A clever combination of a Victorian house and a modern bungalow tied together by a shared back garden. This is really the heart of the guesthouse, with plenty of inviting nooks and ample loungers around the pool,http://charliephillips.net/index.php?errorpage=404&errormessage=Component+not+found&erroruri=%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_blog%26view%3Daddpost%26Itemid%3D0cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, and terraced to make the most of the Signal Hill views. The character of the Victorian home – with its pressed ceilings, large sash windows and whitewashed pine floors – is offset with contemporary furniture and African overtures such as antelope horns and zebra skin; African crafts are used in the décor of all the rooms. Maintenance standards are exceptional (it closes every July for refurbishments and repainting).?
The great American financial historian Charles Kindleberger used to say that after six decades of meticulous research into the origins of speculative bubbles,
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Well,
jordans for cheap, if any of you have friends who got in early on Bitcoin –
the price of which has...ed in the last six months – you must be suffering from a severe loss of mental equilibrium.
Yet it is worth looking past Bitcoin as the latest get-rich-quick scheme, and focusing instead on the deeper drivers of the global fascination with the cryptocurrency phenomenon.
For if he were still alive,
Kicksokok.com, I am sure that Professor Kindleberger would judge Bitcoin to represent the ground zero at which three of the most important historical forces at work in the world today converge.
The first and most obvious of these is the ongoing revolution in information technology that is transforming so many aspects of our lives.
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Amazon has turned goods retailing on its head. Uber has decimated the price of transport. Skype has made long-distance communication virtually free. Since the financial system consists quite literally of nothing more than the recording and manipulation of balances on ledgers, isn’t it even more naturally susceptible to disruption by the IT revolution?
That is just what Bitcoin promises: a means of storing and transferring monetary value more conveniently, more securely and more cheaply than the existing monetary system, with its absurd addiction to antediluvian technologies like coins.
If the cloud has swallowed our record collections and we can speak to Australia on VOIP, why indeed is our money still lumbered with bank branches and SWIFT charges?
This idea that tech can transform money fits neatly with the second epochal trend with which Bitcoin seems utterly in tune: the collapse of trust in the established financial system following the crash of 2008,
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The public perception is that
the banking system as...the people who work in it: the benefits of the boom years were hoovered up by a lucky few, while the costs of the subsequent bust were borne by taxpayers at large through years of austerity.
The official attempts to correct this situation via regulation are too esoteric to have connected with the public consciousness.
Meanwhile,
cheap wholesale jordans, conventional commercial attempts to disrupt the industry via the introduction of “challenger banks” and the like have made few practical inroads.
Bitcoin promises a far more direct reform: an opportunity for Everyman to get shot of the incomprehensible jargon of the central bankers and simply carve a gratifying bypass around a banking system which serves its own ends more than those of its customers.
Today’s urge to take back control goes well beyond finance alone, of course; and the third great force of history with which Bitcoin is conspicuously aligned is the dramatic surge in scepticism of – even scorn for – established political authority.
Across the developed world, faith in traditional political parties and even in traditional representative democracy itself is evaporating at an alarming rate.
The president of France belongs to a party that did not exist two years ago. The president of the United States barely belongs to a party at all,http://ezyrecon.com/files/cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg,
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Even in stolid Germany,
it is no longer possible to form a government because formerly fringe parties have gobbled up nearly a third of the vote.
No doubt this upheaval stems from many sources; yet its taproot is the widespread sense that modern democracies have been captured by special interests,
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Libertarians and Marxists alike concur that the establishment and its elites have been skimming the cream, and the people have had enough.
“Populist” political parties, from the Alternative for Germany to Italy’s Five Star Movement,
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Here again, cryptocurrencies offer a radical alternative. Fed up with paying taxes to a government run by phoneys? Afraid that the state will solve the pensions crisis by slapping on a mansion tax or a capital levy?
Join those who have spirited their hard-earned cash away to a virtual world that knows nothing of HMRC by stashing all your wealth in Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies offer a way to join the political insurrection and drain the swamp – without even leaving your computer.
The seemingly unlimited potential of technology; disillusionment with traditional finance; and the decay of trust in politics-as-usual: such are the historical calls to action to which Bitcoin appears perfectly placed to respond. Yet would Professor Kindleberger have judged it up to the job?
I think not. History is replete with examples of upstart private currencies that threaten the state’s franchise on the institution of money – from the medieval écu de marc, an international merchants’ money used to settle intra-European trade, to the myriad sub-national currencies that proliferated in Argentina after its government imposed capital controls 16 years ago this month.
Frequently, these monetary innovations have played a critical catalytic role: sounding an essential wake-up call to complacent policymakers who have allowed the official system of finance to degenerate from its proper role. Yet never have they succeeded in displacing official currencies for long.
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With any luck, the cryptocurrency revolution will have just such a salutary effect.
We will end by thanking the monetary cranks for inducing some policy sanity – and making our national financial systems fit for purpose once again.
Don’t take that as a guide to Bitcoin’s price in the next week, month or even decade though. As another American professor once warned me: “Nothing can stop a bad idea whose time has come.”
Felix Martin is a macroeconomist, fund manager and author of ‘Money: the Unauthorised Biography’
