I was pondering after reading First Meetings (great short stories, BTW, really liked the ones about John Paul), about how Ender's trust fund collected ungodly amounts of interest while he was traveling relativistically.
With the popularity of lightspeed travel, could some way of regulating interest rates have come into effect in the four hundred (or even three thousand) years since Ender and Val started their galactic adventures? And if not, what would that have done for the economy? Would inflation have gone up? Would short-term stocks become obsolete? Would there be a new economic class of interstellar travellers who invest over an incredibly long-term period?
Admitting that I know next to nothing about economics, I found this idea very intriguing. What do y'all think?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Did many people do a LOT of relativistic travel? My impression was that most did not; that it was a once-in-a-lifetime (if that often) thing for most people.
Posted by Magson (Member # 2300) on :
A friend and I tried to figure out how much he would have made over that time if he were paid $0.01 and had it compound at 8% annualy (though we figure Jane probably could have gotten him 12-20% pretty easily, and he would have been paid considerably more for his military duty and his governorship of that first colony.
It still came out to several quintillion (yes, 18 zeros) dollars over 3000 years. From $0.01. So when Olhado said if he got paid a portion of a % of the total that he saw for a week that he could then buy all the topsoil on the planet -- he was only half joking. . . .
Which makes sense. I saw an investment counselor who used the example of Manhattan Island being sold for $16 and showed how if it had compounded for the ~500 years since then that it would be nearly $3 trillion now. Add the doubling ever 9 years at 8% interest, and it would grow very quickly from there.
Posted by pwiscombe (Member # 181) on :
There would be no reason for any regulations to restrict such practices. The reason banks want your money is to loan it back out at a higher interest rate than they are paying you. In Ender's case, they had his money for 3000 years and were presumeably able to generate more income than he was able to accumulate.
The more he had in his account, the more they are able to loan out again.