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Notes -
There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing, and that most of those workers are largely vestigial parasites/culture warriors who don't productively contribute to society.
What would the practical effects be of Trump pulling a Xi and dropping the hammer of god on wall street and hedge funds, HFT outfits, etc.? Say you can keep venture capital and bank loans to businesses and all the other stuff, but the 'quants' who make a living with options, trading commodities and the like? I'll leave it to someone better versed in that world to carve out precisely what should or shouldn't be banned, or try to convince me that this is a mistake.
The friends I have in that space freely admit that they don't believe that they contribute meaningfully to society. They have advanced degrees in physics, math and CS; wouldn't society be better off pushing them towards engineering, manufacturing, company creation? And redistributing capital from the non-STEM people at these places who contribute nothing of value to society?
The proper pricing of commodities and equities is actually of great value to society. The Physics Ph.D in a Manhattan office building high-frequency trading corn futures doesn't see anything except numbers on a screen, but corn farmers in Iowa (and consumers of corn like chicken farmers) benefit greatly from accurate and liquid futures markets in corn.
In order to consistantly make money in trading, one has to buy low and sell high. This inherently provides a price-stabilizing effect. Buying when prices are low causes prices to rise; selling when prices are high causes prices to fall.
You can have extremely accurate and liquid corn futures without high frequency trading, and without sucking thousands of man-years of the highest human capital down the drain. We're not arguing about banning future markets, but I'm pretty sure corn farmers still can grow corn if you take away synthetic collateralized debt obligations and other modern financial vehicles.
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