Money under the mattress
Money under the mattress – Interview with Beppe Scienza
(9:18)
(9:18)
For those with money, money has become a worry. Once upon a time, money was a source of security. Today having money means you don’t sleep at night.
Investments in state bonds can become waste paper as happened in Greece. Banks can go bust. Shares can lose 5% a day and anyway they have values like telephone prefixes. Derivatives and futures are blasphemy for a saver. Bonds and funds are pure hemlock. Invest in currency? Which currency? The dollar or the euro that are falling together, or the Swiss franc that’s overvalued and at risk of falling? Crikey, it’s worth being poor!
Interview with Beppe Scienza, of the Mathematics Department at the Università di Torino
An idea that is not so odd
”Put your money under the mattress seems like something said as a joke, an exaggeration, and yet to think about it, this idea is not as odd as it seems at first sight and if a lot of people have this idea, they’re asking me, they’re thinking about it, they’re wondering if it makes sense because there is even something worthwhile in the idea, and there’s also a valid reason. Let’s see what doesn’t happen, the nasty things that don’t happen to you if you have your money under the mattress.
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Protection from taxes on patrimony
Another current topic is a matrimony tax, but there has been an infamous tax even though it was not so really terrible, it was done by Amato in 1992 on current accounts, on bank deposits of 0.60%. At that time, this tax hit those who had money in a current account and those who had money in a savings account but not those who had their money under the mattress. Thus having your money in cash allows you to avoid the patrimony taxes. Thus there are non-foolish reasons, if one says: “I want to put my money under the mattress”. I won’t advise them to go to a psychiatrist. This is not a madman. It’s a person who is rightly worried, having been burned by so many rubbishy things that have been sold to them, fearful of falling into other traps. First of all: It’s not absurd to put your money under the mattress. Is it possible to do that? Yes, it is possible.
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Return to the past
I would say that there’s another solution that is worth considering and once more this is a return to things of times gone by, and they are Post Office interest-bearing securities. Is it a retrograde step? Perhaps it is. Certain modern things are no good. Certain finance ideas are no good. I prefer to avoid them. I prefer a house built on stilts in the lake to a house that is collapsing even though it’s been built by a great architect. The Post Office interest-bearing securities have almost all the advantages of money under the mattress, except for one, that one is that if the Italian State goes bust, they are certainly involved in that collapse.
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" Beppe Scienza
 | Soldi rubati - by Nunzia Penelope |
Posted by Beppe Grillo at 07:12 PM in Economics
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(4) | Comments in Italian (translated)
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Once upon a time, in 1987, when the British Prime Minister, David Cameron and the present day mayor of London, Boris Johnson, were Oxford students, they were selected to became members of the Bullingdon Club. Membership to this Club is by invitation only and only the offspring of the British privileged upper class are allowed to be selected. And to underscore its exclusivity no more than 18 to 20 people are members. So, what's the big deal? No big deal, only the fact that this blue-blooded (not all the members are blue-blood) once a year make reservations for dinner at any given restaurant under a different identity. The disguise is needed to avoid the restaurant's owner alarm since the Bullingdon Club is well known among restauranteaurs for demolishing their restaurants at dinner's end. Yes, the lads go on a rampage. They smash mirrors, bottles, chairs, tables and before the police arrives, they vanish into the night leaving behind a hefty sum of money to compensate the damage done. To this day, no one made the effort to analyse the social causes of the mayhem, and that's a shame. Were I to guess, I would tend to think this uncivilized behavior springs from a "sense of entitlement" - a sentiment inculcated in the lads from day one by their upper class parents. I know that to this the lads will disagree by saying that their "sense of entitlement" is in their nature, that is, no one inculcated anything into them. They were annointed with a "sense of entitlement," it's in their DNA and cannot help themselves from displaying it once in a while, which is different from usurping it as a right as the chavs have done. In fact, the Bullingdonians smash-and-pay spree is no way near the mob frenzy we saw on the tely. And they're right, it wasn't. But were my friends and I to engage in smashing and trashing a restaurant once a year, year after year... I can just hear the police crashing down the door of my apartment, slamming me to the floor, handcuffing me and having me joining my friends at the police station. But hey, one either has a "sense of entitlement" or one doesn't have it!
Posted by: Louis Pacella | August 14, 2011 04:28 AM
Caro Signore,
se proprio dovessimo contemplare una visione cosi' catastrofica sul futuro economico dei paesi cosidetti sviluppati non penso proprio che la strategia del materasso sia ben scelta. I nostri governanti, negli stati uniti par la precisazione, stanno tentando di diminuire il debito pubblico facendo pagare noi poveri piccoli consumatori. Come? Bé in una maniera molto sottile e subdola: mantenendo i tassi bassi e stampando moneta piano piano riducono il valore del debito a scapito del nostro purchasing power, potere d'aquisto. Questa é l'inflazione subdola.
Quindi? compra oro e mettilo sotto il materasso.
un cordiale saluto,
Michele
Posted by: michele contarini | August 13, 2011 03:45 PM
Caro Signore,
se proprio dovessimo contemplare una visione cosi' catastrofica sul futuro economico dei paesi cosidetti sviluppati non penso proprio che la strategia del materasso sia ben scelta. I nostri governanti, negli stati uniti par la precisazione, stanno tentando di diminuire il debito pubblico facendo pagare noi poveri piccoli consumatori. Come? Bé in una maniera molto sottile e subdola: mantenendo i tassi bassi e stampando moneta piano piano riducono il valore del debito a scapito del nostro purchasing power, potere d'aquisto. Questa é l'inflazione subdola.
Quindi? compra oro e mettilo sotto il materasso.
un cordiale saluto,
Michele
Posted by: Michele Contarini | August 13, 2011 03:37 PM
Caro Signore,
se proprio dovessimo contemplare una visione cosi' catastrofica sul futuro economico dei paesi cosidetti sviluppati non penso proprio che la strategia del materasso sia ben scelta. I nostri governanti, negli stati uniti par la precisazione, stanno tentando di diminuire il debito pubblico facendo pagare noi poveri piccoli consumatori. Come? Bé in una maniera molto sottile e subdola: mantenendo i tassi bassi e stampando moneta piano piano riducono il valore del debito a scapito del nostro purchasing power, potere d'aquisto. Questa é l'inflazione subdola.
Quindi? compra oro e mettilo sotto il materasso.
un cordiale saluto,
Michele
Posted by: Michele Contarini | August 13, 2011 03:36 PM