No one say bad, they just say these people invoke turmoil and crisis for their own profit. Is it good or bad or neutral, it’s your own judgement.
Joining the ERM invoked turmoil. It was a silly idea and the valuation being wrong wasn't exactly a minority view.
We should be criticising and remembering the idiocy of Norman Lamont rather than of George Soros for profiting from that idiocy.
Now I don't know enough about the rest of Soros' career to have a view of whether he's good or bad. The infamous ERM short is not a smoking gun here.
It was obvious to increasingly.. everyone .. that the Bank was playing chicken with the markets.
Soros was on the winning side.
I believe the point your parent post was making is that these distinctions are bogus. The entire investment business (and not only that) is amoral. This is unfortunately inherent to Capitalism.
Guns are amoral too, but we still expect people to use them morally.
We still expect people to act morally, even in the absence of laws to force them to do so.
I didn't mean to equate them and I don't think I did. I was implicitly making the same connection that you just made explicitly.
> We still expect people to act morally, even in the absence of laws force them to do so.
Who really expects investors to act morally rather than doing whatever's legal? Heck, who expects Facebook to prioritize morals over profits? Don't people who have these expectations deeply misunderstand how today's economic system works?
I expect (as in bound in duty or obligated) them to. However, I expect (as in predict) they will not.
Sure, I hope HSBC won't launder money for Mexican Cartels. And when they do, I hope that some world government decides to toss the executives in jail and fine the company out of existence. And yes, when the settlement is just a slap-on-the-wrist-fine, a low VP getting canned, and the execs sitting pretty I hope for a return in the guillotine. And they all hope that I get fed up with hoping and become hopeless.
Is that what you hope as well?
Naive people do. However, part of the problem is what people believe is moral differs, it's not an absolute. Lots of people project their moralities onto society and the law and are just dumbfounded when they don't match. Is that a problem with society or the individual?
And to pull this back on track, this all came up in the context of the idea the market is amoral so we shouldn't expect the actors in that market to be anything but selfish and amoral. I think that's wrong and pernicious idea.