(October 16, 2013 at 7:37 am)Aractus Wrote: I'm not arguing that you can't negative from your quantity of real money, I'm stating a simple fact: you cannot hold a negative quantity of anything physically in your hand. A bond isn't money and it isn't negative money, and money isn't a bond or a negative bond, you're just deciding to use them as opposites for your example.
Let me ask you this, when you are in debt who has the bond - you or the bank? Can you withdraw the bond from an ATM and have money go IN to your account by doing so?
Money is real, debt isn't. If you think that debt is as real as money then explain to me how the GFC happened...
If you were to hold a proton in one hand and an anti-proton in the other, you would be holding a positive charge in one hand and a negative charge in the other. Negativity is a very real concept.
Regarding money, debt and the GFC, money is no more real than debt. Ask the people of post-war East Germany whether all those Deutsche Marks they had were "real". The physical demoninations are real, but the concept itself is an abstraction built entirely on trust. The fact that governments (and banks incidently) can create money out of thin air shows how weak a concept money is.
