What's a Credit?

Has anybody done the math using prices for existing commodities like gold and grain to calculate how much a credit is in terms of dollars, pounds, or euros?

Secondly, what IS a credit in game? The penultimate fiat curreny? If so who issues it? Why do competing space powers all use the same currency?
 
People have used gold for this calculation, but I do not think gold is a good example because it's clearly a commodity in the ED universe, rather than a store of wealth with significant value above the commodity level.

Silver would probably be my comparison point to current prices.
 
and how do they control inflation without market balancing equities being free-traded on commodities markets? what about market futures and hedging, keeping in mind the problems inherent with sub-prime securities loans?

I have no idea what i'm talking about....
 
I assume a credit is like bitcoin , a virtual currency. In the future it would make no sens to mesure richness by resorces like gold witch are easyer to find when you have a entier galaxy to find it.
 
Isn't gold's "worth" kinda based on how much of it there is on Earth, i.e. it's rarity? Being able to travel the stars and mine the stuff from multiple places probably has a big affect on it's value so you probably couldn't make an accurate comparison.
 
People have used gold for this calculation, but I do not think gold is a good example because it's clearly a commodity in the ED universe, rather than a store of wealth with significant value above the commodity level.

Silver would probably be my comparison point to current prices.

Good point.
 
and how do they control inflation without market balancing equities being free-traded on commodities markets?

It's cryptocurrency.

I assume a credit is like bitcoin , a virtual currency. In the future it would make no sens to mesure richness by resorces like gold witch are easyer to find when you have a entier galaxy to find it.

Yeah, precious metals are definitely pure commodities in ED.
 
It's a video game, and you're a mere pilot unable to understand all that financial jargon anyway.

A Sidewinder is worth 32,000 and that's all you need to know.
 
because space britain must have agreed to allow space 'merica to print credits as the galaxie's world reserve currency backed by gold at 9,742 CR per ton.

the space nixon administration halted space frances attempt to witdraw it's gold from the space federal reserve when expenditures in the space veitnam war showed the world that space 'murica was printing way more credits compared to what it had in gold.
 
I assume a credit is like bitcoin , a virtual currency. In the future it would make no sens to mesure richness by resorces like gold witch are easyer to find when you have a entier galaxy to find it.

Now I have an image of the humble 1 Credit coin with the face of a Shiba Inu dog gazing lovingly outwards: undoubtedly the face of an ancient Earth deity representing the state of modern business.

Much currency. Very quantitative easing. So much exchange rate. Wow.

:D
 
and how do they control inflation without market balancing equities being free-traded on commodities markets? what about market futures and hedging, keeping in mind the problems inherent with sub-prime securities loans?

I have no idea what i'm talking about....

ROFL, that's a +1!
 
Credits are the currency of mankind, it's managed by the Bank of Zaonce. Credits are basically numbers on a ledger.

Don't know who sets its's value. There's no point in trying to equate it to 21st century real world money as it's not exchangeable.
 
Don't know who sets its's value.

Nothing other than supply sets it's value, and supply is controlled by an algorithim that no one can artificially manipulate. It's the only real way to have one non-physical currency for everyone, when everyone includes competing factions. Traditional fiat money wouldn't work.

There's no point in trying to equate it to 21st century real world money as it's not exchangeable.

Just because there is no direct equivalent does not mean working out a rough purchasing power in real world terms is futile.
 
It's pretty impossible to tell.

Gold is around 10k, Animal Meat is around 1500. That's a 1:7 ratio.

1 kg of Gold is around 36,000€ right now

And what do you pay at the supermarket for regular meat? You'll be hard pressed to break 100€ on a whole kg, and that would be some ridiculously exclusive meat and a species needs to go extinct for that. So taking 36€ for high quality beef for a kg, we're looking at a ratio of 1:1000 That is, 1 gram of gold is equal in value to 1 kilogramm of beef.

Another thing is consumer electronics. Assuming packaging and all that would result in a box weighing 20kg means there are 50 products in a 7000 credit container of consumer electronics. So 140 credits per box. With a good steak apparently costing 1 credit, 140 credits for a piece of consumer electronics does sound rather right. But not if compared to gold

But moving on to my favorite piece of broken commondities - Narcotics.

1g of Cocaine here today, the price of course greatly depends on where you buy it, but in the western world you're not getting 1g of Cocaine for less than €100.
That would put the value of a shipping container containing 1 ton of Cocaine at 100 million Euros. Now obviously that needs to be cut down immensely due to the high costs of drug distribution, but even assuming just 1% of that, we're still looking at a million. Another example, The Wire Season 4 Omar sells half the stolen Heroin back to Joe for $400.000 - a bargain price, too. Since that was transported in a small delivery van, it was probably less than a ton to begin with. So this raw Heroin apparently was worth considerably more than a million dollar per ton on wholesale pricing.

But looking at ED, a ton of narcotics is worth 200 credits. Yes, those of you who have never seen narcotics as it's banned everywhere: That's the price. A lousy 200 credits for a ton of hard drugs. This wasn't always the case, in FE2 narcotics were worth 600 credits, and everything was basically increased ten-fold with ED over FE2 (animal meat went from 130 to 1300, for example), Narcotics should be one of these 6000cr commodities today.
Another thing FE2 did was double black market prices for smuggled goods that are illegal in a system. So if you successfully smuggled Narcotics into a port, you had a profit margin of over 100%!

That is basically how it should work in ED as well. Make narcotics very expensive to buy and insanely profitable to sell at black markets, but limit the demand depending on population of the system. Right now, it's more profit to carry computer components around.
 
I'm beginning to suspect that the macro economy is one of those things we should not examine too closely, let we lose "immersion."
 
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