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A lot of the activities that take place on Wall Street are fairly harmless. Some might even be considered socially productive.
by UVB-76 13y ago
A lot of the activities that take place on Wall Street are fairly harmless. Some might even be considered socially productive.
- greesil 13y agoYeah it's just the other activities like the occasional overleveraging that destabilizes the global financial markets and causes depressions. Or, leveraged buy-outs that fuck the rank and file of a company out of their contractually agreed upon pensions.
- jacquesm 13y ago> A lot of the activities that take place on Wall Street are fairly harmless. Most of those harmless activities do not include trading stocks, bonds, derivatives and commodities. Wall-Street is like a very powerful diesel engine, it generates enormous amounts of power and it generates enormous amounts of pollution. Hard to get the one without the other.
- rayiner 13y agoWhat's wrong with trading commodities? Remember, derivatives were invented by farmers to address very practical problems in that domain.
- jacquesm 13y agoYou'll know what's wrong with trading commodities when you see untold volumes grown and then destroyed because certain price points can't be met on wallstreet. Combine subsidies and capitalism and you get the weirdest excesses.
- tptacek 13y agoHow much do you actually know, nuts and bolts, about agricultural commodities trading, Jacques?
- clicks 13y agoShould I start following up your comments with "How much do you actually know about ${DISCUSSION_TOPIC}, Thomas?" Seriously, can you please stop with the snippy responses? This is a place for discussion not credentialing. When you make condescending comments like this it just makes this place personally confrontational, it does not progress a discussion. Please try your hardest in refraining from making such comments in the future.
- tptacek 13y agoKnowledge and experience aren't credentials. In fact, the question I asked is sort of the opposite of a credentials question. In fairness: I think you accurately identified the subtext of my question! I like Jacques and presume that he has more knowledge than me about a lot of things, but my intuition on this thread was that he was going to quote that "How Goldman Sachs Created The Food Crisis" article, or something derived from it, and conveniently ignore the central role commodities trading has in locking in prices for perishable products in the face of uncertain supply/demand. But just because I'm honest about the subtext of that comment doesn't make the comment itself rude; I worded it to create the opportunity for Jacques to come back with something like "I worked for years in trading markets and am very familiar with ag futures markets", which, for all we know, he still might.