A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance

pluralistic.net

26 points·zdw··5 comments

These all seem to be gross simplifications that dont really help the argument. While we could certainly make a case that no value is generated in trading certain derivatives,commodity futures and options are very imporant in regulating price/ supply supply shocks in the global market.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-...

Favorite quotation: »If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.«

Let's say a VC finances a company that successfully makes cost effective fusion, would it be offset for a loss in such a way that if they had financed one that when on to try and fail the same thing it would work out the same for society?

Lots of finance stuff, like index/underlying latency arbitrage, is really zero or negative sum, but there are parts that aren't.

I agree with that. But isn't the net money that goes from the VC to the fusion company included in the 3% that the article mentions which is adding value by servicing individuals and companies when they need money?

While the argument is that the other 97% of transactions in the finance world add no value. And that 97 >> 3.

That said I don't agree that they add "no value", market efficiency is provided which seems to be a valuable thing in some sense. But i find it quite interesting to think about, especially when you look at them in purely monetary terms as being zero sum.

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