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If War Can Have Ethics, Wall Street Can, Too

• Eridrus 10y ago
  This seems like a reasonable place to start a discussion, but hard to assess without real proposals. If I had to guess at what he is suggesting it seems to argue for all risk to be borne by the company, which really seems like an argument for less risk taking and more consolidation, not too surprising from a military man, but pretty anathema to technologists.
  • rustynails 10y ago
    The market will still be free. The business that protects its workers will be outpaced by the business that automates with minimal staff. If you ask an existing business to retain its staff, a new business will appear that will capitalise on automated efficiency as they have no benchmark on which to be compared (eg. Walmart importing cheap Chinese junk or Uber bypassing taxi industry protections). I applaud the attitude. In fact, I'd love to see similar ethics applied to the media. The prejudice I see from most media outlets (especially around gender discrimination) is absolutely appalling. Domestic violence is a prime example. I rechecked today to see if the media had stopped its extremely sexist views and was disappointed to see a complete lack of ethics.
• titraprutr 10y ago
  "Ethics of War" sounds like an oxymoron.
  • teekert 10y ago
    As a defender one is a partaker in a war. As partaker in a war one can choose to either take or not take prisoners and one can choose to torture said prisoners or not. These choices represent different levels of ethicality.
    • elcapitan 10y ago
      It's also not always necessarily attacker vs defender. You can have wars between two sides that both want to go to war. Also, there was a whole period of war (the so-called Cabinet Wars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinettskriege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinettskriege) which was for the most part just princes with smaller armies in a very constrained manner fighting each other. So it's not always the same there.
  • wolfram74 10y ago
    And yet it is internationally recognized to exist. Here's a video that goes into how war has more formalized ethics than, say romance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc
    • M_Grey 10y ago
      It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny it. That's the reality of war.
      • jt2190 10y ago
        True, but this fatalistic view alone isn't an argument to stop trying to maintain ethical behavior even when when waging war.
        • M_Grey 10y ago
          Absolutely, and I didn't mean my post to come across that way. This topic makes me a bit glum, and I think that comes across as defeatist, but I'd rather take on the correct, losing fight, than not fight at all.
      • HarryHirsch 10y ago
        On the other hand, the Thirty Years War caused such destruction that the institutional memory in European nobility lasted 250 years. Total warfare on such scale was only seen again during the Peninsular War.
    • rhizome 10y ago
      And yet Curtis LeMay died a free man.
    • nostrademons 10y ago
      In times of peace, sure. In times of war, it's usually forgotten within 1-2 years of the outbreak of hostilities.
  • sgift 10y ago
    Without ethics of war you'd have no war crimes, everything would be okay the moment a war starts - not really a good idea. Sure, in a perfect world there wouldn't be any war, but that won't happen as long as there are humans.
    • mason240 10y ago
      Which is they Geneva Conventions and other treaties of the like make it clear that the protections only apply to groups that have signed and follow them. The proto-ISIS militia groups in Iraq did not, and would deliberately target civilians, refused to wear uniforms, and hid among civilian population. Because of that they did not have POW rights that afforded to legitimate militias.
      • lostlogin 10y ago
        Refusing POW rights is as much a reflection on those they fight as it is on ISIS. If you're making categories like this you have crossed the moral line, if not the legal one.
        • valuearb 10y ago
          POW rights are earned by wearing uniforms. Not wearing uniforms means you've passed a moral line that encourages the murder, if not slaughter, of civilians.
          • lostlogin 10y ago
            That may be legally correct but is that morally ok? How do you apply this to groups history looks upon sympathetically? French partisans come to mind, but there are dozens of other groups that had similar situations. Selectively deciding abuse of humans is ok is a slippery slope. Not wearing a uniform may relate more to total oppression or occupation rather than be an indicator of disregard for civilians.
            • mason240 10y ago
  • smhost 10y ago
    From the article: > Of course, the Just War Ethic suffers from a problem: The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed. The question for the ethicist then is this: Is it more ethical to make continued (and often ignored) normative pronouncements against the existence of war, or to engage with the temporal reality of war with ethics that seek to limit the cases in which war is undertaken, to moderate its effects, and to guide it toward the normative goal, with the understanding that this goal is not immediately or fully achievable? Obviously, advocates of the Just War Ethic, myself included, come to the latter conclusion.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      The author's argument is a good one, but note that, in the (perhaps rare) case of just wars, he doesn't even have to concede this point: > The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed. With the exception of true pacifism, which is exceptionally rare, essentially everyone agrees that there are just uses of violence. When within a nation with a functioning government, this is the police's uses of force. When it's between nations, it's war. No one would think that rules governing the police's use of violence are inconsistent with the fact that we'd all prefer violence be unnecessary. Likewise, there are at least some just wars (by at least one of the participants), and in these cases the just participant need not be morally flawed at all.
  • dickbasedregex 10y ago
    Not a vet, eh?
  • angersock 10y ago
    Careful not to cut yourself on that edge, sparky. :|
• muninn_ 10y ago
  If Wall Street can have ethics, the US government can, too.
  • dickbasedregex 10y ago
    We're all doomed.
• sfard 10y ago
  Wallstreet has rules. They're just not enforced. People would be shocked if they knew, for instance, how many hedge funds simply operate on a model of "black edge" insider trading.
  • smhost 10y ago
    Hahaha, I doubt anyone would be shocked at all, to be honest.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    >Wallstreet has rules. They're just not enforced. People would be shocked if they knew, for instance... If you replaced "Wallstreet" with "War", your statement would be no less true.
    • dickbasedregex 10y ago
      Eh... the difference is when there's photos of war crimes something often actually happens. When it comes out that there were business crimes, no a whole lot ever happens. Maybe someone resigns. Real justice happening there... Don't get me wrong, things slip by on both fronts. But when it's financial, there isn't any sense of moral/righteous indignation to incite actual action. It's more like, "oh, bankers are screwing people again? Well, that's what they do. They'll just worm out of this like they do everything else."
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        You know what? You're right. That is a huge difference, or at least, it was. Now? I think we're seeing a turning point on both; we see what happens in Syria, but realize that we're in no position to prosecute anyone... when people care at all. That said, until very recently I would have agreed with you completely.
        • lostlogin 10y ago
          Have a read of the Blackman case. It illustrates both of your points. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/16/alexander-blackman-soldiers https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentis...
• rallycarre 10y ago
  In war, there is a benefit to treating your enemy with dignity. Treatment of prisoners, morale("we are the good guys"), etc. In Wall Street there isn't with white collar crime only getting a slap on the risk when they put millions of people on the street. The system is broken when corruption and misdirection is not punished with the weight of their crimes.
• linkmotif 10y ago
  Bad premise war is a crime against humanity, or eh, should be.
  • dukeluke 10y ago
    As is screwing up the global economy for greater profits.
  • Coding_Cat 10y ago
    Wars are fought not only by the aggressors. And the aggressor can be acting to prevent amoral behavior (attacking a state which is engaging in slavery/genocide of its people, but one might argue that is an act of war in the moral sense). If one accepts that acting in a war in such a capacity is the more moral choice than inaction, then it makes sense to talk about the ethics of war, such as: when is lethal force against enemy combatants acceptable, what weapons of war have justifiable risks?
  • zanny 10y ago
    When has there been an ethical war? Not if the art of war can have ethics in conduct, but where the war itself was a just one. The only just wars are revolutionary ones, if any. Except revolution today, like the Arab Spring, isn't done in a formal war. Hell, no real revolution is done like that - even the American Revolution was predominantly guerilla tactics. The wars that obey codified ethics are always the formal wars that were started for purely unethical reasons.
• kolbe 10y ago
  The vast majority of "wall street's" corruption is its relationship to the rent seeking opportunities that the US government makes available for them. And what's hilarious is that its the same bleeding heart liberals who demand things like the government provide low interest home loans who are shocked and outraged to learn that "wall street" commits "frauds" around them (i.e. bankers are doing what they're asked to, and when it blows up in the government's face, get scapegoated).
  • cowpig 10y ago
    You've used a lot of incendiary language here but I am struggling to find a concrete point. What rent seeking opportunities? Who are "bleeding heart liberals" and what "demands" are you talking about? What fraud are you talking about specifically? Who was scapegoated? What should have happened, in your view?
  • deleted 10y ago
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• mjfl 10y ago
  Standard ignorant and hyperbolic discourse about Wall Street. > When faced with illegal or immoral orders, it is the duty of professional soldiers to refuse such orders. When such a refusal occurs, it is followed by thorough investigations, and potentially courts-martial or war crimes prosecutions for those who issue such orders. In the case of the former Wells Fargo employees, the opposite occurred. Imagine the moral and societal hazard if the military permitted such retaliation against those who reported illegal and immoral behaviors. Well's Fargo is a bank that makes money by selling financial products to people including bank accounts and credit cards. To do this they employ salespeople. These salespeople are tasked with selling these products, as much as they can. They have a compliance department that explicitly says "don't lie to people when you sell to them". The salespeople broke those rules in order to meet the sales goals, so they were fired. The way the author writes this article, it's as if they think it is immoral to be a salesman and that the executives of Wells Fargo should be court marshaled for requiring them to sell a lot of things. The analogy, and to equate selling things with war crimes on the battlefield is absurd. > Hedge funds and investment banks utilize high-speed trading to place the individual investor at an insurmountable disadvantage. It's unclear what the author mean's by "high-speed" trading here, I assume they mean high-frequency market making, but most hedge funds are not in high frequency market making business. Does the author know what they are talking about? Probably not. High frequency market-makers like Virtu and Hudson River are in the high-frequency market making business. And it's unclear how high-frequency market making hurts the individual investor, it's much more concrete how high frequency market makers hurt the banks (old-school market makers) and help the individual investor by closing down the bid-ask spread. Even if hedge funds were employing techniques to put an individual investor at a disadvantage, isn't that their job? Hedge funds are in the business because they can presumably make better trades than average, and so anyone who is on the other side of the trades they are making is presumably going to be losing out. This would be like challenging an NFL team to a football game and complaining that their wide receivers are too good athletes. And why should we prioritize the "individual investor" over institutional investors? A pension fund handles money for retired pensioners, while an individual investor might be some dentist day-trader - why should we prioritize his well being over the pensioners? He presumably has enough disposable income already.
  • 10y ago
• erikig 10y ago
  I disagree with the author's premise: "Nearly a decade after one of the most devastating financial collapses in modern history, Wall Street appears as corrupt as ever." Considering the size of 'Wall Street' the size of the ethics violations that he uses as an example are miniscule. In addition, due to the increased scrutiny that financial institutions face and the potential damage that scandals can cause, legitimate organizations seem less willing to risk ethics violations. Also, unlike in war, ethics violations on Wall Street can be reported and prosecuted relatively easily. As mentioned in many comments above - Wall Street has ethics, one can only hope that the current administration doesn't take steps to weaken threaten these.
  • TelmoMenezes 10y ago
    I wonder how one could say this stuff with a straight face after witnessing the credit crisis of 2007, and the not only lack of consequences for the highly unethical and very likely illegal activities that lead to it, but also the subsequent largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that ever took place in human history. Bankers were literally rewarded by the system for being evil. Many lives and families across the globe were destroyed by their actions -- be it by evictions, loss of pensions and savings that took a lifetime to build and related suicides. Let us not whitewash all of this stuff.
  • rhizome 10y ago
    If the financial ethics laws (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley) had any teeth, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon would be in prison right now.
• jamisteven 10y ago
  War has ethics?
  • etjossem 10y ago
    Yes, see the Geneva Conventions for a good example of an ethical code for war that signatory nations can formally agree to. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
    • deleted 10y ago
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• dlwdlw 10y ago
  The article's premise is that war is vicious yet moral, so something less vicious like wall street has no right to complain that morality is a second level concern. A king not killing another king is moral between kings, but those that followed the loser can suffer greatly. The closer you get to becoming god, the more callous the hands gambled. The definition of being god here is how effective you are at controlling perceptions, how your followers perceive reality, your personal religion in a way. So from the peasants view, the kings and gods are corrupt, removed from reality. That is because the god of peasants has always been the god of livelihood, while the elites worship the god of power. The greater god ignores the lesser god.
• eip 10y ago
  You mean like white phosphorus and depleted uranium? Those kind of ethics? Not sure I want Wall Street having those kind of ethics.
• gumby 10y ago
  This is an interesting and broad analogy which I hadn't heard of before. The military, at the end of the day, is a tool (famously, another tool of diplomacy). Either it's useful or not. Likewise finance is a tool (fundamentally a service industry like gardening or medicine). We support it because it helps finance business, helps people manage their pensions etc. Sometimes sidelines are useful too (DARPA, gun hobbyists, weird financial instruments that increase liquidity for everyone). Yet lately the ends have been forgotten and the means elevated. The recent US proposed budget suggests increasing expenditures but there is no discussion as to whether that would be useful or not (and thus whether the increase is unnecessary, too big to even too small). The same problem has emerged in Finance: the point of an financial instrument is the instrument itself. HFT that skims a bit out of the transaction (thus is worse for the fundamental buyer and seller) is considered good. etc.
  • ble 10y ago
    People who have memorized the "marketmaking is essential" arguments for HFT may disagree with you. People who dislike arguments from "does this serve its stated purpose for society" may reject your argumentation style. I think you've got a hell of a point on both sides. If a teeny-tiny fraction of a percentage or a penny flat tax would cause a trade to not be profitable in expectation, then that trade probably never had anything to do with the real economy in the first place.
    • noir_lord 10y ago
      I fundamentally believe that governments sole job should be answering the question "is this for society?" and here society doesn't mean "the people with money" which it mostly does now. We seem to have forgotten that this is governments job and if you go back to first principles and look at government through that lens, I think you end up with the scenario where western governments are failing abd failing badly, government should be both a counterweight again other powerful interests and a referee. Single issues take far too much prominence (which they want as divisive issues by nature serve to devide people).
    • ikeboy 10y ago
• Entangled 10y ago
  War has ethics? That's new to me. The fact that some "rules" are set so idiots follow them doesn't mean everybody does, specially when they are not seen. Abu ghraib anyone? Wall street has a very clear ethics set on stone, profits no matter the loss.
  • elihu 10y ago
    There's the Geneva Convention. Not all countries have signed on, and the countries that have don't necessarily follow them all the time or when they think no one is looking, but that doesn't mean that there aren't mostly-agreed-on standards for what is or is not a war crime. If universal adherence were a necessary characteristic of ethical standards, we wouldn't have many that pass that test.
  • timthelion 10y ago
    War does have ethics. For example, the US military has rules of engagement. A great example of this is that the US at one point (70% sure) knew where the head of ISIS was. He was alegedly in an appartment building in a city in Syria. The US rules of engagement prevent the airforce from simply bombing an appartment building full of civilians, so they did nothing. That means a lot. It means that they don't simply bomb large numbers of civilians, which is a good thing. It is what makes it easy for the US military to point to ISIS and say "those fighers are uncivilized they kill civilians". It is a significant advantage on the ground, because civilians are less hatefull towards the US as a result. It is also the right thing to do. Edit: Abu Ghraib was horrible and the solders should have been sent to prison for the rest of their lives and not just a few years. Also, I do not support the US military and think that they cause more harm than good in their foreign engagements.
    • nostrademons 10y ago
      Much of this is because we're nominally at peace with Syria. ISIS is the belligerent party. We absolutely did bomb large numbers of civilians in WW2, Iraq, and Vietnam, and in the latter two cases we hadn't even formally declared war.
• grandalf 10y ago
  In war, morality is a propaganda technique to convince mothers to let their sons die hero's deaths, and to convince the young and foolhardy to join a crusade that is likely to result in their death. Periods of the biggest moral clarity in war are the periods where the propaganda is the thickest and human rationality the weakest. To believe otherwise one must believe in forces of evil that animate one side and forces of good that animate another, which is a profoundly supernatural view. Similarly, this article suggests that Wall Street lacks morality and uses as an example a VC considering layoffs that would occur if she fails to fund a round. If there is a finite amount of money, an investor will invest in the firm that shows the most promise. Many teams of hard working people are seeking investment, but only some will get it. The investor must use the available information to decide where to place her bet. If the investor is wrong, she will not be able to afford to bet again in the future. Should we all fell sorry if the investor makes a bad decision and a team of people spent several years getting paid to pursue an ill-fated idea? Arguably, the cost to society for this misstep is great, so perhaps we ought to appoint a wise investment minister to make the choices judiciously on behalf of investors? Why not also appoint a hiring minister to direct job-seekers only toward the most promising startups? For that matter, why not also appoint a business strategy minister to help startups make good decisions and avoid bad ones? While these ministerial posts sound absurd in the context of startups, this is our reality in the world of banking and housing. Ministers tell our banks how much reserve capital they ought to carry, they tell our housing market what a reasonable rate is for a 30 year mortgage, etc. Fannie and Freddie flew under the radar for years without revealing their balance sheet, drastically altering the US (and world) economy all at the behest of a small number of officials. I think the reason this was allowed to occur was (ironically enough) to avoid financial bad news when our leaders were trying to sell a war. When you introduce socialized risk the market cannot be counted on to prevent socialized losses. The game is changed. The normal incentives and disincentives do not apply. After 9/11 for example, the government became the insurer of last resort for terrorism related claims. This came as a relief to anyone building a skyscraper or running an airline, but at what cost? It eliminated much of the incentive that would have existed in the economy to prevent terrorism. We let our ministers create very bad policy. Rather than just writing poor people a check to help them get a mortgage, they create artificial demand for high risk housing loans, which creates a broad incentive for reckless expansion of a whole sector of the economy. They keep much of this risk on the government's books, making taxpayers accountable not for a simple payment to the poor person to allow him/her to get housing, but for the entire house of cards built upon those loans. We cannot allow our government to try to address so-called "market failures" by creating infrastructure that distorts and hides information from the market. Not only is it paternalistic, but it also creates a tremendous amount of risk for the whole economy. This is not an argument against welfare. We have two options for how we can think about giving welfare, either as a cash payment (with or without strings attached, fwiw) or by greasing the core infrastructure of the economy to slip in some subprime loans among the many non-subprime loans, figuring that the risk won't really be discernible by financial markets and all will be well. When capitalism contains a lot of incentives imposed by various government ministers, "free" economic behavior adapts to exploit those incentives. This is what the author of the article disagrees with. He thinks that we should all act genteel and avoid transactions that have moral consequences. The problem is that such transactions rarely occur, finance creates abstracted transactions that are rarely correlated with a desirable or undesirable social outcome. In many industries (healthcare, finance, automotive, solar, etc.) government-sponsored incentives dominate free-market incentives. When we allow this to happen, we are effectively saying that we do not want individuals to have free economic choice, we instead want a select group of ministers to create a socially responsible landscape. Welfare is distortionary, but few would argue that it is unnecessary. What is very harmful is when welfare programs corrupt the infrastructure of markets and lead to widespread behavior that exploits the programs. The goal of every industry, and of every firm is to become "essential" or "too big to fail"... in other words, to be declared to be worthy of the guaranteed support of taxpayers. Think about it this way, if issued a credit card with very low interest and a very high limit, most people could easily become billionaires simply by using low risk investment strategies. The problem is that if for even a day, the strategy requires more of a limit than is available, the whole plan comes crashing down. Even with low-risk endeavors, losses must be covered. Without forcing firms to cover their own downside risk, they of course will leverage to the max. This is what has happened in our modern finance industry, the growth since the 1990s has been due to consolidation and increased leveraging. FWIW I think that what is needed is a new financial statement to be added to GAAP which is a statement of risk, which recursively points to all assets and liabilities whose market risks correlate with solvency risk of other firms, so that a broad, a view of the risk a company faces (market, and systemic) that can be viewed in aggregate, so that we can more easily understand the factors that impact an entire portfolio. Ironically, such a statement would allow Wall Street to invest most heavily in firms with socialized risk (for those are the lowest risk bets), but at least then, regulators could impose a limit on the amount of socialized risk firms were allowed to invest in, which is one of the few things that can be done to actually stop the cycle of exploitation. Firms should have an incentive not to be classified as "too big to fail" and not to attempt reclassification if things go worse than expected.
• vfclists 10y ago
  Frankly I don't see the point of these meaningless articles. You have a financial system which is akin to a police force whose commanders are chosen by the drug dealers, and the police employ former drug dealers on the grounds that haven been drug dealers, they know more about the drug business and they can turn their knowledge to fighting the drug war. After a few years in drug enforcement the ex drug dealers return to work for their gangs, taking all the knowledge from working in drug enforcement with them, not to mention that they were still receiving dividends and profits from the the drug dealers who previously employed them during their stint in drug enforcement. I really can't comprehend why any intelligent people can expect this depraved, corrupt farcical system to work. Now you have Trump, unashamedly pro-business (ie leaving the inmates in control of the asylum) and people seriously expect things to get better. Here are your brave American presidents who can bravely and patriotically authorize the executions (ie murder) of alleged terrorists in Yemen and Afghanistan who have done diddly squat to Americans, but can't/won't a lift a finger against corrupt predatory malign financiers whose actions leave Americans indebted, dying prematurely because they can't afford good housing and good health care. Compare the deaths of Americans due to terrorism by Yemenis or Somalis, and the premature deaths of Americans due to poverty and ill-health which these banksters frauds have worsened, and tell me who Trump should be executing without any meaningful evidence or even a trial. I am sorry but due to their corrupt financial system the politicians of the Western world are becoming more and more of a joke.
• deleted 10y ago
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• fennecfoxen 10y ago
  If war can have ethics, can the Times have ethics? If the times CAN have ethics, why did it report this headline: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us-colleges-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students... for this study? http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/TrendTopic/Immigration/intl-survey-results-released.pdf http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/TrendTopic/Immigra... (see bottom of page 1 in particular.) Sigh.
  • ryandrake 10y ago
    Headline: [...] 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants Study: 39% of responding instituions reported a decline in international applicatons Are you complaining about a 1% difference, or the difference between "colleges" and "responding institutions"?
    • Klockan 10y ago
      The study also says that 35% reported an increase so this could just be random noise. So the headline isn't directly wrong but it isn't sending an honest message.
  • cowpig 10y ago
    How does this add to our discussion about the content of this article?
    • fennecfoxen 10y ago
      How does impeaching a witness help with a court case?
• nostrademons 10y ago
  Historically the idea of war having rules has had a very unfortunate past. In WW1, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 and torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania (filled with neutral civilians). There's a long list [1] of hospital ships deliberately sunk in WW1. Then in WW2, aside from even more unrestricted submarine warfare and sinkings of hospital ships [2], we also have the firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and every other major axis city; machine-gunning of shipwreck survivors in the water; the atom bombs; the impressment of Koreans into service as "comfort women" for Japanese servicemen; forced labor at both axis & allied prisoner camps; the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps; and of course the Holocaust. Modern-day, there's the My Lai massacre and Obama's attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital [3]. Probably more too, but you don't hear about them. The author cites that war has rules because rules are written down, but rules are written down for Wall Street as well. They're just not enforced. And similarly, the laws of war are only enforced on the losing side, or on scapegoats that the actual decision-makers make available as a token sacrifice. When it comes to actually conducting a war, belligerents usually follow just one rule: win. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike
  • RangerScience 10y ago
    Does that then imply there hasn't been a "losing side" to which the Wall Street rules apply?
    • nostrademons 10y ago
      Sure there is - it's the ordinary people who make their money through trading their labor and invest it through a retail brokerage. In other words, most likely...you, the reader. Hear that a company is going to beat estimates from your friend the accountant at a party and act on it, and you'll get busted for insider trading. Develop a complex algorithm to identify all the other people who are trading on inside information and do what they do, and chances are nobody will figure out what you're doing. Cheat on your taxes, and you'll get busted for tax fraud. Move earnings through a complex web of offshore subsidiaries in Ireland, Dubai, and the Cayman Islands, and you're technically following the laws of all of those individual countries, but still end up paying less taxes. Start a pyramid scheme through an e-mail chain letter, and you'll get busted. Start a pyramid scheme by creating a ride-hailing app and bringing on progressively wealthier and more powerful investors, and soon you'll own transportation. Borrow lots of money on your credit card, and you'll be dealing with aggressive debt collectors for the rest of your life. Borrow lots of money from banks for a series of increasingly more speculative real estate & casino deals, go bankrupt 4 times, start a reality TV show, run for President, and soon you'll own the world.
• econner 10y ago
  It saddens me that we've gotten to the point of comparing Wall Street ethics to war ethics and even entertaining the idea that war has better ethics than Wall Street.
• randyrand 10y ago
  The moral police are here! The moral police are here! Wee-woo wee-woo. The amount of moral policing these days is way too much. It seems to have grown significantly these past couple decades.