Financial Collapse: It’s Only Natural
[Based in large measure on a speech found here on Control rights (and wrongs) by Andrew Haldane at the Wincott Annual Memorial Lecture, London 23 Oct 2011.]
Everything you say seems true to me John, and I suspect that the structural incentive problems are deeper still than you have yet gone.
It seems to me that money is not a measure of real value to individuals, but only of exchange value.
There is no economic value in abundance, yet there is huge social value in abundance.
As a society, we are still in very dangerous systemic territory, even if all of your measures are adopted, because the incentive structure of money optimisation will reduce “redundancy” in the systems. The really big issue is that the redundancy is required for very low probability and very high impact events. Over a long enough time-frame such events become certainties.
That is why simply tinkering with the monetary system, as you have proposed, will not provide the secure societal outcomes that are socially desirable.
What you are proposing is necessary, and not sufficient.
