I was doing homework one night and the building next door's top 2 floors were blown up because some banker had a hit placed on his head. So perhaps I have pretty low expectations on what powerful people without morals can do.
This allows them to avoid simply killing each other(too risky) while still allowing credible threats to power, and gatekeeping contenders who won't play by the same rules. "Civil" society is an expression that alludes to making that ruleset ethically responsible and cooling down the competition. It's tested constantly by anyone who wants to get ahead.
The behavior is everywhere once you look: If you have a poorly regulated sport, match fixing, cheating, dangerous play, and exclusionary collusion all become rampant. If you have a labor force with few protections and high competition, they start to climb over each other to pump up their image. And when organized crime structures break down, violence erupts.
Democratic structures, coalition-building, collective bargaining, and other tactics that negotiate rights and protections solve most of these issues temporarily, at least until a majority are satisfied enough to stop participating, by which time someone ambitious will have found a new angle for changing the rules.
If it feels like this era is more unstable or more violent, it's because there are some very broad changes hitting. Disruption worked.
Most of the material comes second-hand. It's not hard to open up a biography of a powerful figure and dissect it.
This was certainly true for at least part of the Middle Ages. As Saladin famously said to Guy of Lusignan, "kings do not kill kings." [0]
See also gangs, etc.
And yet, most kings were killed by other kings or elite wannabe kings.
That makes it a big question, why it's not happening more often then they can reproduce. And it's not like they are writing on their own wikipedia page "hey, I, prince Saudi XYZ don't kill Saddam Hussein's nephew because <reason>". So of course it's some guessing involved.
And I have yet to see a more convincing one than that they have dirt on each other. It makes a lot of sense. And while you might think that getting killed is worse than getting bad press or going to jail, for them it means losing power, and that's all they have.
So let's not get too romantic here and try to discuss the facts. If you have a really good reason they don't kill each other more often, then let's hear it. But morals or an "understanding" can't be it.
The more interesting counter-examples are cases like the succession struggles in the Ottoman Empire, which after a couple of generations ran on the Highlander principle. The last brother standing became the Sultan.
Do it for a place like Italy as well, if you want to get really scared.
Wait. What?
Did this really happen somewhere? (Sorry for the question if it's stupid, I just was unaware of all of this.)
Killing a billionaire or a politician it's hard and risky but that only increases the price. Boom or bust
I mean, what city? and when?
I'd just like to read about what happened.
Almost certain that there's a market: want X killed? It will cost you this much.
The amazing thing is nobody got killed, many people in the surrounding apartment were lucky, or not home. Even the banker was not killed.
It was in Eastern Europe. I was about 15 at the time based on remembering the friend I called after it happened. Assassinations were pretty common, granted not using bombs like that especially in a busy residential area.
> was in Eastern Europe.
ah.
You could fill pages with such things in a place like Mexico...
Some examples from a quick search and mainly focused on bankers -- if expand it to business magnates in general, there are tons of such cases...
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-the-silencing-of-maltas-an...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/dec/07/italy.theob...
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/banker-sex-scandals-2011-...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/12/roberto-calvi-bla...
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-doral-bank-murder/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gangster...
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-13/inside-look-two-mo...
https://www.unilad.co.uk/featured/shocking-video-fuels-claim...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/billionaire-who-blew-whis...
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/630866527/mastermind-behind-m...
Any random guy with enough capital can short the company stock and then place a hit on the CEO.
I would expect stuff like that to happen super often but I don't think I have even heard of one real case like this.
This is basic stuff for actual short sell trades so I presume it is easy to produce in the “hit a CEO” fund space.
The second rule is that shorting is much much harder to get right than going long. Small procedural errors or day long mistimes of the market turn trades unprofitable.
Third, the market for this trade is exceptionally non-desperate people. If you have the money to make this trade happen you have virtually risk free access to trades that keep you fat & happy.
Finally, the riskiest part of this trade is the most hand wavy “hit a ceo” is not a thing I can get a counter party to hedge. It’s quite literally impossible for the vast majority market participants. Even before we talk about the very real likelihood of going to jail let’s talk about the risk of not being successful. See above about short timing.
All told the answer to “why don’t rich guys hit other rich guys to short their assets” can easily boil down to “cause that’s stupid”
In your other comments you try to make it seem difficult but when you are in control of a hit at a specific time the risks can be heavily mitigated. The bet is not that the stock will fall, it's that it will underperform it's historic correlated stocks during that time frame.
So the trade looks like this, find a stock with a very high correlation to the target (usually a competitor in the same space). At 9:55AM go long that stock equal dollar value you go short the target stock. This eliminates most risks induced by market-wide or even sector-wide price appreciation. Schedule assassination at 10:00AM. Close out the position when news breaks at 10:15AM or whatever. Even if the attempt fails, you will likely be close to even. Use margin or options to lever up.
The trade is not the hard part of these schemes at all. The hard part is not getting caught because the trades are so easy that the SEC knows exactly what to look for.
While also managing the risk of either of those times being off even a little & not accounting for the risks of the criminality of the trade.
Let me make this easier for you. Pick a share price now. A range of share prices post news event. A % chance each of those prices happen given the outcome you know will happen and an optimal execution path. Show your work on the Greeks.
What does that look like for shorts? What happens when you add the risk pricing of “go to prison forever for being stupid” to the mix?
The correlation trade buys you a big enough window to easily coordinate that. We're not talking about seconds, more on the order of hours.
>not accounting for the risks of the criminality of the trade.
Yes, I already told you that.
>Let me make this easier for you. Pick a share price now. A range of share prices post news event. A % chance each of those prices happen given the outcome you know will happen and an optimal execution path. Show your work on the Greeks.
I'm not sure what your issue is. The trade is trivial and I already gave it to you. You can't assign percentage chances to the prices after the event because there isn't enough data on reactions to unexpected deaths to assign any meaningful volatility values to them.
There is no optimal execution path in an event like that because it's predicting the size of what will be an emotional reaction programmed into headline analysis traders. Headline hits, stock price dumps from automated trading, close position 5 mins later and be happy with the money you make.
> What happens when you add the risk pricing of “go to prison forever for being stupid” to the mix?
This is what I already told you the actual problem is. The trade is trivial to make money on but it's going to be impossible not to get caught unless you do something a lot more clever to have it hidden in someone's constant trading pattern of shorts. But the trade that makes money itself is trivial.
It's the same thing with any insider information really. If you know an announcement is going to come out at 10:00AM that a company is being investigated for fraud by the SEC, you just short it immediately before 10:00AM and then close the position 5 minutes after the headline or whatever. Any % chances you assign to various prices will be a meaningless exercise because price declines are all about the public's perception for that particular company.
At the risk of stating the obvious: did this realization that reality fails to match your predictions cause you to question your model or your predictions?
I looked up the percentage swings caused by CEO deaths and it's actually not that big and not always a definite drop. So it wasn't as surely profitable as I thought. A murderous whitecollar sociopath probably has tons of other lower risk crimes he can commit instead. A typical insider trade would probably make him more.
Also I am not really sure hitmen exist outside of movies... I can't verify this without putting myself on some list though.
(Hello FBI! This is just morbid hypotheticals. I am not advocating serially murdering CEOs for profit)
It’s better to apply your energies to creating things.
And that's after the Marxists were forced to abandon their original premise: that it would deliver superior materialist results for the masses. When that spectacularly, entirely failed to come true and Marxism proved to be an economic and social disaster in every instance it has ever been attempted, the goal posts had to be endlessly shifted, decade after decade. Now it's nothing more than a fairytale, its adherents are told to patiently wait in faith until Capitalism finally dies off.
Generation after generation of Marxists have come and gone, waiting for the market system to collapse globally. Instead, it has gradually spread all over the planet, resulting in the greatest uplifting of the global average and median standard of living the planet has ever seen.
Law number 5. not a hit on the CEO, but close. Those trades are hard to pull off. the SEC is looking for successful out of the money options trades.
If not, why do you think billionaires are any different?
Happened in China, underground gangsters would phone up rich local businessmen asking if they needed their services. As well, debt collection agencies in certain countries are opaque enough that their practices border on near-criminal.
By that measure, billionaires are in any given instant 2/3rds of the way there.
You might think they would consider whether or not they'd be jailed, but that thought never crosses their mind.
You can look at cigarettes companies for trying to deflect from medical evidence that they cause cancer. Similarly with asbestos and black lung. There's so much evidence that senior leadership at large companies are more than willing to let people die rather than pay out.
Down vote me all you want, but there's plenty of evidence to convince me.
That said, I think it’s fairly impossible to spot a successful murder as distinct from accident/natural causes. Consider the death of Michael Hastings. Do I think that was murder? Probably not, but there’s no way to firmly put that thought to bed either. It certainly wouldn’t be marked as an “unsolved murder”.
Meanwhile, the modern legal system offers a much better way to destroy your rivals, take their money, and publicly humiliate them if that's what your ego demands. It suits a billionaire's style to send lawyers, not hitmen.
If I ever become one, I'll make sure to come back to this post and let you know what's up.
This is how large corporations cleans up competitors - either they buy you for the price they set or slowly destroy you through lawsuits.
Wow. What country was that in?