Quantitative Easing | nicholasjakari.com

Tangible Liability

Social/ SilenceOnKey/ TopiksAnOldMemik/ HabitWeMustNowGraspOrFace/ TheEnd

Ten weeks ago who would have said that the unemployment rate in the world’s biggest economy would have gone from ‘brag rights’ lowest level in 70 years: to worst level on record. Thus we are introduced to some massive damage to the world’s progress, as we survey the liaility cost of a predictable problem.

Costs you will remember make that liability tangible

The Tangible Liability inherent in under-investment securing our position in the multiverse of imaginary wealth and prosperity that we call a global economy: has revealed the myth of our brave new world.

Ironically, a bookkeeping rule prevents us from going some considerable way to solving the most problematic part of the catastrophe we currently face… the disappearance of consumption expenditure when people have no work..

The rule requires that certain classes of Assets reflected on a business’s financial records, most specifically on the Balance Sheet; may only be recorded at a nominal and prudent value because they are INTANGIBLE Assets.The value cannot be measured.

One such INTANGIBLE asset is called DATA.

So a business may have a million dollars’ worth of bath plugs on its books at a value that can be measured: e.g. 10 bath plugs to the Dollar= tangible asset

On the other hand, the brand name of the business may be famous, like Perrier once was; yet the value as an “intangible Asset” as reflected on the balance sheets, is normally modest: relative to the turnover of the business. Its value became noticeable when some bad news killed a multi-billion dollar business in hours.

Value here is abstract and basically non-measurable… other than through proxy formulas that often themselves are no more than attitude surveys. Or when the shit hits the fan.

So when value is abstract the rules of the Basle Agreements on Accounting standards require, reasonably, that the value be a prudent assessment: erring on conservative.

Thus; along with such quaint ideas as Goodwill, and Brand Identity: Data takes its place in the ranks of intangibility. Apparently: In practice DATA ranks generally low; often at almost absurdly low numbers, in the books of the standard tech or less tech business.

Check Facebook for instance. It beautifully exploits its vast data holdings to produce 29 Billion dollars[US] of income… But the data itself doesn’t even get a mention in the balance sheet. Presumably it is there somewhere: but not noticeably.

However, prudent accounting practices can sometimes be, almost foolishly, understating risk regarding the asset… Plus risk can often impact only after some time after the event. Thus did Cambridge Analytica demonstrate the real tangibility: of the liability that was incurred through sloppy data management… As does the Covert 19 virus now.

The basic ‘bookkeeping’ rules that require data to be shown as an intangible asset at a prudent value that may see DATA being less highly valued than its records allow…. While the corresponding costs [ie;liability] of holding the DATA hacked are huge.The market understands value better than bookkeepers in this case.

Nonetheless; the facts of life are that all Assets sit on the credit side of the account: because they are OWNED.

So let it be with DATA

And the OWNERS are the PEOPLE who supplied it.

Another way to look at this: is that the OWNERS thus have EQUITY in the data.

So. The world is faced with a catastophe. This virus is here and usually they stay.
So this disruption will continue and we face a global depression that could be worse than any ever known. Universal Basic Income is a 4th Industrial Revolution Tool that can alleviate pain.

The world has changed and now runs on DATA… something in which the Owners have equity that is not being realised.

So the solution starts with a change in the rule that says data has an intangible value because it is turning out, that the damage could see the end of all things that we have ever known.

Therefore i postulate the Thesis that:
Data holds the key to a Universal Basic Income…
That Universal Basic~Income Is Not Founded On the illusion of infinite Debt because it coomes from the Credit side of the business.
Debt is the short version of Debit the opposite of equity

TheEar/ LySciFiWri/ TersLikeHeinleinAsi/ MovAndHerbertPlayedAWorldCalled/ Credits/

Those credits belong to those who gave them … We the People.

Go Figure

Loves ya all

Last week I was ambushed by a glib well practiced Flat-Earther, who left me, frankly, gobsmacked: and almost impossibly, to me: without an answer.

The experience made me realize something I had forgotten about in a rush of enthusiasm. It was this. Over the past year I have presented an argument with far too much seriousness, regarding Basic pay: and how to finance it….

The sheer effrontery of my efforts have left all my readers so similarly gobsmacked, that to this moment, writing this, no one has yet raised any refutable argument against the idea. In a world almost committed to trolling the aisles of lunatic ideas I have been soundly almost curiously ignored. [Technically it is just part of the futility of being a Saharan/Namibian] grain of sand that thinks it can start a sandstorm. Not some conspiracy.]

So here is my apology for ranting on about something almost no one on the planet has ever given any thought to; and is, in its own way, as bizarre an idea as being earnestly informed, out off the blue, as it were, that the Earth is Flat, despite all protestations to the contrary.

That my ambusher last week could suggest, in all seriousness, that everything we have ever learned about the Earth, being a relatively solid ball of tangible rock n mud flying through an ever expanding Multiverse, was/ is, disinformation… Or, in the language of our times: “Fake News”.

So here too is a full konfession. I write fiction. The piece of fiction about basic pay is an idea based on a phrase that emerged from an ‘out of body’ experience that I believe I had, nearly 25 years ago. That was when I apparently flatlined, for an inordinate time: during surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. In the language of that arch-fictioneer Lobsang Rampa, I took an astral journey that may, or may not, have been anything other than a morphine, whatever, induced hallucination. That idea was what is today referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI].

So what am I on about? Firstly: I write poetic based Sci-Fi crime stories. I am also not a literary novelist. My story, “The Jonker Memorandum” is set sometime between Now and Then. Now is whatever it is when you read it [unless] Then is about a hundred and nineteen years later. The “unless” note, means you may read this after many things that were predicted to have happened along the way, have in the meantime become Now.

One of the things that becomes ‘Now’, is basic pay, something that I wrote about in 1994 that has in the meantime begun the journey to become NOW…. only now, is referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI]. In the marketing language of Product Life Cycle curves, UBI is in the Pre-Birth stage now after [from my perspective] gestating for a quarter century. The idea itself in its various forms has a much longer gestation time. And as we know, about 90 % of all disruptive Ideas, unlike babies, abort before birth occurs.

UBI is such an idea, that is currently experiencing some prospective miscarriage at te hands of its fondest semi-supporters.

So: What is UBI?

For me it is a fiction that solves an accounting and economics based problem that troubled the professional me, about a world running on credit [as our world does presently].

My present set of three stories: i.e. Part Four* of the Azanian Quartet is set over three eras: some parts of the first half of the 20^th century, and two set in different parts of the 21^st.

In one of those latter two, Basic Pay [UBI] has become real… and as I have routinely repeated I write poetic fiction. It follows the realization that just as Marxist economics reached its apotheosis in 1989, so too [so-called] Neo-Liberal economics reached its own ideological sell by date in 2008, with the invention of Quantitative Easing [QE].

QE has spurred the global economy into a global casino economy; favouring oligopolies of all varieties: infesting things that once worked well. And as we all know it doesn’t matter how screwed up the political economy becomes: if you are one of the working ‘prekariat’: you still have to pay your rent and buy your own lunch.

The problem to be solved in the story was: how is Basic Pay financed. And that is the conundrum. Some of my ‘up to date’, favorite writers have come out in favour, in principle, of Basic Pay: f.i. Luce, Harari, Acemoglou among others. All have however expressed major reservations, in some cases on moral grounds; and more broadly, pure financial affordability grounds. The widely followed socialist economist Prof: Richard D Wolff on the other hand is adamantly opposed to UBI… and anything associated with it… not to mention how it could never be financed….

Ironically Wolff completely validated, for me, an observation made by Professor Guy Standing, who is a fervent advocate for solving the pending widening and growing reality; of what he calls “the dangerous class” … “the New Prekariat”… a term he has coined: through the use of UBI.

Standing argues, that spokespersons for the left had an ideological blindspot, about the entire concept of UBI

And indisputably in the old world we all lived in, UBI could not be comfortably financed with the instruments thatr we have used to fund “welfare” through the 20th century.

However we no longer live in that 20th century world: and haven’t now for nearly a dozen years. We now live in a world financed by QE…. aka Quantitative Easing. So how did we manage to finance a world using QE. QE btw is, for the uninitiated, is a polite term for mass printing of fake money on a scale that defies reason… without fueling hyperinflation. In fact what should have fueled a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan surge of prices has, to everyone’s confused horror, seemed to produce Deflation or at best Disinflation. Depending of course on what one chooses to measure.

So the US dollar that should have made Venezuela look tame has simply pottered about…. Nonetheless the inflation is there albeit the effect has been a massive asset price bubble, world wide that is, in part, fueling the huge popular discontent noted globally.

Had I encountered all my above informants varied financially founded oppositions before last year, then their thinking and mine: would have been broadly congruent.

However it is now my opinion [for reasons I have shared with you] that their and my objections were /are pre-revolutionary. I mean, the FIR* transformation changes all things … Again. And since I hardly think I am smarter that any of those aforementioned excellent writers… I choose to keep my proposed solution method, as a private fiction that I have tested on all of you on behalf of the character that introduces the financing idea, in the second part of the story mentioned above.

Ok. So you can all relax. I haven’t gone mad and flat earthly-ish type weird: I am simply progressing with the background to my story with your tacit participation.

What predictions next then, when asking: What If?

So when it comes to predictions here’s one for the road: so I can say Yay later.

Based on the current line up; I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only person the Democrats can field, who can beat the Trumper in 2020: assuming she could beat the ‘Tweeds’ and secure the nomination.

*[The podcast ‘Jonker’ you will remember, is Part Three]

Cheers

!NiK[’19]