Mind Reading
From the AP: "Wall Street has ended sharply higher as investors bet that lawmakers will salvage a $700 billion rescue plan for the financial sector."
How do they know that?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:21 AM
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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
How do they know that?
3 Comments:
The key word there is "bet." The Cubs are currently a favorite to win the World Series too.
Another thing that bugs me is why all the inveighing against greed. Wall Street is built on greed (usually described in nicer sounding words) Nobody minded the greed much when their portfolios were going up 20% per year. I understand the need for simplified rhetoric and blame in times of stress, but this charge doesn't make sense.
Maybe they should be inveighing against stupidity but thats a pretty wide net.
Despite being a liberal, I agree that it is wrong and stupid to inveigh against "greed." Given a chance to make a bunch of money, who among us wouldn't take it? The real negative is when people make something for nothing because actual value has been detached from compensation. This may be what people mean when they say "greed," (but I don't think it's meaning is clear enough).
The detachment of value from compensation can happen for a number of reasons -- including intentional obfuscation of the facts -- but also because of blind mob behavior.
Even if the meaning were made more clear, I find it pretty pointless to inveigh against the personal characteristics of the "greedy" ones. If there is an opportunity to make something for nothing, some subset of the population will flow into that vacuum and take advantage. The system should make it difficult for this to occur. It seems to me that forced transparency is the best safeguard. (But not necessarily the only one.)
Claiming to know what they're betting on is still mindreading.
Wall Street isn't built on greed so much as humanity is. People try to get good deals. When you go shopping, you don't pay more than you have to. The question is what does your economic system do with this--fight it or use it?
It's also very hard to predict what the future will hold. The me the best system is one that stays close to a free market so that if you try to "take advantage" of a deal, it's more likely because you're doing something that other people can actually use.
As far as contracts, I can see why people want insurance, as infuriating as it is when the bottom drops out. If you're good and they want you, whether it's sports, movies, Wall Street, or anything else (and I dont mean to imply this only goes for high-paying jobs--union contracts try to spread this concept out among all their workers as much as they can) you want to get a guarantee you'll do okay even if things don't work out as well as hoped--with perhaps a bonus if you do better than expected.
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