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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.

Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.

https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...

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The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.

The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.

A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.

Futures significantly pre-date your link.

* https://ehammurabi.org/law/48

We've made a couple advances in food production, storage, and distribution in the decades since Hammurabi last walked the earth.

And still we are subject to bad harvests, floods, droughts, pests, and diseases. Any given farmer still has to deal with the consequences of this, even if a nation, or humanity collectively, is better insulated.

Futures contracts are themselves also more developed than what was in those laws.

How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?

Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological.

If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.

Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.

"as reliable a supply as weather and other unforeseen circumstances and human efforts spread across as wide an area as is possible"

the point of a system is what it does. if the futures market lets a bank make money off bread, thats the point of it

The profit to be made on futures trading is there to supply the capital needed to fund the benefit to the people selling those futures, i.e the farmers.

Accurately and fairly pricing risk is a whole field in its own right, one whose surface I have only lightly touched upon in my life by learning of actuaries and Black-Scholes. Free lunches don't tend to last long in finance, which means all profit margins everywhere, from share dividends and growth, to tresury bonds, to futures, to mortgages, tend to similar risk-adjusted real return.

That was certainly not the intention nor goal of the folks who first set up a futures market for flour in Chicago at the beginning of the previous century.

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