Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who’s standard of living? We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners. We’ll tolerate flagrant cartel monopoly and flagrant securities fraud and all manner of evil to drive equities up? Qui bono? Not the working person at the median.
> Who’s standard of living? Each person's. It's an individual determination. > We will render arbitrary people homeless to constrain the supply and push up real asset prices for homeowners Yes. Because from the homeowner's perspective, they're maintaining their real standard of living. Crafting good policy requires being very careful about whose relative standard of living you're sacrificing for the greater good. Bec…
But we went through the Enron thing, at a high level?
Because the public tolerates it. We have a financial sector where routine financing is run through permutations and combinations and evasions that in the default capital raise the legitimate entities would be far better served by some version of what YC does with e.g. the SAFE docs. When you apply string theory people to bond pricing you get one of two things: socially negative complexity / garish externalities and whatever the hell Medallion is doing.
Pushing that sector up into the double digits is weird: those people should be playing chess against Magnus Carlson not John Q Taxpayer. You can in fact convert genius into a gangrenous infection. And before you say that cheating is inevitable, inb4 predictable soundbyte, no it isn’t. The only two utilities of arbitrary wealth past mundane security and as much luxury as anyone can count (which is nowhere near billions) are blind “I Am The Repubkic” sociopathy and actual security in a world where the real ballers don’t feel safe on the same continent as their subjects. There are places where this is pushed even further: the City generally, let’s call it Canary Wharf is a wonder drug for international FX and outright fraud with thugs and just kind of a lesion on the Old Smoke.
Plus? Cheating is impossible or even difficult to detect or enforce or discourage to make an example of pour encorages les autres? Ask Madoff’s estate how it went to try that shit with the money of the donor dinner circuit. I recommend not fucking around and finding out on Jamie Dimon’s nest egg. You’ll wish you were never born.
Now if after all that unpleasant real talk about some but maybe not all the things you condescended via “reasons you presume” are actually a matter of the integrity of our companies and regulators and financial markets?
Then tell me you are already going through appropriate channels to bring the guilty to justice or can the TED talk and count your pieces of eight.
You seem like a really smart person with at least some basic moral instinct so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and just ask you to not try to teach your grandfather how to suck eggs.