They fail to understand that this small group is actually the first portion of the bell curve: early adopters. Our friends buy based on our recommendations.
122 karma · joined March 25, 2010
Besides that, he has a point - reading only things that you agree with leads to narrow-mindedness, but it's not something that's new to the Internet era. It's been around for quite some time...ref: religion.
This is kinda cool...
Anyways, in terms of the questions my non-economically-inclined-self has to ask,
Who else knows about this? Are politicians aware? Is it something that's not being addressed because they are afraid of losing the support of their wealthy donors? Do the likes of Obama and McCain not address this and place blame elsewhere because it's too complicated to explain to the American public? Has anyone ever tried? I was born and raised here and have never been presented with anything nearly as lucid as this to understand this system over the past 26 years that I have been alive. To those of us who don't study economics outside of the 1-2 required classes as part of college studies, this type of explanation of Wall Street and the commodities market is never really given to us. We don't even cover investment options in school to be honest - most of us don't know what 401k's, IRA's, etc. are when we get out of college.
So back to the original question - who knows about this and what have they done to make the public aware?
Chris repeatedly mentions that commodities trading bets long and they mostly bet on the prices to go up. "But in commodities, where almost all speculative money is betting long, betting on prices to go up, this is not a good thing—unless you’re one of the speculators."
So my question is, would it balance itself out if we required the banks to allow their investors to bet on prices to go down as well as up?
Is this something the banks are abusing their power with - meaning now that they have the letters making them authorized as physical hedgers rather than merely speculators, are they abusing this power by not presenting their investors with the option to bet on prices going down?
Why can't we just revoke these letters given to the banks? What are the downsides? Basically, all these questions are simply my logical brain trying to figure out "Ok, you presented the problem spectacularly well; now what's the solution?" That seems to be my naturally-triggered response to reading your post. I hope he'll oblige with a follow-up or some other readers have answers to these questions.
Anyways, if you're looking for alternatives, I used Bloglines before I was a GReader fan. Might want to try that out again, or a desktop app might be up your alley too.