's like you have to pay a steep price because some rich dudes have burned down half of the houses in your neighborhood, they get to privatize profits and socialize losses - the dudes like that but the rest don't.
> If a bank gambles it's deposits on snake oil like Tesla or Ai Companies... the worth of that bank rightfully collapses.
"it's deposits" aren't bank's deposits, they are depositor's - like yours and your neighbor's. In a sane world, nobody would care about "the worth of that bank" but the disappearance of depositors money is such a humongous failure of the system that the too big to fail will be immediately bailed out - I've already explained who'd be paying for it.
This outcome is a natural consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the rest of the New Deal, that process was completed by the end of 1999.
> This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze.
Why is it a danger for the value of money to be correlated with major things happening in the real physical world.
If my house burns down, the value of my house changed.
If a bank gambles it's deposits on snake oil like Tesla or Ai Companies, and the market wakes up to the true value of those companies, the worth of that bank rightfully collapses.
Is the author arguing the value of money should be divorced from the physical world?
> If my house burns down, the value of my house changed.
If your house burns down, it's only your loss and possibly lower profits for your insurance company.
> Why is it a danger for the value of money to be correlated with major things happening in the real physical world.
If the financial system burns down it will be everyone's loss and there's no insurance. It's like you have to pay a steep price because some rich dudes have burned down half of the houses in your neighborhood, they get to privatize profits and socialize losses - the dudes like that but the rest don't.
> If a bank gambles it's deposits on snake oil like Tesla or Ai Companies... the worth of that bank rightfully collapses.
"it's deposits" aren't bank's deposits, they are depositor's - like yours and your neighbor's. In a sane world, nobody would care about "the worth of that bank" but the disappearance of depositors money is such a humongous failure of the system that the too big to fail will be immediately bailed out - I've already explained who'd be paying for it.
This outcome is a natural consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the rest of the New Deal, that process was completed by the end of 1999.
https://archive.ph/2026.03.17-135001/https://www.nytimes.com...
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Paywall thanks