Okay so the US doesn't like something about how Japan's economy was doing in the 90s, what was the beef? I know Japan was manufacturing a ton of stuff, but I thought the US wanted consumer products manufactured overseas.
So they're not happy with this, so they do a run on Japan's currency. What does this mean? Like how do they do it?
The run on the currency causes the value of the Yen to go up. This is bad for some reason, even though your currency is worth more? Like can't you get more for a Yen? But clearly it's bad because it destroyed their economy, I'd like to understand why or how.
Because right now the best I was able to explain it to someone was "America did some money magic bullshit and destroyed Japan's economy", but I would like to be able to answer some follow up questions.
It’s all bullshit tbh money isn’t real it only works bc we believe in it
It’s superstition
Money is very much real, just because it's not a social construct doesn't mean it's not real. Tell your landlord that money's not 'real' and see what that gets you. And even if we all 'stopped believing in it" and it vanished as a social construct we would still need a means of account to determine what goes where and how much, money is just the particular form of this that takes place in capitalism.
That’s simply not true
If the concept of money vanished overnight we would still be able to provide goods and services for each other. People lived for much much longer without the concept of money than with it. There’s no need to account for anything
That's not what I said. I said that just because money is a social construct doesn't mean it isn't real, it serves a very real function that has material impacts on the world and in this way we make it very real. Those societies did not use money in the modern sense with all the intricacies and nuance that this implies, but they did use some means of account to allocate labor and goods be it something abstract as socially recognized honor or a system of credit between people, otherwise there was no way to properly measure and distribute goods. Debt by Graber is a good primer on this, even hunter gatherer societies had systems of account.
Money's first use was probably even as a material object that could serve as an accounting unit. This is why early currency was made of durable metals, which could be counted and set into piles to represent e.g. a measure of grain. It gets hard to remember how much you've got or to move it around on clay tablets, but coins you can just put into different piles and keep track of things.
What do you mean by 'real' here?
It’s no different than state sanctioned bitcoin
It has no intrinsic value, other than serving as a medium of exchange, which is unnecessary
It has a very real exchange value by virtue of the fact that it is used as a means of exchange, no?
This is similar to how a word gains it's meaning from how it is used. Just as the meaning of a word is not contained in the physical sound, the value of a $1 note is not contained in it's paper (if it were we'd be discussing it's use value, perhaps as tinder).