1434 Disappearing Money

Money can appear or disappear at any time because it’s only a matter of accounting. For example, if you bought a share of GameStop stock for $1 and it went up to $300, that $299 gain materialized from nowhere; nobody put $299 into the market for your share, they bought someone else’s share for the $300, bits in a computer twiddled, and now everyone assumes your share is worth $300 too. It’s not just your share that went from $1 to $300, it was all shares. The same thing works in reverse; obviously, there’s nothing like the physics of Conservation Of Energy, where the total remains constant, for money. Similarly, the Fed makes money appear & disappear; for example, quantitative easing, where they transfer an asset out of a bank’s accounting into their own, then the bank twiddles the bits to show they now have money instead. Most of the assets the Fed appropriates in this manner disappear. Capitalism relies on this imaginary nature of money, an illusion that everyone is willing to believe, even idealize. The danger is that people who produce nothing except manipulate the artificialness of money are admired & emulated. It only works because everyone wishes it was them who owned GameStop.