What is the economic foundation of global infrastructure?

[Vic]

Free trade.

All else is BS. Money itself (regardless of currency) is merely a symbol thereof.

 

[Rogodin2]

Free trade.

Free Trade is an market model, not a natural resource. Free trade is worthless without something like an economic unit of account. There must be something of value to underwrite the 'notes' that a country's treasury produces. Fiat currency is the smokescreen of the global economy. What truly drives this system is cheap energy and the petrol dollar.

Rogo

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2

Free trade.

Free Trade is an market model, not a natural resource. Free trade is worthless without something like an economic unit of account. There must be something of value to underwrite the 'notes' that a country's treasury produces. Fiat currency is the smokescreen of the global economy. What truly drives this system is cheap energy and the petrol dollar.

Rogo

Perhaps we're talking past each other. The term free trade is often abused and misused. I did not mean it in the neoliberalism/globalism sense but in the way that value is assigned to commodities in a marketplace by the actions of the participants within it.

Currency is an abstract. It has no intrinsic value of its own. I think we can agree on that.
What gives it value is the actions of the participants within a market, price being the meeting point between a buyer and a seller. So if the participants choose to use currency as their medium of exchange rather than say trying to barter chickens for a cow, or years of indentured servitude for a house, then by that action they have assigned value to that currency in lieu of whatever they might have otherwise bartered. And that's it. Currency has value for no other reason.
What you're trying to do is claim that one commodity drives the value for everything and that's simply not the way it works. The reason why countries had systems like the Gold Standard before was because people did not understand (or did not want to understand) how it worked. So, in order to make up for the abstract nature of money, governments provided a tangible to serve as a symbol of currency's value in order to instill confidence in market participants. But, in reality, it was an illusion.
The Federal Reserve and other central banks exist for much the same reason BTW. To give the illusion that someone is driving the bus and thus instill confidence.

edit:

Originally posted by: 91TTZ
Goods or services that you want in exchange for goods or services that someone else wants.

Exactly.

edit again: oh yeah, and economies existed before oil and they will exist after oil too. So if you wanted to say that "oil is the economic foundation of the current global infrastructure," then you might have been getting somewhere.

 

[Rogodin2]

dit again: oh yeah, and economies existed before oil and they will exist after oil too. So if you wanted to say that "oil is the economic foundation of the current global infrastructure," then you might have been getting somewhere.

Global infrastructure implies that village based infrastructure (your false variable) isn't relative to the economic model in which this global population resides.

Economies did exist prior to the discovery and economic growth of oil exploration, but those economies are irrelevant to those that are economically supported by both the oil and the unit structure of their economy (99% of our own population and 87% of the world's population).

You're properly fvcked Bic.

Rogo

 

[Born2bwire]

Bullshit apparently.

 

[Rogodin2]

Bullshit apparently.

My sarcasm meter is reading a 10+ but 'bullshit' is a shitty foundation of global economic infrastructure. Use your mind lad.

Rogo