Jim Rogers is no stranger to the headlines. Known for his natural charisma, easygoing southern charm and trademark bowtie, he has long been an industry favorite for interviews and guest speaker slots. But what he is most known for is his willingness to go on record with bombastic, headline-worthy predictions.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of consumer, investor and business confidence to the health of the overall economy. All of this, in large part, is an aggregate reflection of how people feel. And judging by economic numbers as a whole, people have been feeling pretty good over the past few years.
The fear of machines taking jobs away from human beings is not a new one. This fear has proven to be misplaced as technology and machines have created more jobs than they have taken away. But could all that be changing going forward and if so, why is this time any different?
Many economists have criticized President Trump's stance on tariffs. But in the words of Thomas Jefferson, when it comes to matters of the economy, “no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances.”
One of the most frequent expressions we’ve heard in support of cryptocurrencies over the years is, “It’s all about the blockchain.” Indeed, as highlighted earlier in this series, the blockchain technology introduced to the world by Bitcoin truly is one of its special characteristics.
In the same way that an escalating price does not validate cryptocurrency as legitimate, a collapsing price does not necessarily reveal it to be a fraud. Its long-term staying power will be determined by a whole host of other aspects in addition to investor sentiment and price behavior.
Is cryptocurrency money? The short answer to this question is clearly yes since we’ve already established that pretty much anything can be money, and cryptos meet most of the general criteria for something to be considered as such. The more relevant question is whether or not they are a good form of money.
The meteoric rise of the “cryptos” has been one of the most fascinating phenomena we’ve seen in our careers, and we continue to watch its development with great interest on a daily basis. In this week’s Insight we’ll rewind the clock about ten years and provide a high level review on how we got to where we are today.
We cannot have a conversation about cryptocurrencies without having a conversation about the blockchain. In simple terms, the blockchain is the digital architecture upon which cryptocurrencies are built. It is the accounting system, the ledger, the mechanism for keeping the transactional history for any particular cryptocurrency.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “When you boil it [cryptocurrencies] down, all it really is, is an online ledger. The difference is that there’s no government backing it. The ledger is maintained automatically on a network of computers.”
In our first post in this series, we talked about how money has implied value due to a society wide networking effect. We determined that one of the most important aspects of good money is that it is widely accepted. In this week’s post we’ll look at why certain forms of money, such as the US Dollar, are much more widely accepted than others.
Pretty much anything can be used as money, but not all forms of money are created equal. In this week’s post, we will look at different aspects of money which can be used as a sort of moneyness test to differentiate between good and bad forms of money.
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