The Value of a Dollar (as featured on austinheretic.com)
Economic and financial markets are just like people.
They are temperamental, volatile and they can either bring you great happiness or great despair.
Don’t you realize that?
Why is it that we put so much value on a green piece of paper with a dude’s face on it? Why is it that when I swipe my bank card at Chipotle, Cava, or another Guadalupe Street staple, the machine registers my account, does its thing, and then Chipotle is authorized to give me a bowl of rice, chicken, lettuce and sour cream?
Why does a college or university accept my parent’s money and not, like, 254 pickles per semester?
It makes sense and it doesn’t.
Anyways, why even care about saving up for retirement when the national and global economies could collapse due, in large part, to the Federal Reserve’s negligence?
Also, why can my credit score instantly go up right after I sign up to use the services of a credit or personal finance company?
That alone speaks volumes to the artificialness of credit. A few numbers next to someone’s name doesn’t mean a thing, yet it holds so much over us as humans. The only likely reason credit scores exist is that it gives big banks and other financial institutions the ability to make you feel bad enough about yourself and use their services, since, you know, they care about you a lot.
Big Banks claim they care about you and your goals, right? They don’t. In fact, they would likely love for you to overdraft and pay their astronomically high fees, adding more to their top and bottom lines.
Big Schools assert they care about student’s financial wellbeing, but they offer a few optional seminars that hardly anyone attends and the core classes that students take are so unapplicable to personal finance. You know our country’s education system is in the toilet when we have students memorizing astrophysics equations but can’t properly budget.
Big “Anything” does NOT care about you or your future. They care that you spend your shekels at their overpriced establishments. They want you to pay a filthy price premium that benefits them alone. They want you to come back soon and do it all over again.
The cycle starts and ends all at once, over and over again.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t need Uber Eats to give me a high five or a hug whenever I order food from the app, but I would love if their ads represented the actual experience of having my cold food appear at my door.
A truthful ad campaign would be ultra-refreshing.
It would probably go something like, “are you looking to pay absurdly exorbitant delivery fees so some poor average joe can wait at a restaurant for like 12 minutes, pick up your food, and drive through traffic for a meager wage, but while they’re stuck in traffic, they notice your bag of food smells good, and they steal a few fries which becomes a handful which becomes your entire dinner?! Well, you’ve come to the right glitchy, annoying app to do such things!”
Uber Eats is not your friend.
Bank of America is not your friend.
Any major university or college is not your friend.
The Federal Reserve has never and will never be your friend.
You can take all that to the bank (if the bank held anything that actually had any value, that is).
Suffice it to say, the value of the money attached to your account and routing numbers is just about as valuable as general debt itself. At its core, money is worthless, credit is worthless, and debt is worthless.
If the dollar hasn’t had any real value since its inception, why should we believe it has any value now?
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