My Actifit Report Card: April 20 2022
Got in to see the doctor today and was able to resume narrowing down causes to match the symptoms. No ideas for immediate relief, but they’re going to have an endoscopy to check out what’s going on with my stomach.
On one hand, it’s sort of weird because this will be my first procedure under anesthesia since I had my wisdom teeth out years ago, though at least the recovery period will likely be a lot easier.
Today was productive, though I didn’t get much done on either of my main projects. Instead, I spent a decent chunk of time writing about the woes of fractional reserve banking and how people don’t understand the consequences of its inflationary effect. This is, admittedly, less than money printing, but is also less easily accounted for in the market–especially under the current system which requires banks to withhold a reserve of 0% of deposits. That’s not a typo.
“How does it work?”
Well, the banks get loans from the Federal Reserve whenever they can’t clear transactions for the day. This lets them continue to be solvent while they get their money, but it’s obviously not ideal. They keep some reserves (at least we can hope) but nowhere near what they ought to have.
If there were a bank run, the government would bail them out (that’s the FDIC thing you see on all the banks), so basically the taxpayer is subsidizing massive economic gambling since banks are lending out that money for a profit.
The ethical way to handle this sort of thing would be to have full reserve banks that use things like time deposits or bonds–which block the withdrawal of funds for a set amount of time so that the bank can loan out money with much less risk–if they are going to lend (or at least contractually guaranteed minimal fractional reserves).
This is less “desirable” because it doesn’t give you the ability to make money just by putting it in a bank, but if you wanted to invest there would still be opportunities to do that (they just would probably not permit withdrawal on demand or would involve shares in an enterprise).
This should not be overlooked as a potential threat because it was one of the major causes of the Great Depression (and It’s a Wonderful Life, though in that case the fractional reserve was a result of the Savings and Loan misplacing money instead of deliberately lending it out–this doesn’t mean that historical savings and loan enterprises didn’t operate on a fractional reserve basis).
Combine a bank run with fractional reserves and you have a bad day. Insure the banks, and you manage to avoid the pain to depositors but everyone else foots the bill.
I did a good chunk of work for the client. I’m not fully happy with it–it’s layout work and I’m just not feeling like it’s going as well as I’d like. I might make some small tweaks and changes to try to get stuff sorted out. There are a few major issues that just relate to the client’s demands. They theoretically sound good, but they presented their sketch on a Legal pad (8.5”x14”) and the final requirement is a Letter format (8.5”x11”), which means that they sketched with lots of whitespace and room for designs and I’m losing about three inches.
And I still need to have room for writing for a lot of things. The client wants some graphical elements, and I’m just getting anxious about how those will even come into play with some whitespace issues already cropping up.
I’ll figure it out.
Health not great, but my cat perched over me like she was protecting me as I was falling asleep last night and it was so adorable that I can’t care about anything bad.
God is good, life is good.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
