Topic: the huge Problem that most people doesn't really understand - page 2. (Read 9407 times)

I don't disagree with any of the above, but (in this particular context), investing and saving are two entirely different things.  If you look back through the thread, the user i was addressing was mistakenly assuming that his money should maintain its worth *without him investing it*.  In other words, he felt that he should be able to put his money in his mattress, and come back to it being worth just as much as when he left it there.  That's, if I am reading you right, the opposite of what you are saying.  I have nothing against investing - we'd be living off nuts and berries if it wasn't for that.

A.) Absurd.  Dogma.  Why?
B.) Hoarding is both the correct and most commonly used term for it.  There may be other terms for it, but that's not relevant.  Your claim that a thing must be scarce to be hoarded is proven wrong.  Hoarders hoard - money, feces, old newspapers, what have you.  That type of non-life-affirming behavior is called "hoarding."

*If you're rich and brilliant like Howard Hughes, it's not called anything, at least not to your face.

That's exactly what I mean.  Money (and currency, not quite the same thing) is an abstraction of wealth, but not wealth itself.  As noted by others, thinking of cash/gold as wealth is a common error.  Think about what the "old money" of the North-Eastern US does.  They certainly don't sit on billions of dollars, or even billions of dollars worth of gold; they buy assets and/or commodities.  That's investing, but it's also savings.  They may simply be buying equities in corporations, but that is still an abstraction of what real savings is.  The corporate capital is the savings, and the stock certificate is simply a deed to a small part of that.  The monetary price to aquire said stock certificate is only relevant to when it's bought or sold, the rest of the time it's irrelevent.  In the novel Cryptocromicon, a wealthy character describes it like this, "Gold is not wealth, gold is the corpse of wealth; I can show you how to make  wealth."

I agree with you that we have been eating through commodities like oil for centuries, but you can't possibly mean that these commodities are "savings"?  Sure, the oil economy can't continue indefinitely, but neither can the universe (which, according to the second law of thermodynamics, tends toward entropy).  I'm not trying to nit-pick but by savings, I mean not spending MONEY for a nontrivial amount of time.  I'm all for trying to cut down on unnecessary consumption.

Well, I think, the OP wanted to know the way to protect his money from inflation.
As many pointed out, keeping "wealth" in money is not a good idea.
Therefore, I've suggested converting money into something else.
In my opinion, investing into essential business is the best option.

Money is nothing more than a temporary storage of wealth.
One should not store his "wealth" in money because it will depreciate due to inflation.
All standard currencies will depreciate - process is unavoidable and unstoppable.
Best advice for OP is to save and then invest into something inflation-resistant.
That is assuming that there is no interest on debt to be paid.
If there is interest, need to pay that first.  

Well, A.) Don't cite a TV show as an example. Ever.

and  B.) None of those things are scarce. There's another term for what that is. But you already know that

If you take money out of this argument, than what, exactly, are we talking about?  What do you mean by the word "inflation"?
As for your other points, I agree.

See TV show "Hoarders."  I suppose you could argue that old newspapers and broken combs are scarce, but most won't find your argument convincing.
+1 for creativity, nonetheless.

Hoarding implies there will be or already is a scarcity of whatever it is you're hoarding.

Saving money in your bank account is not the same thing. Not even close.

1. I wasn't talking about money. I was talking about "wealth".
2. Hoarded or not - it doesn't matter. I have "wealth", I don't want it to depreciate.

Basically, all I wanted to say is that: if you truly want to preserve your "wealth", you should invest into essential business.
You should not invest into currency or diamonds.
You may try to invest into housing/land, metals or stocks - if you have insides into how these markets are manipulated.

No matter what happens in this world, there are 3 things that people will always want: food, health and s_ex.
If you have the business dealing in those "essential" areas, you will be ok.
Investing into these type of businesses I would consider a true protection against inflation.

We dont need to Go back to 2008 also for that
Fiat economy is worst we can see every week back

That is the problem Hera fault is not of OP fault is of yours, Why you only go on Thread Title Why dont you take a bit of Time to study and watch where you are Investing and where you are driving.
Good Luck to Hold your oins not to PANIC SELL

Credit cannot exist without someone first saving the capital to support the extension of said credit.  There is no way around the fact that savings, in some form, must exist.  However, savings isn't necessarily in any fomr normally associated with the concept.  Savings can be food storage or the like.  Take this example...

Before the industrial revolution, most economies were agriculturally based, the United States included.  The new colony in the wilderness needed to establish farms quickly, in order to produce food for the families.  If the farms did well overall, the community could commit resources towards other endeavors than food production, such as craftmanship, artistry or public works; but none of this can come before the surplus food production even if there was some rich dude with gobs of gold able to lend out for credit (lacking a greater society to trade resources with).  Gold or not, if the colony couldn't produce enough food for it's own population, the young people who might otherwise study blacksmithing, advanced carpentry, masonry or any form of art would have to spend their time hunting or gardening in order to make up the difference.  That would be what we call 'subsistance farming' today, where the methods used require all of the labor time of the community to maintain an even keel, and leave no surplus gain.  In this context, any surplus gain (for the individual farmer, or the community at large) is the savings.

If you really want to learn something about this, I recommend the Uncle Eric Series starting with Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?  They are great, short primers on economics and praxeology.

EDIT:  The above example should provide a hint as to why both gold and Bitcoin, while great forms of independent currencies, are not capital in the proper sense.  Both are an abstraction of capital, because so long as a trade market exists, both gold or Bitcoin could be traded fro true capital.  Capital is the means of production; i.e. to the farmer, the tractor is capital; to the ditchdigger, the shovel (and backhoe) are capital; and to the programmer the computer is capital; but to the recreational gamer, the computer is a toy.

EDIT2:  And when I say that we've been eating through our capital for decades, I mean this literally.  In our modern world, oil is the primary input commodity for just about everything, including industrial fertalizers.  In a world where such protrolem inputs become significantly more expensive, less valuable uses get priced out; while everything that currently utilize cheap oil as an input becomes more expensive, as production shifts to more expensive methods and inputs.  Industrial food production is no exception, and a greater number of the population must become involed in their own food production (via backyard gardens, hunting, fishing, etcetera) in order to provide enough cost-cutting|savings|production|whatever to support the entire family.  Youth unemployment might be very high for some time, but they better be reading gardening books from the library whether or not dear old dad still has a job or not.

Could OP finally PLEASE correct the thread title to make it comply with basic grammar rules? Thanks. If I see this popping up every day in my Updated Topics list I am more likely to panic sell.

Saving does not need to precede spending.  Buying on credit is not only possible, but commonplace.
We have not "been eating through the accumulation of savings of our predecessors for 30+ years."  Perhaps some of us have, I have not.
I agree with "that which is not sustainable cannot continue forever," though you have failed to show the relevance of that truism to this topic.

Savings must come before consumption on the aggregate.  Nothing else is possible.  We've been eating through the accumulation of savings of our predecessors for 30+ years.  By definition, that which is not sustainable cannot continue forever.  The only difference between savings & hoarding is the perspectives of the observer.

You're mistaken, that's not "what money is for."  That's what you want it to be, but your wish has no basis in reality.
Money is not meant to be be hoarded any more than food is meant to be hoarded, and inflation is the mechanism through which money-hoarding is discouraged.  

The analogy begins to fall apart (as they always do), but when you want to consume, you bid the price up.

If you want to invest instead of save, you use your money to buy for instance another microwave to the shop owner for a share in his business. Or lend money to someone who will invest.

Resources are needed both for consumption and for investment, the money queue is for both. Saving is necessary to invest, either the investor or someone else by lending. Thinking that you can create investments or consumption by manipulation of the money supply or the interest rate, is a fallacy.

You can change the market by the manipulation, but that only means some other person is moved backwards or forwards in the queue. Ultimately, the investment must use resources otherwise used by someone else to invest or consume, the result is suboptimal.

What you describe is saving, but this is what money is for. You do not have to save the actual dinners, don't buy them, or if you made them, trade them for money,

It's all about LIQUIDITY, in your 'in-line' analogy holding money is not like getting out of line because you the money holder expect to go to the front of the line at any time you wish.  Holding money is like lurking at the front of the line refusing to consummate the purchase because you can't decide between a hotdog or nachos.  You might be letting individuals pass you one by one while maintaining your position at the front.  That is bad line manners even when you let people pass and one jerk at a time doing it is annoying enough, imagine dozens of people at the front of a line who are just 'holding' thouse places and who you need to pass.  

Then imagine that they start demanding to be PAID in order to be passed, they say they EARNED that spot in line and they might buy something at any time if the whim strikes them so they should be compensated for giving that up.  Soon their are a bunch of people just camping the line and they have formed a kind of cartel, no one actually uses the line anymore, their are just a group of people who act as rent seekers at the front of the line and everyone must pay them to pass before buying their hotdog.  That's interest and the banking system, it arises from giving people unconditional rights to just sit on money.  We would never tolerate this in a line and we shouldn't tolerate it in money either.

If you want to keep your purchasing power then you need to actually go to the back of the line thus giving up liquidity, this is what any decent bank CD will do for you, protect you from inflation with no risk.  But as everyone has said investing is the smart thing to do which would be like opening up another hotdog stand so some of the line moves to you and everyone gets served faster.