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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Without growth, there is a fixed pie. Anyone else's gain is your loss. It becomes extremely important that you protect what you got, because once someone else has it, they are going to fight like a cornered rat to keep it.

A society without growth might be possible, in the sense that it would not violate the law of gravity. But anyone who thinks they can pull it off and be in charge is already too dumb to actually achieve it, and they will start destroying people about 5 minutes in.

People gambling money on various esoteric financial instruments do not contribute to growth.

Capitol allocation is important to growth, and all investment activity, even derivatives, are capital allocation.

Yes, but adding extra several layers of gambling doesn't help and destabilises everything. Did we learn nothing from the financial crisis ?

Did the elaborate financial products whose risks were not properly understood help in any way, or were they merely helping to set up the system for a failure ?

Investments involve risk, and the point of derivatives is to allocate that risk to the investors most willing and able to accept that risk. They exist for the same reason insurance exists.

If the instruments that are supposed to help allocate risk instead create extra risk because they're employed in an irresponsible way, what then ?

"Extra layers of gambling" seems rather arbitrary. Are calls and puts extra included in this? They're contracts that grant the right to sell or buy securities at a certain price. They also help to check prices that are either too high or too low. If there's a buying or selling panic you can contradict the crowd, help to nudge the price, and make money if you turn out to be right.

A credit default swap is just insurance.

The financial instrument is easy to point to and say "it's too complicated," but no one is forced to trade any particular instrument. The people that traded them almost certainly understood what they were, they just had little incentive to care about the risk they were exposing their institutions to.

The people that traded them almost certainly understood what they were

They didn't. Nobody understood the risks of the pooled mortgages failing.

Or rather the relevant credit rating agencies lied / didn't care, the banks who were making them didn't want to and the customers were too stupid.

They convinced themselves that the odds of a large package of mortgages failing were minimal because not enough of them could go into nonpayment at once, so even a financial instrument made out of a lot of dogshit mortgages was actually not risky because odds of mortgages failing were independent, or some BS like that.

You guys don't remember any of this ?

A credit default swap is just insurance.

Yeah, sure. But if you're buying insurance on stuff you don't own, in a completely disproportionate amount, because you see the CDS's as being just free money, and then it blows up, you could argue that it was just stupid gambling.

Are calls and puts extra included in this?

Nothing wrong with that. But why is the derivatives market apparently something like an order of magnitude bigger than planetary GDP ?

Good thing that’s a separate argument no one is here discussing

But doesn't that happen in cycles? The national economy starts to grow, then it revs up and year upon year everyone is getting richer, and it looks like the good times will never stop.

Until they do, and you are plunged into a recession. The Great Depression was like that, and so was Celtic Tiger Ireland where we were being assured that this time for sure, we had broken the old cycles, and Ireland was now going to be modern and self-sufficient and not at the mercy of outside forces anymore, and it would never stop. Then 2008 happened, and the housing bubble burst (exploded, more like) and suddenly people were taking the emigration boat and planes once more as the national economy stagnated.

plunged into a recession

The recession does not undo all the growth since the last recession. Even the Great Depression, the very rough picture was that each year of it wiped out 1 year of normal growth.

No, but recessions knock out "our economy is going to grow forever and ever and never again will there be a crash".

There is always a crash. There is always a boom.

I am not sure who in this conversation said "there will never be a down year" but anyone who said that was wrong.

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