Contextual synonym in the realm of physics.

“Consider a round cow.”

Intergenerational wealth is why we have a clueless elite. All the scions have is capital, and the freedom they can buy (rent, actually) with capital. They think that’s all they need.

Connections? The only connections they have are with each other. That’s why they’re inbred.

Yes.

Gavin Longmuir: “Real wealth is the capacity to produce goods & services which other people want.”

Real wealth is the capacity to induce people to produce the goods and services that you want plus the capacity to pass that capacity to your offspring.

That’s why they call it “intergenerational wealth”.

Ask any family office.

Remember that all anything is ever worth is what someone else is prepared to trade for it on the day the current holder wants to sell it. One day, Facebook shares are worth a lot of $, the next day not so many $. Has there been a loss of “wealth”? Or is it merely a loss of the perception of “wealth”?

Real wealth is the capacity to produce goods & services which other people want. (Or, in the case of Treasury Bills, the capacity of the government to take from their population). There is an important difference between the financialized paper “wealth” which is the focus of the stock & bond markets and the real-world wealth which is supposed to underpin that paper. Unfortunately, the financialized tail is now wagging the real-world dog. There will be consequences!

True but that’s not what you said. You said,

”Today, we mistake a stock certificate or a Treasury bill for ‘wealth’. But those are not real wealth.”.

Misdirection.

I asked the pertinent question, which is just who did this “…stock certificate or a Treasury bill…” or other go to and why?

If you want say, lumber. You can’t directly trade a treasury bill for it but you can readily trade it for cash and buy all the lumber you want, so saying the treasury bill is not “wealth” is…misdirection.

I assure you if you were to bring a truck load of, “not wealth”, treasury bills to my house I would readily trade the car I have up on blocks for them.

Not trying to convince you of anything, Sam. Simply pointing out that a chasm has developed between the Real Economy (where people produce real goods & services for which other people are prepared to trade the real goods & services they themselves produce) and the Financialized Economy (where people imagine that others are so keen to get those pieces of paper that they will trade real goods & services for them).

At its best, the Financial part of the economy helps to direct savings (deferred consumption from the Real economy) into investments which increase the future production of real goods & services. But when people fall for the Money Illusion and start to think the pieces of paper are more important than real production, we get a bubble. Then we get a collapse. Not good.

Let’s see if I get this right. You’re trying to convince us that wealth, is not wealth.

I wonder why this would be? I wonder why convincing people that this is true would be beneficial? And who would it be beneficial to?

It’s all a black void. Such a mystery.

“Economic war is slow. It takes decades, and looks a lot like “Free Trade” to the dummies on the losing end. The US offshored its once world-leading manufacturing capacity to China, which is now the world’s #1 in steel-making, ship building, automobile manufacturing, and much more.”

They knew what they were doing.

They knew what they were doing.

They knew what they were doing.

(Repeat until it sinks in.)

In ordinary times, the instinct to keep prices as low as possible is usually adaptive; but of course these are not ordinary times, and an attempt to keep prices stable in the face of inflation by cutting costs internally is like trying to drop a ladder down a bottomless pit. A business owner cutting into his own wiggle room, which is capital, in response to an inflating money supply, which is a matter of programming, is committing a basic category error.

Moneys are used, in broad terms, as approximations of potency. The potency necessary to bring about a state of affairs, potency created the accomplishment of a state of affairs, potency facilitated by a certain state of affairs. A state of affairs like ‘having an oak log cabin’ in Afghanistan would be more involved to bring about than the a similar state of affairs in Maine, and differing ‘money price’ would be an expression this.

By presenting a money price to a man in exchange for something, you are signaling ‘i am powerful enough to have this’, in terms of your person, in terms of your household, in terms of a broader system you may be participating in; such potency that you may be facilitating for the later being remunerated in kind. It is saying that, instead of sending fighting men to take thing (and men to drive it, and men to fabricate it, and men to source it…), we simply skip the whole messy dance and you just give it to me (whom the proprietor can then say the same thing to other parties for whatever he needs that is within the means of his ‘liquid potency’ in turn).

In this light, more farcical thought exercises of relative value like ‘trading a bottle of water for a bar of gold to a perishing man in the desert’ start missing the forest for the trees; in such an extreme case, the traveling man could well either simply take the gold from the perishing man by force, or the perishing man could well simply take the water by force, or the traveling man could well simply share his water regardless.

Any given money, being a creation inside Being, naturally cannot also encompass all Being with complete felicity; which is not to say they may not be felicitous; which is also not to say they may not be more or less felicitous.

It is to say, instead of any particular being needing to be a whole nation unto itself to bring about things, they may each all participate in a same nation; this is the economy that moneys facilitate.

Today, we mistake a stock certificate or a Treasury bill for “wealth”. But those are not real wealth. Real wealth is the coal mine, the steel mill, the factory — the physical assets that generate real goods and services for which people will trade.

Quigley may have had a point when countries which had pieces of paper also had real physical assets. But this time it really is different.

Look at the US today. It cannot put a fighter plane into the sky without imported chips from Taiwan; it cannot drop a smart bomb without imported parts from Switzerland. The world has changed.

Nuclear weapons had a lot to do with this, by making all-out war a losing proposition for everyone. China’s leaders were smart enough after Mao died to recognize this. They switched to economic war.

Economic war is slow. It takes decades, and looks a lot like “Free Trade” to the dummies on the losing end. The US offshored its once world-leading manufacturing capacity to China, which is now the world’s #1 in steel-making, ship building, automobile manufacturing, and much more. And the US has been reduced to a Cargo Cult economy, exporting IOUs in exchange for real goods.

Someday, China will use its economic might to impose its political will on the DC Swamp — without firing a shot. Real wealth will result in real power.