Littlebangtheories’s Blog

I can imagine companies like Apple losing the iphone and returning to being mobile  service providers ( itunes) and the Visa / Amex /Banks becoming the next generation of mobile handset makers…as security becomes an issue ( phone as wallet).

The advantages of having all your money at your fingertips in real-time by mobile should have some interesting spin-offs.
How are business transactions going to tracked -taxed ..? Will the Tax Office inspect mobile phone transaction.
The disappearance of the cash ( black ) economy ?
A tipping point should surely come ..when coins and notes become too expensive to circulate as demand for them drops ( 10 -15 years ) 

I wonder if any country would dare to make records public ( increasing security by making all transactions tranaparent )  once cash had disappeared…casuing  tax receipts to increase.

Addendum: 16th June 2010

What if…as in Africa , the telecoms allow credits to be traded as money..do they become Bankers as well…able to create as much ‘credits’ as they like and control inflation as well.

Could be a regulatory mess …if we can all become monetary issuing entities.What would the consequences be?

When the blood hounds just sniff blood….the fox is dead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/business/global/25swaps.html?em

Greece has symptoms.So some buy some bond insurance.So the cost of bonds go up.So it costs more for Greece to sell bonds…..so Greece has more symptoms ..until the bonds fail to sell and the insurance makes money.

Self -fullfilling…or just an accelerator to the inevitable ?

Probably the latter.Greece could’nt balance it books in the good years..it won’t now in the hard years to come. A default is coming….

The Germans will have to lose some fingers before they act….so they will act late in the day and that will cost them.Thats politics…..just not possible for the Germans to act early.

I wonder what the political fallouy cost will be…..German State control over EU finances…a German Chancellor for Europe ?

I think I’ve posted on this before .At the moment 30 economists have written to the Times with one outlook and 60 others have written with another outlook , supposedly in opposition to the previous economists.Cue jokes about economists who can’t agree over anything.

( BBC joke …If you lined all the economists end to end  in a line , you would still not reach a conclusion .

my favourite is …three economists go hunting deer…one aims…misses to the right ..next aims …misses to the left…the third …exclaims…”we got IT!”…)

Actually …markets are unknowable because knowledge itself alters the market.Therefore widely desseminated knowledge would widely alter the market..hence there can not be a consensus.If there is…it will fail to come exactly right.

If we all knew exactly how economic indicators were going to behave , we would all go out and purchase financial instruments to take advantage of that and that itself would alter the result.

England created Income Tax so it could wage war against other Europeans.

Alongside other financial instruments of war ( the Rothschild war chest Bank that lent money at better rates than the French could fund themselves) , its these factors that determine whether the army is going to be able to find the food to march on and for how long.( The French had the War-gastronomy angle  on their mind as they invented tinned foods for troops  while the nation of  shopkeepers spent its time wondering about the costs )

In India, that Tax cash cow that funded the   World Wars ,the Brits could have remained in power  as they kept themselves separate , in Cantons , like a Caste .Just what India likes .

But because , unlike the Moguls , they could actually collect the Taxes they imposed , they were always going to get kicked out.

Its one thing to have Taxes , its another to collect them.Have a look at the Sub-continent and you get the idea.

To prevent the Tony Blairs of this world from taking from a well funded tax-base ( UK) and conducting adventures  abroad based upon personal whims…I say lets go back to the roots of Income Tax.

Lets increase income tax by 10% during wartime .The furor that would ensue would mean that only justified wars will take place and that the soldiers will go in with good well funded equipment.