Also, super glad HE is retired...

maybe I missed your point?

sheesh, I'm up too late, the little cells aren't functioning properly..

He used to pal around with Rand herself.

at least among the Milton Friedman milieu which Greenspit is a brethren, and you know what they say about gurus and gods.. they're immortal.

Exactly what is a dollar bill "worth" anyway? OK, so it has the backing of the US Government...um, to do what, exactly?

By those lights, the tomatoes I traded for corn were a bubble. Those durned things will rot eventually, you know, and have no intrinsic value...

Nor should you can your Bitcoins if you have any, although I'd seriously consider selling them right now and putting that into a more stable resource. Which dollars are.

My point is that it's kind of a joke to say that coins and bills have intrinsic value. They're merely more stable, but that doesn't imply eternal stability. A Reichsmark has numismatic value, but no monetary value these days. Ditto any other currency from any country that no longer exists.

. . . or the big stone rings on the island of Yap.

But one ex-acquaintance of mine (ex because I completely cut him out of my social circle and won't go to any gathering that includes him) was huge on buying gold for when Obama collapses America and sends us back to the Middle Ages (or whatever, I wasn't really listening).

He got...rather incensed...when I pointed out that post-collapse, gold's worth jack. I can't eat it, wear it for protection, build a house with it, or burn it for heat, so why would I want it? It has minor use in electronics, but that's probably not going to be high on my list when technological levels are collapsing back to the 19th century.

A bag of potatoes is worth more, pound for pound, than gold in that instance. So is firewood, loomed fabric, and clever ideas like passive solar heaters for windows made from trash lying around.

Did you ever notice that right-wing radio programs have a gold ad at least every hour?

Someone decided that they could stoke fear in those with Obama Derangement Syndrome and convince them that they needed to buy gold. The elites were in at the bottom, then they began their ad campaign on right-wing radio and the price steadily soars.

I'm convinced that this is what happened. Most of the gold investments seems to be fear based. These ads that are saturated on right-wing radio (and Fox News too) are all about the economy collapsing.

It wasn't too long after the "gold rush" that Glenn Beck started marketing emergency meals. He started talking about food insecurity and the chaos that Obama would bring. I heard him ranting like a madman about his pantry and how it is stocked with these dried meals because "I love my family and I need to be prepared for their sake."

All of these right-wing hacks have cashed on on the fear that they have stoked in these sheep. It's crazy.

You would be hard pressed to find a country where the economy has collapsed and gold became worthless. Just the opposite, in fact-- if the local currency goes bad, gold can be used to buy necessities from outside the country.

For example,

I'll give you $10,000 or the equivalent in Bitcoins. The catch is you can't do anything with them for 10 years. Which would you take?

They have a higher probability of retaining some value for ten years. Minus a small percentage chance of total collapse. Minus a one hundred percent chance of inflation that reduces their value.

Similarly, I'd take dollars over many other countries' currencies--but not all.

However, they still have no intrinsic value, merely a much higher probability of retaining some use after a decade.

Legal Tender is a given unit of earned equity that one trades for goods and services. The market decides the value of ones effort/equity against the value of the offered/purchased goods and services.

Wall Street is about skimming equity out of the economy without providing anything of value in return.

Post the company going out of business, you can probably get some value out of wiping your butt with the stock certificate, but otherwise the intrinsic value is nil.

I'd argue that very few things have intrinsic value that can't directly be used to support a minimal lifestyle. It's too easy to picture a circumstance where money and stock certs simply have no value, a la those three burglars in that Twilight Zone episode where they slept for a century.

If you leverage most of the value of your home with bank loans and the value goes down, your deed is worth no more more than the hypothetical stock certificate you mentioned and the exact same principles are involved.

Buying stock buys you equity. Buying a bitcoin does not buy you equity. That is the difference.

That's why some are described as being "The fanciest outhouse wallpaper you ever saw".

Stocks today are little more than intangible digital blips in some computer.

"Going Public" felt like you were printing your own money.

but Greenspan's great mortgage backed derivatives were a prime example as to why no one should listen to this fool.

Warren Buffet called them weapons of mass financial destruction. He was right.

he created to help Dubya's miserable economy.

Now, THAT was a mother of all bubbles!

the "full faith and credit of the United States", a currency based on digital bits is no more insecure than the dollar these days.

...he isn't moving drugs on the internet black market.

Maybe that was the "value" he was talking about...

Buy low and sell high.

That man is a rat.

The guy has no credibility after 2008.

They only have value if people think they do. Otherwise they're just paper and metal bits.

there is a company, unless that company goes bankrupt.

Stupidass libertarian Republican was kept for two decades in a job he never understood because he was such a perfect toadie of the wealthy elite. Despite all the wreckage laid out behind him for all to see, he clearly believes to this day that he's been an omniscient blessing upon us all. What a pompous ass.

Took the bastard long enough, didn't it? In fact, I don't remember him ever admitting that there was a housing bubble.

He was the one who spearheaded that bubble and was the stalwart that everyone looked to, for economic guidance in the run up to the 2008 implosion.

The man did not issue warnings. Are we supposed to believe that he didn't know that the mortgage-backed securities that the banks were selling on the secondary market--were worthless? The Fed Chairman didn't understand? Oh please.

They were all in on it. They all orchestrated it.

And now he talks about a bubble. With a straight face.

Holy irony, batman.

Counterfeiting to me. It has the same backing, which is none.

..... since he was so instrumental in destroying the value of the dollar and our economy in general.

The bullshit that comes out of Greenscam's mouth, that's what.

Why anyone would put an pounce of credibility to anything he says after he took the economy over the cliff in 2008 still amazes me.

A few years back I worked at a computer store and people would come in to build powerful computers in order to do bitcoin calculations cause they got free bitcoins for doing so. Now I almost wish I had done the same as it seems it's really taken off, yeah probably a bubble.

Add a brand new Tesla Model S to the growing list of items you can buy with bitcoins.

An auto dealership in Newport Beach, Calif., revealed Wednesday that it sold its first vehicle with the virtual currency as legal tender.

“Bitcoin, a fully encrypted and fully digital currency, has been used by a recent client of ours to pay for a Tesla Model S Performance we had in our inventory. That's right, an electronic currency was used to purchase a fully electric vehicle,” Lamborghini Newport Beach boasted in a blog post.

A Lamborghini Newport Beach official told The Daily Dot that the buyer, who was not identified, paid 91.4 bitcoins for the premium electric sedan, which was voted Motor Trend’s 2013 “Car of the Year.”

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/electric-sale-someone-used-bitcoins-buy-tesla-2D11702822

copycat virtual currencies that operate just like bitcoin? One could become more popular and bitcoin could go the way of MySpace when Facebook took over. People who bought bitcoin at near its peak are going to real sorry.

Where was this perception ten years ago?

Where was he when things were bubbling up around him?

This is just a sad old man that is desperately trying to stay relevant.

PS -- I agree with him, though. BitCoin needs to be regulated as there's nasty fraud going on with the stuff.