Iraqi Dinars. Bad Investment, or Worst Investment?
"Iraq is a US vassal/puppet state. I'm not sure what 500 South Vietnamese Dong were worth in 1972, but today the paper currency is worth $10 in mint condition. I'd suggest blackjack or craps as an alternate ""investment""." "Currency, like gold and other commodities, isn't really much of an investment at all. It doesn't actually generate any return. Its value might fluctuate at a different rate than that of the US dollar or Euro, but that's about it. It might have a place as a very small slice of a basket of global currencies, but most US / European households don't actually need that sort of basket; it's really more of a risk-management strategy than an investment strategy and it doesn't really reflect the risks faced by an ordinary family in the US (or Europe or similar). Investments shouldn't generally be particularly ""exciting"". Generally, ""exciting"" opportunities mean that you're speculating on the market, not really investing in it. If you have a few thousand dollars you don't need and don't mind losing, you can make some good money speculating some of the time, but you can also just lose it all too. (Maybe there's a little room for excitement if you find amazing deals on ordinary investments at the very bottom of a stock market crash when decent, solid companies are on sale much cheaper than they ordinarily are.)" "Once a currency loses value, it never regains it. Period. Granted there have been short term periods of deflation, as well as periods where, due to relative value fluctuation, a currency may temporarily gain value against the U.S. dollar (or Euro, Franc, whatever) but the prospect of a currency that's lost 99.99% of its value will reclaim any of that value is an impossibility. Currency is paper. It's not stock. It's not a hard commodity. It has no intrinsic value, and no government in history has ever been motivated to ""re-value"" its currency. Mind you, there have been plenty of ""reverse splits"" where a government will knock off the extraneous zeroes to make handling units of the currency more practical."
"For real. AAA treasury bonds are used a safe investment vehicle for the reason of ""its the US government, its safe"", which is pretty similar to the ""dude, who doesnt pay their mortgage?!"" line of thinking.      You got people dumping money into these derivatives and suddenly someone goes ""oh yeah you just bought a bunch of bad debt that should be rated 'junk'. Oops.""" You have stumbled upon a classic trading strategy known as the carry trade. Theoretically you'd expect the exchange rate to move against you enough to make this a bad investment. In reality this doesn't happen (on average). There are even ETFs that automate the process for you (and get better transaction costs and lending/borrowing rates than you ever could): DBV and ICI. "The risk is that greece defaults on it's debts and the rest of the eurozone chose to punish it by kicking it out of the Eurozone and cutting off it's banks from ECB funds. Since the greek government and banks are already in pretty dire straits this would leave greece with little choice but to forciblly convert deposits in those banks to a ""new drachma"". The exchange rate used for the forced conversions would almost certainly be unfavorable compared to market rates soon after the conversion. There would likely be capital controls to prevent people pulling their money out in the runup to the forced conversion. While I guess they could theoretically perform the forced conversion only on Euro deposits this seems politically unlikely to me." Swaps form backstop to a shit load of int'l trade. Liquidity of currency is a huge factor in being a govt reserve currency, which USD currently has the VAST majority of holdings. This agreement is a shove against USE dominance in trade settlements, which is negative. Also challenges us general capital markets dominance a bit Surely there's more to the picture than this.  Breaking the borrowing limit by going to 3.5% multiple times is surely no where near as bad as going to 18% once.  On top of this there was a fundamental difference in the use of capital.  Borrowing to invest (as Germany did) has been ridiculously beneficial for them. "I think you're confusing risk analysis (that is what you quoted as ""Taleb Distribution"") with arguments against taking risks altogether. You need to understand that not taking a risk - is by itself a risk. You can lose money by not investing it, because of the very same Taleb Distribution: an unpredictable catastrophic event. Take an example of keeping cash in your house and not investing it anywhere. In the 1998 default of the Russian Federation, people lost money by not investing it. Why? Because had they invested the money - they would have the investments/properties, but since they only had cash - it became worthless overnight. There's no argument for or against investing on its own. The arguments are always related to the investment goals and the risk analysis. You're looking for something that doesn't exist." "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/july/global-energy-investment-fell-for-a-second-year-in-2016-as-oil-and-gas-spending-c.html) reduced by 86%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Global energy investment fell by 12% in 2016, the second consecutive year of decline, as increased spending on energy efficiency and electricity networks was more than offset by a continued drop in upstream oil and gas spending, according to the International Energy Agency&amp;#039;s annual World Energy Investment report.  &gt; Global energy investment amounted to USD 1.7 trillion in 2016, or 2.2% of global GDP. For the first time, spending on the electricity sector around the world exceeded the combined spending on oil, gas and coal supply.  &gt; The United States saw a sharp decline in oil and gas investment, and accounted for 16% of global spending.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6nqnvn/july_global_energy_investment_fell_for_a/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~168423 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **energy**^#1 **investment**^#2 **spender**^#3 **year**^#4 **Global**^#5" It's a failed state. The belief that people are going to hunker down in austerity and pay off national debt was always silly.  Sucks for the bond holders, but all these people who bet against sovereign debt defaults have bet wrong. "It's a risky ""investment"" given how capricious the government can be, and like another poster said... if you don't understand it and can't explain proof of work, cryptographic hashes, and how and why there's a limit to total BTC ever, as well as changing difficulty to PoW, and what implications that those things *might* have..." I would strongly recommend investing in assets and commodities. I personally believe fiat money is losing its value because of a rising inflation and the price of oil. The collapse of the euro should considerably affect the US currency and shake up other regions of the world in forex markets. In my opinion, safest investment these days are hard assets and commodities. Real estate, land, gold, silver(my favorite) and food could provide some lucrative benefits. GL mate! It looks like the advice the rep is giving is based primarily on the sunk cost fallacy; advice based on a fallacy is poor advice. Bob has recognised this trap and is explicitly avoiding it. It is possible that the advice that the rep is trying to give is that Fund #1 is presently undervalued but, if so, that is a good investment irrespective if Bob has lost money there before or even if he has ever had funds in it. Damn. I just looked to confirm. Without reinvestment (but just holding dividends), looks like the return through 2013 is 0 and then there have been decent returns since 2013, but holy shit, it does not look good at all. All of that not adjusted for inflation.  I wonder how much of that shitty performance can be reasonably classified as 'necessary' due to the spin-off of GE Capital, which generated a lot of the profit for GE but really was a huge problem for them when liquidity became scarce in 2008. I asked a followup question on the Islam site. The issue with Islam seems to be that exchanging money for other money is 'riba' (roughly speaking usury). There are different opinions, but it seems that in general exchanging money for 'something else' is fine, but exchanging money for other money is forbidden. The physicality of either the things or the money is not relevant (though again, opinions may differ). It's allowed to buy a piece of software for download, even though nothing physical is ever bought. Speculating on currency is therefore forbidden, and that's true whether or not a pile of banknotes gets moved around at any point. But that's my interpretation of what was said on the Islam site. I'm sure they would answer more detailed questions. "I think the issues you have listed will definitely be some of the larger ones over the next few months even. In relation to interest rates though I think inflation/deflation will aslo start to become an increasinly debated topic, especially if they decide on more QE.  Over the next few months into the election I expect to see a flight to quality from the big money and then from retail investors (aren't we already seeing this?). This would bear negative for most stock averages and indexs and positive for ""safe"" assets such as gold, treasuries, what else? In my opinion the industry that stands to take the biggest losses are the  financials, particulary the TBTF banks. This will be a large issue in the election and there is really no way they can walk away from the Europe situation unharmed.  In the event of a war (Israel/Iran I assume you mean), I would imagine oil would come up from the relative low it is at now. This would then increase the appeal of Nat Gas which I don't think can stay at the price level it is at now.  tl;dr - bearish for the stock markets, bullish on safe assets as doubt in the system increases significantly" "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2017/10/20/The-Macroeconomic-and-Distributional-Effects-of-Public-Investment-in-Developing-Economies-45222) reduced by 48%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; This paper provides new empirical evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in developing economies.  &gt; Using public investment forecast errors to identify unanticipated changes in public investment, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output in the short and medium term, with an average short-term fiscal multiplier of about 0.2.  &gt; We find some evidence that the effects are larger: during periods of slack; in economies operating with fixed exchange rate regimes; in more closed economies; in countries with lower public debt; and in countries with higher investment efficiency.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/77ql6o/imfthe_macroeconomic_and_distributional_effects/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~232230 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **public**^#1 **investment**^#2 **IMF**^#3 **paper**^#4 **view**^#5"