1) From my understanding, the vast majority of fossil fuels were formed not by literal dinosaurs, but more often plant material, and most often in seas and swamps. Basically, some amount of biological matter fell into places that didn't support the normal processes of decomposition, and were instead eventually buried in things like sediment. Given geological timescales, the combination of more and more sediment piling on top, along with tectonic forces like subduction, led to what might have once been the floor of a shallow sea instead being a formation of limestone (as happened to most of Texas for example). So while it's poetically evocative to talk about "burning dinosaur bones," to quote a Soundgarden song, it's mostly burning phytoplankton :)
2) That's true, but it becomes complicated when markets for stocks are easy and fast enough (or as they say in the biz, "liquid" enough) that you can effectively trade stocks for stocks at their current nominal value. It's also further complicated by the fact that modern accounting treats stocks as a "cash-like asset" on the assumption that you can always sell them for their current market value and get cash instead, so why not just treat them as the cash they're one step away from? These assumptions, of course, ignore the role that fast changes in the market can have, and even more ignore that if you have enough of them, the very act of selling them is likely to change the market price. There's more complex financial analysis that tries to model all of this, but it's rather hairy.
3) Looks like you anticipated Scotlyn's point below! That is true for current "fiat currencies," which most major currencies (very much including the dollar) are. There are strains of economic thought that argue that such fiat currencies are inherently inflationary (almost impossible to disagree with), subject to dramatic changes in value, usually in a bad way (fairly widely accepted), and overall bad for the "real" economy of human weal (much more controversial). If you want to dig more into this, check out cryptocurrency enthusiasts, most especially "bitcoin maximalists," or go straight to the source and read folks from the Austrian School of Economics like Mises, who are the folks crypto types most heavily draw on.
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1) From my understanding, the vast majority of fossil fuels were formed not by literal dinosaurs, but more often plant material, and most often in seas and swamps. Basically, some amount of biological matter fell into places that didn't support the normal processes of decomposition, and were instead eventually buried in things like sediment. Given geological timescales, the combination of more and more sediment piling on top, along with tectonic forces like subduction, led to what might have once been the floor of a shallow sea instead being a formation of limestone (as happened to most of Texas for example). So while it's poetically evocative to talk about "burning dinosaur bones," to quote a Soundgarden song, it's mostly burning phytoplankton :)
2) That's true, but it becomes complicated when markets for stocks are easy and fast enough (or as they say in the biz, "liquid" enough) that you can effectively trade stocks for stocks at their current nominal value. It's also further complicated by the fact that modern accounting treats stocks as a "cash-like asset" on the assumption that you can always sell them for their current market value and get cash instead, so why not just treat them as the cash they're one step away from? These assumptions, of course, ignore the role that fast changes in the market can have, and even more ignore that if you have enough of them, the very act of selling them is likely to change the market price. There's more complex financial analysis that tries to model all of this, but it's rather hairy.
3) Looks like you anticipated Scotlyn's point below! That is true for current "fiat currencies," which most major currencies (very much including the dollar) are. There are strains of economic thought that argue that such fiat currencies are inherently inflationary (almost impossible to disagree with), subject to dramatic changes in value, usually in a bad way (fairly widely accepted), and overall bad for the "real" economy of human weal (much more controversial). If you want to dig more into this, check out cryptocurrency enthusiasts, most especially "bitcoin maximalists," or go straight to the source and read folks from the Austrian School of Economics like Mises, who are the folks crypto types most heavily draw on.