Photo: Julian Bleecker, Everyday Digital Money conf, UC Irvine, 18-19 Sept 2008.
(B***S***)
The U.S. Mint is temporarily halting sales of its American Buffalo 24-karat gold coins because it can’t keep up with soaring demand as investors seek the safety of gold amid economic turbulence. The 1-ounce coin has a face value of $50 but is priced for sale according to the fluctuating value of gold.
Which aspect of [...]
A large Australian eBay seller, EBS International Pty Ltd, skipped town with “thousands of dollars”—an understatement, given almost thirty pages of furious feedbackers out hundreds of AU$ each. In the resulting brouhaha, PayPal has come up with what it calls a “one-off process”: offering users compensation only if they sign (and fax) a statutory declaration. [...]
Surprisingly clear:
In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made.
If the NYT and its ilk did actual [...]
Via RISKS, B. Elijah Griffin (a/k/a eli@panix) points out that the LA Times staff writer (Matt Moore?) is hinting at a next step in the Zimbabwean crisis:
Apart from the paper crisis, the real fear inside Fidelity is that its software license for the European banknote design technology that it uses could be withdrawn because of [...]
(Note the expiration date.)
[Begin update: And that date was optimistic. What a difference a few short months makes. From thisiszimbabwe.com:
End update.]
At the request of the German government, Giesecke and Devrient GmbH (motto: “Creating confidence”) has been supplying currency-quality paper to Zimbabwe. According to the AP’s (so sue me!) Matt Moore, G and D
said it [...]
BBC notes that “[f]or the first time in nearly a decade China is issuing new banknotes without the image of Chairman Mao Zedong.”
“The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Shanghai says Mao’s dominance of the tender came in 1999, when his image was introduced partly as an anti-counterfeiting device, albeit an unsuccessful one.”
See also “Promo currency.”
(Marginal revolution)
The NYT:
To put this in perspective, the difference between a [Ford] Focus and an F-250 over five years is $60,000. The annual pretax income of a typical family in this country is also about $60,000. So choosing a F-250 over a Focus is like volunteering for a 20 percent pay cut.
Of course, the same math [...]
A collection of promotional “banknotes” printed by currency manufacturers.
This one’s ugly but pithy: money with a picture of money on it. Front and back, it contrasts a crisp and bright banknote printed on the manufacturer’s paper with shopworn, filthy notes.
“Ontology” as such is supposed to incorporate really disparate things, but, still, this is a really curious list—a library of “OWL ontologies,” where the acronym OWL, according to the dyslexics at the World Wide Consortium Web (W2CW, a/k/a, the W3C), stands for “Web Ontology Language.” It’s easy to look at a list like that and [...]
OC GOP Rep Dana Rohrabacher, often condemned by leftoids for his (“stormy”?) relationship with the Taliban, says to the NYT
“Barney [Frank] has been very fair,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California and one of the most conservative members of the House. “I think that I have been treated more fairly, and a number of my [...]