EVE General Discussion

Alas Yang, I hit reply with the intent of going along with your Aaronicde. I can not bring myself to follow through.

It was a reaction to the bile rising up my throat.

Currency is a commodity and traded world wide. Google "Forex"

if anyone wants to send me their worthless fiat currency (which is a massive fire risk btw) PM me for my k-space postal address.

Irony.

The legal tender thing is rather important. While there are some cryptocurrencies that are fiat money (e.g. BitCoin) but it still has to get approval from the government (it is considered a virtual currency in the U.S. and there were a number of instances where the government has acted as if BitCoin were a currency).

Governments like having their monopoly position when it comes to money and their role in the banking industry...typically because it lets them finance government activities. Banks, depending on the country and the banking system, can work to raise money for the government (basically like taxes) or can be used to promote policies indirectly where direct promotion would be much more difficult. For example, if you want to encourage home ownership a great way to do it is via the banking system as it looks like it has little cost in term of the government's budget. Of course there is a problem here in that what looks like a "free lunch" is anything but. For example, to often get this kind of a change government will implicitly promise to bail out banks and/or cover higher mortgage default rates....this can lead to a moral hazard problem which can be quite costly as we saw here.

In the case of a currency crisis things tend to go out the window. The government has basically lost its credibility at maintaining a stable money supply and people then turn to another alternative (for example in Zimbabwe it is my understanding most people use U.S. dollars).

Anyhow, this is getting quite far from the topic of PLEX prices.

It's like the currency in some places.
It's not that the prices are going up so fast.
It's that the money is losing its value so fast.
You have to raise the price just to make
the same amount of money as before.

Simple math. Something economists fail to employ.

From an investment standpoint, currency is not considered to trade in commodity markets. The commodity market is simply the trading of products that are not manufactured in any way.

Currency can be (and is) manipulated through interest rate adjustments, issuing/buying back securities, and adjusting minimum reserve requirements.

Commodities can not be manipulated like that.

Could Japan manipulate the price of copper the same as it is currently manipulating the Yen?

How do you describe the act of trading one currency against another?

Money combats the inability to trade unlike skill sets or goods in barter, We are given fiat money yes I agree, It does hold value because we use it to pay our bills. I agree that it has no underlying value.

If I've got £100,000 and I want to trade it's value against another currency then I've got 100,000 commodities.

Individual countries probably will struggle.

But try telling De Beers or OPEC you cannot manipulate a commodity price.