Quote from: practicaldreamer on May 14, 2016, 06:57:21 PM

In the UK the Govt.(we the taxpayer) bailed out RBS (amongst others) to the tune of £45billion. The Chancellor lately decided to sell the stake that the Govt. hold at a price less than what they (we) paid for it. It means a loss to the UK taxpayer of £13billion.

The UK though was handicapped going in. It had just gotten burned worse than anybody else in the Eurozone by the mideast Asian banking crisis, before it had really gotten fully and completely recovered from Barents' bank getting Leesoned. Plus there were Eurozone treaties intended to prevent countries from dragging each other down which had the unfortunate effect of preventing them from working together very easily as well. I mean, yeah, it did completely suck on the ground, but the guys at Downing Street could have done a hell of a lot worse.

And most of that money? Didn't really exist in the first place. The £45billion was less than the replacement value for a £65billion bezzle, ie, the money that people were pretending was real in order to continue their scam. It was distributed throughout the economy, in everybody's pockets, including the fatcats. When they printed more money, the fatcats' holdings were devalued way more than the ordinary taxpayers'. And now the £45billion that they printed is distributed through the economy, and they're coming back and making the fatcats pay back about £32billion of it. So, yeah, you got ripped off, but you and the fatcats lost a very similar percentage of your wealth. And as for your graph? Smooth out that bump and you've got a net *increase* in property value over the last few years, so the bubble got popped but your economy didn't sink.

Quote from: practicaldreamer on May 14, 2016, 06:57:21 PM

Bitcoin means Governments will lose a large tranche of their nation states control over monetary policy, were it ever to be adopted wide scale. Where would that control go ? It strikes me that by default it would go (back) to the people who were previously carrying the can (carrying the can precisely because they had no control).

Back to the uncontrolled six-to-eight year boom/bust cycle that characterized the "natural" state of the economy before economists figured out effective monetary policy, unless I miss my guess. It was a lot rougher than the ride we've been having since WWII.

Quote from: practicaldreamer on May 14, 2016, 06:57:21 PM

The commercial banks could do the fractional reserve once, but they wouldn't be able to do it twice if they got it wrong the first time round.

Your faith in the wisdom of crowds is charming, but misplaced. You can fleece sheep every year.