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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

It's what happens when someone realizes some useful construct could be treated as first-class citizen[0] in the financial sense.

Much like in modern programming languages[1], you can "hold a function in your hands" - pass it as value and return it and assign to variables, in finance someone notices, "hey, this thing can be packaged up like an asset and sold/leased/leveraged". Here, someone figures a business model - "I have a patent, patent trolls make money threatening people with patents -- hey, let me lend them my patent and ask for a cut!".

For some reason, in programming this leads to good thing; in the economy, it leads to bad things.

Just wait for when someone figures out how to make securities out of loaned patents and then package them up into bulk-tradeable assets.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen

[1] - And in Lisp since before most people here were born.

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> in the economy, it leads to bad things

there are two parts to this

- The first part is the good part, where people say something like "increasing liquidity provides a useful service, we can move money around more efficiently, so it gets to the people doing actual things faster."

This works in my opinion if financial services play a small role in the economy.

However, much like a programming language, if you have a massive project with 75 layers of abstraction, its own custom scripting language with multiple versions supported and used in different areas of the same codebase, it really is a waste of everyone's time and only serves to retain the jobs of the developers that understand the mess

- This leads to the bad outcome, where financial processes become labyrinthine and hide risk, and massive effort must be spent on the services without achieving useful work at the end

You’re right that some assets have been packaged to negative effect but there are clear examples of the opposite - futures are stabilize commodity prices, MBSs decrease volatility for investors which increases access to underserved SES profiles, carbon credits incentivize companies to decrease emissions, IP creates an incentive to innovate in a way that the public eventually benefits from.

I’d be curious to know what distinguishes assetization that creates negative externalities vs positive. Probably something about assetization that decouples the value of the underlying good or service from the created asset?

You can fuck a program up by calling an integer that you thought was a function but first class functions are still useful.

That "first-class citizen" idea involves hiding information. You don't have to worry about the details of what it means to hold a function in your hands; you get to just pass it around and work at a higher level of abstraction.

Abstractions which hide information are often good when that information is irrelevant, and in programming you usually have people working together to try to create a better program, so the technique is only applied when somebody thinks it's beneficial.

In legal and financial spaces, however, the incentive for misconduct is high. Rather than abstract away irrelevant details to create a better product, all the dirty laundry is hidden so that the fancy, glittery bits are all their marks see.

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