Argonaut Gone Wild

We posted a missive over at SA titled The Transactional Velocity Effect Of Speculation And Financialism.

Despite our explanations for the title and subject matter, we were incessantly heckled by a troll posing as an intellectual. The trolls screen name has been changed, not to protect the innocent, but the idiocy.


Argonaut: Nothing is a transactions velocity unless its numerator is a measure of transactions. Not a single series you cited above is.


You show a plot of the SP500 and say it shows that the volume of transactions in stock trading is increasing. It says literally nothing whatever about that matter. If I trade a beanie baby on e-bay once in 5 years for twice the price, the price will still show it doubling faster than the SP500 rise. On the other hand, if me and my sister trade it back and forth every five minutes at an unchanged price, we will generate oodles of transactions by the price series will be flat as a billiard table. The two things simply have nothing to do with each other.


More fundamentally, income is not movement of money.


We Nattered Back: Your attempt to be "literal" and subsequent beanie baby regurgitation has fundamentally misguided you into completely missing the point of the missive.


This poor misguided troll commenced erecting numerous straw-men and disingenuous ad hominem responses.


Argonaut: My point, of course, was and is that the missive doesn't have a point. It is fundamentally confused about both transactions and monetary economics, and has nothing to teach us.


SA editors began redacting many of the trolls responses and several other SA members became involved in this trolls folly.  The level of idiocy hit a crescendo with this inane statement:


Argonaut: "transactions have no direct relationship even to the income"


To which Salmo Trutta responded: Wrong. Rates-of-change in bank debits mirror roc's in N-gDp, R-gDp and inflation.


More to come in Part 2.

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