The GameStop story, which is becoming more of a general short squeeze story, is a good example of what happens when an economy is fully financialized. Since there is little money to be made in making things or creating things, the best human resources flow into finance, where a bright person can get rich finding a slight imbalance in the marketplace for an asset or an error in the holdings of another player. The economy becomes a massive poker tournament with the central bank as the house.
If you step back and think about the transaction at the heart of this story, there is no moral or economic reason for it to exist. The practice of shorting a stock can have both moral and economic utility. In the former case, an investor seeing some corruption in a company or sector is letting the world know about it by betting against it with his own money. On the latter point, the blend of shorts and longs provides useful data about stocks and sectors for investors and planners.
When everyone at the table is using chips borrowed from the house and many of the whales at the table will never have to repay the house, both of these functions are flipped on their head. In the case of GameStop, some sharps were gaming the system in an effort to artificially deflate the value of otherwise good companies. GameStop is a solid little company that is an example of modern retail. They are a value-added retailer, which is the future in the world of digital commerce.
The point of the shorting activity was not to reveal some flaw in the company’s approach or signal a lack of faith in the retail sector. The point of the trade was to fool other investors into piling in on the short, so the price of the stock would collapse. This would allow the hedge funds behind this scheme to make a quick profit. The losers in this will be the people holding the stock and the company itself. Like all victims of piracy, their only crime was in trusting the system.
The neoliberal defenders of financialization will counter that the WallStreetBets activity is exactly the sort of self-regulation imagined when the process of financialization began in the 1980’s. Instead of government bureaucrats with no understanding of the market picking winners and losers, savvy players would do battle in the marketplace. In this case, clever traders saw an opportunity to raid the pirate ships raiding companies like GameStop and they carried off some booty for themselves.
This sounds great, if you are a pirate. There is no doubt that the people involved here love the action in the same way gamblers love it when some guy is on a huge roll at the craps table. It is an exhilarating drama, even for the observers. The thing is most people are not pirates and have no interest in being pirates. More important, they do not wish to be ruled by pirates. They do not want to live in a world of no fixed rules, just the shifting standards of the pirates making war in the economy.
This brings us to the purpose of having markets and rules to govern trade between people within a society. In order to have a society with any chance of survival, you have to have rules governing exchange between members. Otherwise, your society is a war of all against all. This opens the prospect of outsiders exploiting these constant divisions in order to conquer or destroy your society. Obviously, you want to prevent this, so the rules are designed to reduce division.
Put another way, economics is a tool. That tool is used to bind the people closer together, by rewarding the things that promote the common good and punishing those things that harm the common good. Inevitably, they help the society to strengthen itself against other societies. Just as males compete with one another for mates, societies compete with one another for resources and status. One is linked to the other as an immutable part of the human condition.
Neoliberalism reverses the relationship between society and economics. Instead of society wielding economics as a tool, pirates pick up parts of society and swing them around like flails at one another. In this example, a little company that probably should be private, is seeing its share prices stuffed into the cannons of financial pirates and fired at the ships of other pirates. When it is all over, the pirates will sail away to the next skirmish, while a little company lies in ruins.
This type of economics is inherently unstable. For one thing, the pirates must always be looking for new raiding opportunities. This is why the United States, the pirate’s cover of globalism, is always belching out raiding parties around the world. The quest for new plunder is insatiable. The constant war with Russia, for example, is over the pirate’s desire to financialize the vast natural resources of Russia. The Middle East is chaos, in part, because it is endlessly plundered by pirates.
More important from the perspective of the West, financialization undermines the institutions, because they become partners in the endless raiding. Instead of being the source of stability in a society, they are seen as aiding and abetting the pirates endlessly plundering the economy. Look around the West and the one universal thread is the public no longer trusts or respects its institutions. The people inside the institutions look out seeing nothing but sails on the horizon.
The age of pirates ended when the British government decided it was no longer in their interests to promote it. The British navy went out and sank pirate ships where they found them, and pirates were hung when they were caught. Eventually, order was restored to sea commerce. The modern world lacks an authority with the will and ability to bring the pirates under control. The public, on the other hand, demands such an authority, so eventually, they will find one or create one.
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Do these pirates wear eyepatches or little hats?
Little hats.
Maybe both.
Ahoy Vey.
Ahoy Vey
Stealing it (in the spirit of the thread)
“What did the Jewish pirate call out to a passing ship?”
Sure the tiny hats are ubiquitous in the circus tent. But for all the redpilled and dissident big men counting hats there sure seems to be an affinity for what schlomo has on offer, i.e. goodfeelz “winning”, make money buy things, talk about both as virtues. Ive yet to encounter a white dissident king who would leave a nickel on the table while selling his mcmansion to a young white family; his business to an eager up and coming young white man whose little hat bank leaves him 5% short in the cap stack; his farm to a young white… Read more »
I believe that mindset is changing and that tight-knit groups of whites are forming all over America and other white countries.
You don’t mess with money
rather, you can let the young white family buying your house have some of your stuff, and that works just as well. Let him keep the tractor, or table saw, or the nice fridge, etc. But you don’t mess with money.
why? I don’t know, but that’s just one of those iron rules of the universe, perhaps akin to a guy agreeing to be raped, and I don’t think it has anything to do with schlomo
When you meet your Maker, He won’t care about all those nickels you’ve hoarded to bribe Him with.
My husband and I gave one of our nephews and his beautiful cornflower blue-eyed, blond haired wife the down payment to buy a house plus paid off a sizable chunk of her ridiculous student loan to encourage them to start raising a family and for her to stay home to raise it. They did and she is.
Now you’ve can say you’ve had at least one encounter.
Thats awesome! Thats kin. Good on you, still. I reckon more of my bitter point was to highlight the nature of the transactional man. A tiny hat is easy to mock and despise, but what of the white man at the same table, playing the same game, solving toward the same priorities while schlomo moves around the pea? When he “wins”, is he really taking house money – or his brothers’? There is a point where the trader becomes a traitor, but only if his people matter to begin with. At least pirates are loyal to their shipmates, that is,… Read more »
What makes them better at looking out for their own? Thousands of years of outsider status and perceived unjustified persecution. They swim in those waters – most Whites don’t even see the rip tide about to engulf us.
The amount of normal white Americans being red pilled since the November elections cannot be over estimated.
My old mother said to the other day, first words out of her mouth, I’m sick of black people! She is mostly sick of her TV shows glorifying the black man and denigrating the white man but she can’t avoid noticing and she is over it. She ranted for like 5 minutes. And then on February 1st she sent me a text saying “its Black History Month! Now we’re going to have to hear about black people a hundred percent of the time instead of just 70! Haha!! She’s not the only one. And let’s hope the young ones are… Read more »
It’s funny, the things Normie begins to notice when the sportzball and entertainment industries crap out….
It’s also funny how much people still can’t see if told not to or just incurious. Look at those thousands of troops in D.C. right now. It is blatant, brazen and now inside a razor wired wall to boot.
It’s very presence is screaming at us and should send shivers down the spines of Americans and what it portends.
It’s also they don’t have to be around them, working remotely for example. the whole thing was always a house of cards. The only reason whites acted or trained themselves to be accommodating to blacks is because they had to work with them and for fear of being fired. So at the behest of your bodily fears your brain gets busy organizing your thoughts so only the allowable ones are moved to the front and the bad ones are buried deep in the attic. This way even in a heated moment, you are likely to not let a bad word… Read more »
Hmm. Not too sure many even trained themselves but were trained, some of the denial is staggering. As if The Lord himself was on our side, I notice AmRen pushing this one again:
https://www.amren.com/news/2021/02/a-conversation-about-race-in-america/
Admittedly, the creator of the documentary selected only ‘True Believers’, but the white’s attempts to avoid saying anything bad about other races… ever, is something to behold.
I make comments like that in front of my elderly mom quite often. “Do we live in the Congo now?” as the fifth straight commercial featuring joggers airs. I’ve yet to get her to voice a word in agreement but I know she sees it. It’s kind of an experiment I’m running to see how much prodding it takes to overcome the “No Noticing!” brainwashing.
Yeah the utility of having old people wake up is limited but it is nice to be in agreement with your family. My two sisters are hard left so I’m the only one she can rant to. I started with look how they always make white husbands and fathers idiots. She saw it as soon as I pointed it out. The race thing came later
My mother (96yo) complained when we saw some gay couples cuddling around in a an aids medicine commercial.
“they can’t allow that on tv, can they”?
Allow, nothing. They’re PUSHING it on us , Mom.
And those ridiculous lists of things black people invented, which they really didn’t. It’s not like there aren’t real things for which black people can take pride in.
But everything has to be about blacks and so anything that you can find, even at a major stretch, where a black was involved, no matter how trivial the contribution, it’s all black and we whiteys would still be in caves beating our ugly white wives if not for them.
“like”
A lot of black people believe this. It’s a whole race suffering from the Dunning Krueger effect. Unlimited confidence and low ability. Actually, they’re the race that has it, we’re the race suffering from it
It’s leading to our demise
Being around black people seems to have altered white people at the genetic level, making them weak and unable to reproduce
Truly bizarre. But bottom line whether we like it or not, our survival depends on removing blacks from our midst. Their negative effects on us as a people are deep and far-reaching. Not fun and games anymore.
Too late. White youth is 90% Africanized.
Wait: are you saying black women did NOT run the US space program? Now you’re just typing crazy stuff… Let me tell you, they made a movie about it and everything, so it must be true.
And the obsession with slavery in the 1800s is a great distraction from the slavery underway right now which is what pisses me off about black people. They get so hooked up on things from 100s of years ago they can’t see what’s happening and are too ignorant and maybe even too feeble-minded to see the atrocities right in front of their faces. They are such tools. And you would think they have to be thinking that, geez, if these people in charge can turn on regular white people after saying how great they were for the longest time, what… Read more »
I’ve often noted and mentioned this before, but blacks will get ridiculous and out sized credit for completing even the most mundane task that the average White would do w/o thinking. They do love to be fawned over and a certain group of Whites love fawning over them.
Just wait until real hardship arrives in suburbia. The stampede will be biblical.
Thought experiment:
1. China conquers Taiwain in 1-3 weeks.
2. At least two US carrier groups are sunk attempting to “save democracy”.
3. US decides maybe democracy isnt that important.
4. Long Beach, Seattle/ Vancouver, Oakland accepts Chinese military ships in exchange for manufactured goods from the orient.
The US would have peace (“Be safe!”), but only as a vassal state.
Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos.
None of this is happening any time soon.
Or ever, probably.
Correct – China doesn’t have the sea lift required. Taiwan would immediately assemble nuclear weapons. The one thing China can’t deal with presently is the U.S. nuclear attack subs, which would sink their navy and cargo fleet.
Further thought experiment:
If the USA’s Fleet Command becomes fully, woke trans, and POC populated…
Wouldn’t that offset the Chinese shortcomings?
A real collapse is the cure because it forces awareness and action. For that reason, the Deep State would choose to manufacture a different type of phony war. The core idea is to distract the plebs with measured anxiety, but not existential fear, and then ship all the alphas overseas in endless lukewarm conflict. Methinks Yemen could become the next tarbaby scapegoat.
I thought that’s what the Red Chinese Plague was for.
What happens when the alphas stop joining up? The draft? That’ll be the day. Can you imagine drafting all the aspiring rappers?
Lots of CivNat/NormieCons who were waving the flag and in love with the military just a couple of months ago now say that they wouldn’t serve and would do anything to stop their sons from joining. The change is astounding.
They can talk all they want about blacks, browns, women, and gays. The actual trigger-pullers are mostly regular white guys and they’re saying “to hell with this.”
I’m not sure they could even pull that off anymore. It’d almost assuredly have to be some 9-11 or PH type event – an evil attack on the precious “homeland” to get enough people to buy into it. Of course these evil bastards probably wouldn’t have a problem going to such lengths and hammer a (former) american city, claiming it was the ruskies or chinks. In any event, the covidian nonsense has been such an unexpected winner, why not just come up with something similar, but much more dire to get the sheeple cowering even more.
Won’t happen because it doesn’t need to and it’s far too messy.
On Xitler’s orders Xiden will get the troops tangled up in the Middle East to facilitate the MIC grift, box in Russia, and facilitate the BRI project.
The PLA will waltz into Taiwan with fairly light resistance.
China will take Taiwan, because it must.
A US carrier may be sunk, revealing the US for the over extended paper tiger it has become.
US democracy isn’t important.
The Chinese will never invade the US mainland. But they’ll control it where it counts anyway.
Based on the behavior of the US government and media China has no need to invade North America.
Taiwan is of enormous financial, intellectual, industrial, political, and strategic value to the West and China.
At some point, the fat, gay, incompetent, tranny-filled US military will no longer be a credible deterrent.
Based on recent PLA activities, they appear to believe that point is drawing near.
Back in December it was leaked that the CCP has infiltrated Western corporations, governments, and universities. https://tinyurl.com/4j8323xh The MSM sure gave that story a leaving-alone.
The only MSM coverage I saw was Sky News Australia, who are surprisingly red-pilled. I’m amazed they are still on the air.
If the West is that compromised, imagine how compromised Taiwan is, being 100 miles from the mainland and sharing a common ethnicity and language.
Simply a matter of time.
Our new “governor” Kim-Jung Goldberg.
Sinking a carrier “group” would be quite the undertaking, and for as little as I think of the diversitard military about the only way China could pull it off would be if we were docked in one of their ports. Now sinking a carrier is perfectly doable and I’ve heard there are even many third rate countries that could pull it off (depending on their suicidal tendencies). What’s interesting though is the move would be akin to the Japanese concentrating on sinking the battleships at Pearl Harbor: they’d be taking out the weapon from the last war. Apart from the… Read more »
From what I’m given to understand there is no real conventional way to wipe out a carrier group short of a nuclear attack. Supposedly the Russians have some toys that can pass through the rings of anti-air/ballistic missile protection, but whatever – being Russian, their stated qualities are questionable if they work at all. A full sinking wouldn’t really be necessary, though. A carrier is an expensive platform from a bygone era. Do enough damage to one to require a return to home waters and you’ve effectively “destroyed” it.
Nuke subs secure carrier groups. Sink a USN carrier and in 15 minutes you are radioactive dust.
Imagine being the CEO of GameStop, or belonging to the board. Must be an interesting feeling to be a cannonball.
Feeling sorry for merchants is something I don’t do well. Gamestop’s owners went for the prize. So did others.
Agreed. One thing I realized a couple weeks ago is how my favorite companies to deal with aren’t traded on the NYSE (specifically, Aldi and Menards, and even Trader Joe’s). If a company wants to swim in shark-infested waters, so to speak, I can’t be bothered to care when they get bitten.
Reminds me of a scene in the movie Margin Call, about the stock market crash in 2008. One of the analysts figured out the crash the day before everyone else, and all the top execs flew in for an emergency meeting. One of the ladies asked the man his background, and he stated his extensive engineering and physics studies. She asked “So, you’re a rocket scientist”, to which he said yes and stated how much better the money was in the financial sector. We have battalions of potential rocket scientists who are, instead, being hired mercenaries for large financial firms.… Read more »
Shoot, building things that can actually benefit human society and/or deepen our knowledge of the universe is so yesterday. When you can use your intelligence to game the financial system mostly run by grifting idiots, and can cash in big time, why not? Don’t have to work as hard, make better $$ and can afford to buy all the useless crap that rich people typically do. Modern (former) america in a nutshell.
I just read a really good post by Scott Locklin arguing that we will never again be a, “society that builds things.”
I believe it. Unless it involves re-building or repairing things that used to work – if appropriate parts can be found or, god forbid, made.
“The quest for new plunder is insatiable.” Arguably, this is at the heart of woke capital. Up until WWI or so, capitalist expansion was geographical (i.e. exporting products into new territory, setting up production facilities in new territory, etc.). Since geographic expansion has been fully achieved, there needs to be a new realm for expansion. This new frontier is individual identity, which replaced the group identity of yore. Woke capital is simply creating new markets by selling to identity groups instead of regions. As a result, there is a drive for ever-increasing identity groups because that is literally market expansion… Read more »
It is unfortunate that so much talent is either funneled into finance for building/buying/selling complicated derivatives or into tech for advertising and blender recommendations.
However, given the current state of universities/NASA/government labs/etc, I don’t think it is actually that misallocated.
> However, given the current state of universities/NASA/government labs/etc
That’s another problem. Even the pure people who don’t care as much about money don’t have a place to go where they can just work without politics getting in the way. The new generation missed the exhilarating cowboy days of the early internet.
These days the real talent is locked up and being burnt out at SpaceX.
I don’t know how Elon is getting around the diversity mandates with the fedgov contracts SpaceX holds.
I want to say it’s because they are a private company, but that seems far too simple.
A recent news item is that SpaceX is being investigated by the DoJ for discriminating against non-US citizens.
I can’t speak to the talent at SpaceX, although Musk’s companies certainly have a reputation of burning out employees. However, current estimates for SpaceX’s total number of employees is only around 8,000. Talent is definitely locked up elsewhere as well.
SpaceX can afford to burn out talent because it’s a resume-maker the way Google was 15 years ago and Microsoft was 30 years ago.
I heard that too, but I thought DFARS (or was it ITAR?) didn’t allow that?
The plaintiff in the suit is neither a Citizen nor a Green Card holder. This sounds insane to me.
It shouldn’t sound insane. It isn’t your country any more.
The rot goes all the way through. How many decently intelligent people do we have who should be figuring out how to get rare resources out of the earth and make them into something, but are instead getting their MBA so that they can better move numbers from one column in Excel to the other (without regard to what such movements do).
Always a good thing to remember. There is a market and a demand for everything. It’ll be interesting to see how the demand for ‘protection from diversity’ increases massively in the coming years. Even if it has to be done by, ahem, unofficial contractors.
There are still millions of people who want a stable family in a safe neighbourhood. And this is a major selling point of anyone offering community, or talking about banding together as the smegma of wokism descends.
Self segregation in that way will be made illegal for the average white but red sea tribe members will be allowed that kind of protection.
Israel?
There is a good chance that may happen. In the US before the UK, but at some point all men – and this is hard to face – will have to ask not whether it is illegal, but whether is it just. I don’t know how I’ll stack up, but that tipping point is coming, and I hope I choose right. It is a horrible and frightening question to ask oneself, yet here we are. Get all the good, solid people round you while you can. Make all the good, solid people from you while you can. Also, we’ve yet… Read more »
“ask not whether it is illegal, but whether is it just”
Law used to be represented by a balance of the scales.
Blindfolded Fortuna holding them is both the yin and the yang. The heart and the arm, neither overwhelming each other.
There is a legal term called an “attractive nuisance”. Think rusty girder shaped like a teeter-totter balanced near a cliff or a closed amusement park full of fun things to fall off of. The owner of said nuisance has to put a fence around such “nuisance” or suffer liability when children, US citizens or other trespassers harm themselves. My wife and I live in a safe community to raise our children. High taxes act as a fence against poor people. Almost double the tax amount in order to pay for private schooling and avoid the degenerate culture. Open societies, towns/… Read more »
Me being a bigot and all, the first thing I thought of when I read this was: women. Off to Gyno-Gulag for me.
“High taxes act as a fence against poor people.Almost double the tax amount in order to pay for private schooling and avoid the degenerate culture.” Interestingly, while this is the ‘classic’ wisdom, it is almost wholly inapplicable in our Extreme Clown World. You are probably going to encounter far more degeneracy surrounded by a bunch of rich white people then you would surrounded by some salt of the earth low income trailer hicks. May want to read some of your kids textbooks and talk to their teachers sometime, you may get quite a surprise… (yes, even private school) Rich white… Read more »
Indeed. I couldn’t agree more. Locating public schools, finding the staff and examining their Twitter feeds is a most revealing exercise. It is a great tool to use for converting others; scary as it may at first be.
GME is crashing. One set of pirates have left. Another set of pirates is having fun now. Pigs got slaughtered.
There was no reason to continue to hold a long position in Game Stop past Friday. The short contracts all had to be met then and the company’s financials do not support a stock price of $350. It will settle down below $50 a share. This was unavoidable.
Yup.
The big guys squealed about getting caught napping, but they’ve been around the block.
Eventually they were going to wriggle out of their shorts one way or another.
Exactly. The ones who kept holding or bought when the stock crossed $300 are the pigs that got slaugtered later.
Financialization has corresponded with Washington taking over more and more political power from the states. Financialization consolidates power on the economic side.
Industrial capitalism spreads power throughout the economy, much like when states used to be more important than the federal government.
Then, of course, you have technology and tech companies consolidating power in their realm. The country is now run by a very small elite in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
One way to fix the current system would be to eliminate limited liability, so that everyone who owns a company, whether directly or by proxy, is fully liable for the behavior of the corporation it owns. The other fix would be to only permit direct sales of shares privately. There is really no economic value to short sales, options, puts, etc., at least from the standpoint of functional output of the businesses. There’s no reason for the economy to be treated like a casino when Vegas exists for gamblers to get their fix.
Eliminating limited liability means every small business owner who runs afoul of the woke mob is at risk of losing his home. No thanks.
Unofficially he almost is anyways, almost. If you don’t bake the cake – it’s lawfare, doxxing, public and private harrassment…
Hate to tell ya but we already are.
Small business owners are also less likely to run afoul of the mob, since the mob generally targets large, TRE companies.
Are there any corporate legal beagles around? I’d be willing to bet that there is law and legislation to prevent this kind of thing, and that it is being ignored – much like insider trading. The usual power brokers never get punished for doing that – just the dirt people…
Know thy enemy. Waking Up To Reality (cont) Jackboots are real. They exist because no tyranny can survive without them. Most are Caucasian men who have been screened & selected based upon their proclivity for following orders and the propensity to act with violence on autopilot. And they all believe that they act with righteousness and official sanction which immunizes them against guilt or restraint. They could be your neighbor and will still feel no remorse for your persecution. They are formidable, lethal, and prefer to attack only in overwhelming numbers. And they are best avoided. There is no upside… Read more »
Yup.
There are enough woke/PC bro types and civnatters in LE and the military for the Bolsheviks to field a formidable force.
“The pirate’s cover”
I think you meant “The pirate’s cove”. Good essay nonetheless.
“When it is all over, the pirates will sail away to the next skirmish, while a little company lies in ruins.” Be patient with me; I studied physics in school and worked a career in engineering, and I’m sure there’s some business-world fundamental here that I’m not seeing. Help me. Suppose I have a business, Game Stop. I need capital to expand it by buying more capital equipment: stores and fixtures, I suppose, whatever it is you need to Stop Games. Okay, so you issue stock, people buy it, you take the money and buy your capital goods, and let… Read more »
Technically, the wild gyrations in GME over the past week have no relation to the company’s fundamentals, which Z has pointed out are not bad. It was nothing more than an opportunity for two opposing factions – wall street insiders vs. retail outsiders to duke it out in a pretty much unprecedented fashion. Lots of money made and lost, but I imagine the company officers and employees benefited very little other than to see their retirement accounts (if they have them) and any company stock they might own shoot to the moon and crash back to earth. Company stock holders… Read more »
Note that a lot of the retail outsiders were guys who have fond memories of GameStop and gaming in general.
This is why u/DeepFuckingValue was able to mobilize the masses on YouTube and WSB. He understood this key psychological part of the situation.
You couldn’t mobilize people like that over an alfalfa farming stock that was 140% short.
use the Hallmark ruse, never go public with your shares—
To first order, I suppose it is the shareholders that lose or gain money. However, there are second order effects. For instance, depending upon how low the share price falls, it may no longer be possible to raise sufficient funds (for acquisitions, expansions, etc) by selling shares. This could force the company to need to borrow.
Yeah, I can see that. Thanks!
Not really in my wheelhouse but I’ll try. GME was being naked-shorted with the intention to force the stock price down below where the fundamentals would dictate. This can (and was probably intended to) cause a cascade effect where everyone starts running for the exits thinking there’s something wrong with the company. When that happens vendors go from allowing 30+ day terms to demanding “cash on the barrel” and at that point it’s game over and off to bankruptcy court.
From the company management perspective it doesn’t matter provided you have enough cash in the bank to cover invoices, and don’t have debt. After the IPO the stock market is simply a market in second hand goods. Hence it’s called the secondary market. It is essential as people need an incentive to buy into the IPO in the first place. Another way to look at it, is that a savvy company with cash on hand can use this to it’s advantage. If the shorts win and weak hands sell, then the company can buy back shares at way below market… Read more »
The broad answer to that question is that it matters because your equity is only one component of your capital structure. Debt is the other. And a severe collapse in your equity will impact the terms and structure of debt/credit offered to your firm. GameStop probably had a revolving line of credit which it used to fund operations. That line of credit likely was canceled, or at least severely restricted, during the short squeeze. Ditto for vendor financing terms. Few large businesses can survive on cash terms, even if they are profitable. Once their credit lines get cut it’s a… Read more »
“The thing is most people are not pirates and have no interest in being pirates.”
I’ve felt this way for a long time. There’s no place for us cash-under-the-mattress men in the modern marketplace. Everything’s gotta be a scam, entitlement or loophole in a world whose rules are constantly changing for the sake of change. Like wiping away your footprints at the crime scene.
” The practice of shorting a stock can have both moral and economic utility. In the former case, an investor seeing some corruption in a company or sector is letting the world know about it by betting against it with his own money. On the latter point, the blend of shorts and longs provides useful data about stocks and sectors for investors and planners.” For the first time ever I think, Zman, your talking bullshit…I am a long term investor (never shorted a stock)…there is NO necessity for a company ( or your gun, guitar, shoes, lawn mower, you get the… Read more »
It is not about “rights” which is why I never mentioned it. It has nothing to do with liquidity either. I think you are confusing the naked short with the regular short.
Granted naked shorting is worse…..but markets have been in existence thousands of years (more on than off) and for the huge majority of those years there was no short selling of any kind ….even the times of market disruptions when short selling of any kind was outlawed, the markets settled down ,albeit, with much less volume and volatility…
Thank you for this discourse….
P.S. Could be wrong, but guessing our Jewish friends promoted this through the years…of course, my Sicilian brothers and sisters learned rapidly (or rabidly!) from them..
Shorting is implicit in all transactions. If I have a coin collection and sell it to you, I’m doing it because I’m desperate, I’m bored with it or I think its value will decline, so I would rather put the money in something else. Formalizing the short between two parties is fine, as long as it is regulated. Both sides need to be able to guarantee the transaction. That’s where you need regulations to put hard limits on shorting. After all, there is a limit to what you can lose on the long position. There is no limit on the… Read more »
If you have a coin collection, YOU own it so you can sell it or buy more….it’s not the same as borrowing your coin collection from a third party and I sell it and promise the third party to buy it back so they can give it back to you…..truly don’t understand your point….it is incredibly different
Long term investing doesn’t mean you won’t necessarily short a stock. By not buying a stock you’re betting that its price does not change. By shorting a stock you’re betting that the price decreases. A short can also help you hedge your long positions.
If your “betting” your not really “investing”…but even investing is a gamble when you can’t believe the numbers management gives you..
This is what is disturbing about libertarians. They’ll argue about how a pirate economy is what they want. Anarcho-capitalists will drive this point till they die.
It’s always centered around a wet-dream like Atlas Shrugged, where they imagine themselves as titans of industry who “help” ordinary people.
Never crosses their mind that, in reality, the closest thing we have to that is Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, who clearly despise the little man.
The only comments worth reading are the original comments to your articles. This is true for other posts from other sources. It’s interesting how many comments are derivatives, responses to other comments, etc. These are not worth reading, and yet, the greater the number of these, the greater you can tell the effectiveness of the original post. Good job, btw, on your post. I believe you are right.
Much of this piracy would disappear if interest rates were allowed to rise to their natural level. They haven’t been there in decades. If someone is making a good return on savings, that capital is less likely to be deployed into exotic financial instruments in an attempt to make a margin above inflation. Most of this damage was done by the Federal Reserve, which has been juicing the system to bail the economy out of each and every recession since 1990. It’s easier said than done however. If this situation was ever corrected the recession that rebalances everything would be… Read more »
I agree, but it will never happen because the interest on the national debt would become untenable.
The economy is created by society for its own benefit, not an independent pirate? Someone will need to come along and set things straight? Look out Zman! That’s the kind of rational thinking that led the most rational and educated people in Europe in a certain direction. Gosh, we can’t have that!