I really wonder if those guys really created $500M worth of “value” for the rest of the world. Because if they didn’t, it means it’s theft...
Some of the market participants were effectively insuring others against the price of oil dropping too low.
That currency is only used by people in a small island, and that island only exports clamshells and imports Big Macs.
In this scenario, and unless I’m mistaken, the FAKE/USD rate will vary depending on: - how much clamshell those people can export and how much US people value them - how much BigMacs those guys import and how much those guys value them
Enters a day trader - someone who will never buy a Big Mac nor any clamshell. The guy speculates and there are two possible outcomes :
- He fails. Technically he basically gave “value” to either USD holders or FAKE have holders. Too bad for him, but he kinda made this happen.
- He succeeds. Now what? Isn’t that kind of a parasitic behavior? Couldn’t that be considered theft to some extent?
I guess the question may boil down to “why would they even let the day trader be part of this?”.
If you think that is theft then I don't know what to tell you.
Though I guess it might be hard to deceive an entity that is literally everywhere.
why is it "too bad for him" when he loses (to the people he gave value to), but "theft" when he takes value from the people? That's just a double standard.
And you also mis-understand derivatives trading's purpose - to offload risk to a third party that is willing to take it.
My point of view is that the trader willingly entered the market with the sole intent of trying to make a profit, whereas the other two just wanted to actually trade goods.
Which is why the situation is asymmetrical in my opinion, and why the way we judge it could be as well.
They wanted to trade excess goods, in other words, unrealized profits, for something usable to them to realize the profits of their labor.
Everyone's intention is to profit, that is the reason you sell to the market.
It shouldn't be surprising when one of these parties isn't trusted by the other two...
It's essentially scalping. Do you trust the people who buy concert tickets in advance and sell them to you at a 100% markup? They're serving the exact same role in society as these market players. No one likes them for a very good reason.
One party produces oil and a second party consumes oil, but those events do not occur at the same time. A third party 'stores' the oil meanwhile and charges for it. You are welcome do it for free, I'm sure you'd be a hero to society.
There are two ways to make money as a pure market player: connecting buyers and sellers who wouldn't trade directly (and taking your cut) aka arbitrage, or getting paid to take on risk. Maybe the trader notices that people on the far side of the island are hungry but can't get a big mac without a long walk, so he buys as many as he can carry, walks over to the other side of the island, and sells them for a bit more than they'd cost on the dockside - that's the first kind of trading. Maybe a clamshell farmer wants to make sure they can afford enough big macs over the next year. They might agree to sell their next year's clamshell harvest at a fixed price (that's lower than the average), or buy their big macs for the next year at a fixed price (that's higher than the average), or both; the farmer loses value on average, but they offloaded their risk, while the trader makes money on average but has to carefully manage their risk.
The third thing is to actually take an active position in the market, if you can predict what's coming. E.g. if you realise the clamshell harvest will be big this year, maybe you sell a bunch of clamshells short. That should send a useful signal to all the farmers, and it means you make money if you predicted right.
Same thing with Tesla shares, or whatever it is. If you can create more Tesla shares its not zero sum (which is done often).
Currencies too are printed when needed. About the only thing really zero sum are some cryptocurrencies.
You could argue in some way that it is zero-sum, but if the price goes down and oil companies don't pump oil out, they don't really lose anything - especially with derivatives as it is on a future outcome.
The Hong Kong dollar is pegged at the moment, this also means it's not zero sum for a buyer or seller either, especially at the peg boundary like now. They simply make more Hong Kong dollars or withdraw them.
A pegged dollar is the same, it only takes a little longer. When they print they dilute the value of the current dollars in circulation but not immediately, because of the peg. But eventually, because it is zero-sum, so much pressure is pent-up trying to maintain that non-zero-sum peg that the system begins to crack and they have to re-peg it. Which happens often with pegged currencies.
This does not mean there are no winners and losers, personal finance is of course not a zero-sum game. And because the adjustments are not instantaneous there is a lot of room to profit if you know what is happening, which gives the impression of it not being zero-sum.
It is never really instantaneous and can take more than months, years. You would have thought printing 6 trillion would have changed something but not really.
> You would have thought printing 6 trillion would have changed something but not really.
I know these are crazy times, but that money did something: it delayed the inevitable by keeping alive zombie companies that should've gone bankrupt the minute the crisis started, if not before. The whole point of printing 6 trillions was to maintain the status quo, not change it, to maintain it and not face economic reality. It didn't work 100% as a lot of that money went directly into assets such as TSLA, AAPL and HTZ(??), some of it went to gold and bitcoin and a lot of it went into bribes and corruption, which prevented companies who could've used that money to stay afloat for a few more months to do so. But because it's a zero sum system it will crash eventually, just that for now it appears to be holding if we stay completely still and don't make any sudden moves.
However, the net supply of derivatives (such as options, forwards, futures) is zero.
so we believe, but yes.
also CDOs have entered the chat
it does follow that a and then b could have made more profit by not lending or selling, but it is far from zero-sum.
Its a game that people play and there are winners and losers, but if everyone willingly enters then it is not theft.
It could be considered legalized gambling I guess but everyone involved is a gambler.
Marx didn’t like the idea because he said it presupposes that property exists, which he obviously had a problem with. Fun fact, this disagreement was the primary conflict that split the IWA into seperate anarchist and Marxist movements. With the anarchists later going on to adopt national socialism, which at the time was known as fascism.
But those aren't going to be the losers. Oil producers typically sell their future contracts immediately to lock in a good price. Likewise, oil consumers are typically going to be buying oil futures early, hold them until they expire, and take delivery. In either case they're not going to be affected by the price going negative on the day of expiry.
Also, if two people make a bet, and one person wins, is that theft?
Without people like me, Arthur might have gotten a much worse deal (possibly $0). Again, without people like me, Bob might have gotten a much worse deal (possibly $100, or maybe he wouldn't be able to buy at any price).
That's the service that active traders provide to everyone else in the market.
It's not for you to judge whether the $40 is "worth" $40. It is.
The situation in the oil trading story is the same, in essence. It is "worth" $500M. Unless the traders intentionally manipulated the prices, which may nor or may be true. The same scenario could play out either way. So it could be that such a trade is worth $500M.
$500M may sound like rich compensation for this type of work, but everybody's compensation is determined by supply and demand, i.e., the rarity of people who can perform that work, and its utility. [1]
(There was also a lot of risk involved, and capital allocation is how a market economy coordinates its activities, but that feels too big to get into here.)
When you accuse honest people of theft, that's nasty. That's probably why you are being downvoted. Then again, people also get downvoted unfairly all the time, so who knows.
[1] Well, except when the government alters the curve. For instance, $500M can pay for 14,000 American teacher-years. But the government forcibly operates an education cartel and artificially holds down the salary of teachers. They are certainly worth far more than the $35K a year I used in that calculation.
> It's not for you to judge whether the $40 is "worth" $40. It is.
What other sensible quantative way of defining value is there?
The question is do we think the position leveraged to extract that value is fair. You seem to think that price manipulation (presumably of some explicitly prohibited forms) can be unfair. So I assume you amenable to some extrinsic definition of fair play.
In your example what might be the form of advantage you exploited? It could be informational or it could be based on capital. Perhaps your informational advantage is based on diligent study of a situation or perhaps it is based on cronyism. Similarly perhaps your ability to take on the risk is based on hard work or inherited wealth. I'm not saying any of these is inherently wrong but people can and do take moral/social positions on such advantages exploited for profit. Even though that discussion might be rather intractable.
So we can define the value of the trade by the spread but that says little about whether the information/capacity asymmetries were fair. If a well functioning market is meant to approximate fairness with sufficient diversity of participants then a market anomaly like this seems like more like an exception to that rule.
I do not think it is justified to call it theft.
Type A is when all the players in a basketball game are the same height.
Type B is when all the players in a basketball game play by the same agreed-upon rules (i.e. don't cheat).
Trying to eliminate Type A fairness from the world is not in anyone's self-interest, except (maybe) the people who are extremely low in the hierarchy of wealth/earning power. (But I think they would be better served by climbing the hierarchy than trying to make the world type-A fair.) This is quite a claim that I won't try to justify here; just think about it.
Type B fairness is in the interest of almost everybody. If you think you can cheat successfully, you may be against Type B fairness. But that's foolish. Creating a rigged system in one game opens up the doors for others to rig the systems in the games where I don't have an advantage (or cannot sustain the cheating advantage). For instance, Republicans in power now are undermining property rights, and that will hurt them more than it helped when they are out of power. Even if there are a few people who can get away with this (e.g. if you are an elderly Republican who is about to die maybe you don't care), the rest of us should reign these people in, as we are the majority.
If we want, we can call these two types egalitarian-fairness and rule-fairness.
Going back to oil trading: it may or may not be Type B fair. It probably is fair, though, because there aren't many rules in trading. The regulators try to create some rules, but few of those (if any) are actually recognized as real rules by the players; rather, they are obstacles. If you can get around them, you're just a better player of the game. (I'm not a professional trader, but that's my assumption about most of what goes on in trading; a professional trader may be less cynical about it.)
If you break a real type-B rule, you are cheating if it's a game and committing fraud if it's business. However we judge that, it's in the interest of the majority to punish that, to dis-incentivize rule-breaking.
That in itself is ok, but you need a compelling argument as to why the two ideas of theft are equivalent or at least similar. And you haven't provided any argument let alone a compelling one.
The point of an internet forum is to debate ideas on their merits (in the best case). Asserting something not generally accepted, without argument, tends to annoy people because you're not even attempting to convince people of your idea's merits, which is the entire point of the game.
Its not that you're wrong, its that you didn't try to convince people you are right.