Live data from Hacker News

Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

cnet.com

251–260 of 281 posts

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am under the impression that Islam technically bans loans. So one would have to do an investment instead of a loan with interest. Do you know if I have this right?

My understanding is that it isn't the loan that is banned but charging interest. A fairly simple workaround would then be to charge a monthly fee instead, and you would then end up with something that in practice is more or less the same.

> A fairly simple workaround would then be to charge a monthly fee instead, and you would then end up with something that in practice is more or less the same.

No. Islam bans all these workarounds. What you describe is still a money for money exchange. Interestingly enough, Islam does not just ban interest, it has a concept of Riba, which includes interest/usury, but encompasses other transactions as well. What you describe falls squarely under Riba.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it isn't the loan that is banned but charging interest. A fairly simple workaround would then be to charge a monthly fee instead, and you would then end up with something that in practice is more or less the same.

This is my takeaway with religious practice. If something is desired, but banned, people will find something that is practically similar enough, and technically allowed by the religion.

Except with Islam, since its texts are clear enough to warn about and prohibit what you're describing. Don't lump all religions together.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Events like these make it clear why the vast majority of Wall Street practices are banned in Islam (including shorting). It's a terrible predatory practice that is not just gambling, but also creating artificial risk that does not correspond to the value being created from such transactions. This can easily collapse the entire market as we already saw in 2008 and many times before. The sooner we prohibit these terrib…

Ah, because countries with Islamic finance are renowned for the strength of their economies. The Catholic Church prohibited usury across Europe until the invention of the contractum trinius, allowing the economic revolution that powered the Renaissance and the transition to modernity.

Correlation vs causation.

If you look at Iraq during the Ummayad dynasty (Umar II), there was a period of time when there were no poor people left to take charity (Zakat). Would be nice to see that again in "modern" financial economies.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Events like these make it clear why the vast majority of Wall Street practices are banned in Islam (including shorting). It's a terrible predatory practice that is not just gambling, but also creating artificial risk that does not correspond to the value being created from such transactions. This can easily collapse the entire market as we already saw in 2008 and many times before. The sooner we prohibit these terrib…

I really love the way they do home buying. Basically no-interest, but also no opportunity for mortages. The bank owns the house until you've completely paid it off. I looked a little but couldn't find a longer article explaining it in more detail, but it should be easy enough to search out for interested parties.

To be fair, those transactions are also usurious, because they increase the price of the asset in exchange for postponing payments. There are several Hadiths (narrations) that prohibit that transaction.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#255
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, because countries with Islamic finance are renowned for the strength of their economies. The Catholic Church prohibited usury across Europe until the invention of the contractum trinius, allowing the economic revolution that powered the Renaissance and the transition to modernity.

> Ah, because countries with Islamic finance are renowned for the strength of their economies. As opposed to the Western world and its traditional decennial world-threatening financial crisis? And the ever-widening gap between rich and poor?

The fact that the West's economic crises - which, viewed in the long term, are bumps in a continual upward trend - can threaten the economy of the world as a whole is testament to the strength of its economic model.

And the gap between rich and poor is ever-shrinking, not widening, as poor countries develop by adopting modern technologies and institutions.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#256

Aaaaand it's crashing!!! Down from 450 to about 125 in the last few minutes!!!

Many retail brokerages have disallowed buying GME, AMC, and a few others. Though, they are still letting users sell. Without the ability to buy, the price can only go down. There are other HN threads covering this aspect.

Yeah I thought that, then just after I posted the stock doubled again and then dropped 30% so who knows.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#257
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, because countries with Islamic finance are renowned for the strength of their economies. As opposed to the Western world and its traditional decennial world-threatening financial crisis? And the ever-widening gap between rich and poor?

The fact that the West's economic crises - which, viewed in the long term, are bumps in a continual upward trend - can threaten the economy of the world as a whole is testament to the strength of its economic model. And the gap between rich and poor is ever-shrinking, not widening, as poor countries develop by adopting modern technologies and institutions.

It doesn't change the fact that the modern financial and economic system are morally bankrupt. We don't learn from our mistakes, and it becomes normal to have these cycles of collapse then build back. These cycles are caused by interest/usury being at the core that drives the system (why did the government move away from the gold standard? because they want to be able to print their way out of their usurious debts, it's all related).

Look up Iraq during Umar II's rule, how there were no people left to take Zakat because there was a proper economic system.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Go to the third world and you'll see that reliability and longevity give Toyota a huge cachet that is basically unrivaled. >That effect is amplified in countries that have import tariffs on automobiles, because the secondary market is large. This is the exact same naive logic people use to justify Tesla's valuating. On one hand you have yuppie fanboys bindly harping on about Tesla's magical engineering in the face o…

Some of your response is a non-sequitur. The argument on the table is: > Toyota makes fairly boring products of the last century. Toyota sells around 10mm cars a year. Only about a fifth of those sales take place in Canada, US, and Mexico. The demand picture for EVs and vehicles in general is not uniform across geography. Some places like small cars, others big; some places like EVs, others have no chargers; some pla…

I made no mention of the buyer's motives. You're not understanding or ignoring what I wrote.

The availability of vehicles in the 3rd world is determined in large part by the used car market in the first world (with south America depending more to north America and Africa/ME depending more on Europe) Exporters buy from auctions just like the rest of the used car dealers. Everybody steers clear of vehicles that have been used hard. The used car dealers steer clear of cars too old for prospective buyers to get a car loan on. The lower down the economic ladder you go the harder people are on vehicles and the more likely they are to keep them until they are totally clapped our and the more likely they are to sell private party. This means that the cars the dealers and the exporters want to buy are the upper middle class trade ins that were never smoked in that were kept clean and maintained, etc with the importers erring toward 10yo+ ones that the dealers don't want as badly.

The net result is that the vehicles of the upper middle class are over-represented in the set of vehicles that exporters steer themselves towards.

If every dumb yuppie in the US and Europe woke up tomorrow and decided they would only commute in blue cars from now on then in 10yr we'd have morons on the internet making up reasons that blue cars are more reliable and using their prevalence in the 3rd world as evidence.

Of course there's market specific models and locally made stuff available too but I'm not talking about those and that's not the avenue from which cars that have a 20k+ MSRP appear in those markets.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#259
post #34
post #3

Good. I'm tired of fake Economics where the value of a company or the product is not made from the real value of it, while some yuppies get rich in the proccess. The more they cry, the better. Hope is collapses so "middle" and low class workers can get fair prices of what they earn by doing actual hard work. Because this will create a good crash, dont fool about it. It will harm everyone, but at least this Century wi…

> I'm tired of fake Economics where the value of a company or the product is not made from the real value of it I still don't understand how Tesla is valued so high when they're still figuring out panel gaps.

The Supercharger network. That pretty much justifies all of the build-quality issues with the cars, given how hard it is to actually use a non-Tesla public charger.

Re: Reddit's GameStop, AMC surge is the new Occupy movement

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the West's economic crises - which, viewed in the long term, are bumps in a continual upward trend - can threaten the economy of the world as a whole is testament to the strength of its economic model. And the gap between rich and poor is ever-shrinking, not widening, as poor countries develop by adopting modern technologies and institutions.

It doesn't change the fact that the modern financial and economic system are morally bankrupt. We don't learn from our mistakes, and it becomes normal to have these cycles of collapse then build back. These cycles are caused by interest/usury being at the core that drives the system (why did the government move away from the gold standard? because they want to be able to print their way out of their usurious debts, i…

We do learn from our mistakes, which allows us to make new mistakes. We learned how to free our currencies from their chains of gold and allowed the money supply to respond to the demands of the economy. We learned how inflation is a monetary phenomenon and tamed it with interest rates. We learned how the business cycle propagates itself and introduced countercyclical policies to damp it down. We found that the Great Moderation promoted speculation in real estate, causing the GFC, and responded to that with stress tests and capital buffers in our financial institutions. We have come through a pandemic with our economy running, jobs preserved and society intact. I can't wait to see what the next crisis will be, because the solution will make us even smarter and wealthier.
Post reply on HN