> Better question on that front is how it’s legal.

Because, when, after allowing FDIC broader discretion to decide how to resolve bank failures so long as at least insured balances were covered from the creation of the FDIC, Congress narrowed that discretion in 1991 by adopting the least-cost rule which normally prohibits FDIC from committing more from the Deposit Insurance Fund than necessary to cover insured accounts, they also permitted the FDIC to choose a higher-cost resolution when the required set of officials certified the existence of a systemic risk. (The system risk provision itself precedes the least-cost rule, but when the least-cost rule was adopted, the procedure for systemic risk waa changed and the system risk privision was made an exception to the least cost rule.)

The legal loophole is that it's essentially a levy on the (other) banks, not the taxpayer. The comedy, of course, is that "bank customer" and "taxpayer" are more or less the same set of people.

FDIC has broad authority to issue advance dividends on uninsured deposits, based on their estimate of what they will be able to recover from asset sales.

FDIC determined that a 100% advance dividend was appropriate, but merchandised it in a way that allows the receivership bank to continue operating as normal.

The explanation I heard was congress gave FDIC some vague exceptions to its charter because congress knew these sort of actions are politically toxic, but economically necessary(ish).

Oh I see what you mean. No I don't think it's been shown that he was hypocritical there.

I think that's the point - it was just materials and men, not so much money.

Err, weird take.

With the forenote that I'm opposed to slavery, British companies and wealthy individuals purchased (or owned) copper from Welsh mines (or some other commodity) which they traded in Africa with African nations in exchange for humans (who were purchased already 'enslaved') and then either further traded in the Americas to plantations or used directly in plantations owned.

eg:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/uncomfortable-...

This was a large and complex business enterprise and didn't involve formal enslavement by the British Government.

The Abolition referenced above was the British Government outlawing slavery within its territories and by its citizens - as an act of Government it was only supported on the promise of slave owners (which included nice little old widowed grannies of modest means with a 2/6 th share in a slave left by an uncle) being recompensed for their forfeited property.

The funds that flowed to former British slave owners went on to establish canals, factories, rail lines, develop colonies in Australia, etc.

From that it follows that everyone whose property rights were created by the British government owed tax to Britain on that property. Ergo, the American Revolutionaries were in the wrong and the U.S. owes Britain substantial reparations for property theft and non-payment of taxes.

Did that ever happen? I thought people were normally enslaved outside British territory.

Hmm... I'm now wondering if North Africa should be paying reparations as the ones who did the actual enslaving.

Well, that's specifically what they're saying they didn't do.

One thing crypto has been good for is it made us think critically about why money actually is. It's all a matter of faith and believing someone else will value it in the future...or a military will tell you to value it. Gold has the same issue; its intrinsic value is somewhere around silver or copper.

Once you think about currencies this way, you realize that while crypto could be used as a currency, it isn't; its a speculative investment, like a digital beanie baby.

No, money is suppose to exist as solid green paper. The value is imaginary but its existence is physical.

The bank and government claim that if I want my money they can give me my money in green physical paper bills because it exists in the bank.

Problem is that it's a lie. That's why bank runs are possible. And the current bank runs ends with another institution taking over and articulating the same lie.

You pay fees, even if they are hidden (e.g. lower interest rates in savings).

It's not all that funny, considering that the reason they were paying those reparations was the 'damages' inflicted upon French slaveowners by slaves freeing themselves.

consider that some countries have a larger bureaucracy/democracy than others, it may be that dictatorships with few people in thr actual inner circle of power can adapt faster than those countries that have to persuade their constituency and find consensus before making a move.

My point is that the value is no more 'imaginary' as a balance in a bank account as it is as green pieces of paper.

I'm not sure 'imaginary' is the right word. Value is real whether or not it's a social construction.

The value of money is a human construct, much as the meaning of words is.

There's a widespread misperception that money is some physical entity. It is not.

A description I've come to use is that money is the medium of greatest acceptance within a given market or region. Note that money need not be paper notes, coins, or even any sort of government issue. There's an excellent 1945 paper on the economic organisation of a POW camp which describes how an economy based largely on cigarettes and various Red Cross ration items emerged amongst Allied prisoners of Germany during WWII:

<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133>

In particular, it looks at what problems money can solve (and what happens when there's an insufficient money supply --- in this case, cigarettes), as well as those it cannot (an insufficiency of goods generally to transact).

At various points in time, clams, beaver pelts, cowhides, knives, massive multi-tonne stones (<https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...>), letters of credit, and cryptographic hashes have served as money. In mediaeval Europe, Roman coins were long used in trade, well after the Roman empire itself had fallen. In parts of the world, US dollars are a preferred currency even outside the 50 states and US territories, with several countries officially adopting the US dollar as their own national currency: <https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/040915/countries...>.

William Stanley Jevons defined what to him were the vital set of properties required of money in Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1877): utility/value, portability, indestructibility, homogeneity, divisibility, stability, cognixability.

<https://archive.org/details/moneyexchange00jevorich/page/30/...>

I disagree with him on the first property. Money may have an intrinsic value (as with gold or specie), but need not. In particular, the intrinsic value of money is inverse to the trust in the monetary authority itself. That is, in a low trust financial system, money typically consists of or is backed by some physical store of value. In a high trust financial system, currency tokens need have no fundamental utility (as with paper banknotes or digital accounts), but rather there is a trust in the system as a whole to function predictably and reliably.

The value represented by money is one that is socially, legally, and economically recognised. It's ultimately a tokenisation of credit and wealth. It is not directly tied to any physical characteristics (though as a medium of exchange it can be traded for any given physical commodity or service). That's not "imaginary" in the same sense that other social conventions such as which side of the road to drive on are not imaginary. Which side to drive on is entirely arbitrary as an initial social choice, but once that side has been chosen there are very real consequences to flouting the convention.

Social construct != imaginary.

By that logic a law requiring banks to hire security experts who can keep their systems safe from hackers is also a tax, do you object to that too?

Depositors can be made whole without receiving little green pieces of paper.

Checks, account transfers, wire transfers, etc.

There is no fundamental limit on the Federal Reserve to create (or destroy) money as needed. The Fed, as other central banks, does however exercise that power very judiciously, and with specific targets (inflation, unemployment) as its foundational charter.

Note that both inflation and unemployment are not assessed by the Fed, but by an independent federal department, Labour. It's a classic instance of not giving a single entity control over both the means of control and the measurement of success.

> The bank makes a business claim that they can redeem ALL of the green paper back to everyone at the same time.

They never claimed this. Everyone has known about bank runs, fractional reserve banking, etc. for a long time.

France required compensation money in exchange for recognition of Haiti (which was Haiti's only choice at the time, nobody else wanted to recognise them). Because of course Haiti didn't have the money nor any realistic prospects of coming up with the money soon (not only was their infrastructure decimated by the slave revolts and civil war and revolution and various campaigns, their cash crops were only viable with slave labour, so unviable in the free Haiti), French banks provided loans at exorbitant rates to pay France. Those loans were the ones that Haiti was still paying, to French banks, not France the country. Banks have zero interest of forgiving loans, regardless of ethics, so it's not at all surprising they never did.