It is a good decision. He traded on insider information, he should not be able to get off because he tried to be clever and traded a different company’s stock.
Some observations. That guy must be a very decisive (or impulsive) person. He heard the news and decided on the alternate stock trick, found an alternate stock, found a suitable option on that stock and executed the trade all within seven minutes. Perhaps the merger was in the works for a while and he had been thinking and planning this for a while and just pulled the trigger when he heard the merger was approved.
Also, hners should know that they are getting a lot of value by reading that article. Apparently it was written by a team of eight lawyers, seven of which are partners! Considering the billing rates of toplaw partners, this humble article may easily represent 10k dollars of billable time!
IANAL but some clarifications people might find helpful.
An "interlocutory appael" is when the proceedings are stayed until the appeals court rules on a particular matter. During trial a judge needs to give leave to an interlocutory appeal, generally speaking.
It's always worth adding that appeals courts generally deal in matters of law not findings of fact. Trial judges make rulings on the law in the service of finding facts. A consequence of this is that verdicts aren't appealed, which a lot of people seem to think. You can't just appeal a guilty verdict because you don't like it. You need to find a basis, being where (in your opinion) the judge misapplied the law that had a material impact on the case.
Lastly, related securities are a common theme in investing and trading. For example, someone might buy Exxon and short Chevron. Why? Both companies move to some degree in relation to the price of oil. So you've effectively removed that variable. Now you're betting that Exxon will outperform other oil producers (Chevron in particular).
So this does seem to be anovel interpretation. I agree with the decision but it wouldn't surprise me if appellate courts end up gutting this interpretation.
There are a whole community of trading degenerates who trade 0-days till expiration (0dte) options all day long. Some of them claim they make money with black box algos. Those options move a little too fast to trade as a human unless you sit there with your finger on the sell button all day long.
I wonder if this is more about lighting up the gambling addiction thrill seeking and whatnot part of the brain than it is really about getting rich quick for some individuals.
A lot of Investing is just a legitimized, sanitized, gentlemanly form of gambling. Definition: “placing a monetary wager on an uncertain future event.” Instead of professional gamblers sitting at a poker table in dirty casino that smells like smoke, you’ve got professional gamblers sitting in Goldman Sachs Or Morgan Stanley doing the same thing. Instead of firing up DraftKings, youre firing up eTrade. It’s the exact same thing but we pretend things like options trading are a respectable part of the economy because Ivy Leaguers do it.
You'll definitely get flagged because of the disproportionate non linear payoffs. But that's the point of call options. So some people do use them legitimately
As posted elsewhere, making $107k is illegal. Making $107M is legal. Lots of people made thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. In aggregate, they made single-digit billions based on the losses Citadel had to report. DFV alone made north of ten million (realized then) and is up north of $200 million right now (currently unrealized gains).
> the SEC really seems to only go after small timers
Insider trading is a fuckwit sport. The N != NP asymmetry of executing an insider trade, profitably and discreetly, against the simplicity of looking for weird trades ex post facto leads most with money to conclude it isn’t worth it. The meme about the lawlessness of finance tends to be held by those furthest from it.
I humbly submit to you hypothesis that the lawlessness of finance is so pervasive that it has effectively become legalized through intellectual and regulatory capture. If you're interested in supporting evidence for this idea, check out how Enron sought and acquired SEC 'approval' for their ponzi instruments....
Well official disclosure in finance is very similar to assigning value, since many of the instruments that actually trade are derivative or abstract representations of actual assets with 'real' value.
My only point is that the notion of 'legal' can get very fuzzy when you're talking about an industry with so many private/self-interested entities that rival or exceed intellectual/manpower of the agencies responsible for regulation.
The SEC has a three-part mission: to protect investors; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and facilitate capital formation.
These mandates are, of course, subjective and vague enough to be interpreted a variety of ways whether you view 'investors' as institutions, households, individuals, etc... What you define as 'fair/orderly/efficient', and what meaningful 'capital formation' really is.
When SEC approved Enron's change in account reporting practices from historical cost to mtm, I would argue that the SEC failed it's mandate to protect investors by allowing disingenuously optimistic instrument valuations. You could argue that eventually the SEC fulfilled its mandate by recovering much of the misappropriate funds, but it's hard to say they didn't also facilitate the disorder in approving these instruments given how that story concludes with a corporate collapse and flurry of regulation...
> When SEC approved Enron's change in account reporting practices from historical cost to mtm, I would argue that the SEC failed it's mandate to protect investors by allowing disingenuously optimistic instrument valuations
In a broad sense, sure. But that means making the SEC both an auditor and determiner of fair value. Even after the ensuing flurry of rule making, that is very much not part of the SEC’s remit.
There is a reasonable debate to be had around whether it should be. But the SEC not double checking auditors is not evidence of its lawlessness.
The financial markets are more than the SEC but the SEC is part of the financial markets. Evidence of the SEC's imperfect lawlessness implies the greater financial markets are also, in part, lawless.
But my point wasn't even to say whether a given industry as broad as finance is 'lawless' or not, that's your sweeping strawman. I was just saying that in Finance of ALL industries, the line between lawful and illegal has been, and continues to be literally, morally and philosophically blurry...
> Evidence of the SEC's imperfect lawlessness implies the greater financial markets are also, in part, lawless
By this logic lawlessness anywhere means lawlessness everywhere.
> my point wasn't even to say whether a given industry as broad as finance is 'lawless' or not
You said the “lawlessness of finance is so pervasive that it has effectively become legalized” [1]. You cited the SEC in respect of Enron as an example. I “asked for one example of something the SEC had a mandate to do that it didn’t” do with Enron. You ignored the question and started pontificating on not the law but legal philosophy.
You continue to evade that first question. Now you’re claiming you didn’t make the first statement.
To maybe help you alleviate a small bit of your presumably nearly overwhelming confusion I will repeat my reply to your SEC question[1], if that is indeed the 'first' one you ambiguously refer to.
> When SEC approved Enron's change in account reporting practices from historical cost to mtm, I would argue that the SEC failed it's mandate to protect investors by allowing disingenuously optimistic instrument valuations
I'm not sure what about that you think is evasive but I'd like to end the conversation here regardless.
[1][Whats] one example of something the SEC had a mandate to do that it didn’t.
Most big timers also come out super bad, it's just you don't hear about these cases because it is almost never so dumb(the option trade this guy did is not hard to catch at all).
IIRC only Steve Cohen managed to battle back from catching an insider case.
In April 2022, Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter. He was legally required to file a disclosure notice when his ownership exceeded 5%, but he didn’t. This allowed him to keep buying billions worth of stock for cheaper because the price immediately went up when his ownership became public.
Obvious violation of securities laws, with hundreds of millions in profit. Who knows if he’ll ever be held accountable. Musk seems to delight in mocking the SEC.
Congress exempts itself from insider trading laws. There is a 'Nancy Pelosi stock tracker' Twitter account that tracks Congressional buying and selling of stocks.
Pretending to be subject to a law however in practice never prosecuting opens the door to inconsistent (aka selective) enforcement. How is this not the worst of both worlds?
What a weird gotcha....
You've got it backwards mate, a lack of enforcement isn't an agreement or resolution or much of anything reliable or solid or sound. This vacuum of enforcement actually ENABLES selective enforcement because a lack of enforcement isn't an official stance but technically at odds with the written law: It's an implicit status quo that could be changed any time and when it does, you could become retroactively liable for behavior that was acceptable under the prior status quo. That is precisely the conditions of selective enforcement: the choice of the enforcer. Under these inconsistent regulatory modalities you may insidiously lose valuable rights like: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Laws and their enforcement will always have some nonzero amount of selectivity by the localized nature of the universe but good legislation confronts these challenges proactively and tries to make prosecutorial discretion closer to the question: What should the Punishment be? Rather than: Is this behavior Punishable?
>> an implicit status quo that could be changed any time
> So is a history of enforcement!
Are you really saying that history can be changed at any time?
While there will always be jurisprudence that attempts to advance precedent, a history of consistent enforcement cannot, in fact, be changed. People will always have vulnerability to novel interpretations and surprising re-interpretations of the law, but laws which sit on the books IGNORED can easily lead to essentially undefined behavior which I have no doubt you can understand the potential pernicious nature of...
It seems to me (not a lawyer) that the definition of non-public in the jury instructions is a strong grounds for appeal. (Based on the summary of the instructions in the article.)
I work in finance, so I have had numerous trainings on NPMI from different points of view.
There are two things to address, and the framework to answer them is usually well know.
- Non-public: The general consensus I have seen is that if you are the one placing the trade, you should not be the one deciding whether the information is public. In simpler terms, if you have potentially NP information and are willing to trade it, let your compliance department decide whether it is public or not.
- Material: this one is harder to assess. For insider trading to trigger, there has to be a certain level of certainty of the information, and a certain level of impact on the price. This can be tricky to assess, if your boss is let go and you learn it, you have non public information, and I guess you could decide to short your company, because it's most likely not widely accepted as material, unless your boss is the Head of Research.
Anyway, the main takeaway is that whenever you are in a position to access sensible information, either trade under compliance approval, or don't trade at all. Everyone knows that, and the mere fact of not doing it is a signal of shady behavior IMHO.
> I work in finance, so I have had numerous trainings on NPMI from different points of view.
What point of view did you get training from other than the point of view of your company's compliance department? I've worked in trading for a long time and never got training from any other source.
Compliance should tell you to take a very conservative view of the law: they have basically nothing to gain from allowing you to trade in a gray area, but you might.
That doesn't mean the SEC or the District Court should take the same conservative view. They have to apply a balanced reading of the law and look at historical precedent.
Most people in the US do not have an employment contract. However last company I worked for did have business ethics you had to agree to every year and I believe one of the things was not shorting company stock.
How comes the SEC can even find something like that?
$120K in options trading win/loss is nothing. Peanuts.
It's also quite wild that this one is the case we hear about. There's obviously actual insider trading ongoing with proper amounts and not this $120K non-news event.
So how comes they even found him and how comes it's that minuscule, ridiculous, amount that gets reported and published everywhere?
On a big equity or index, $120K can be a single option contract on a 5% move in a single day (OK, 5% moves in a day aren't the most common but still).
And AFAIK there are millions (tens of millions?) of options contract exchanging hands daily.
> It’s automated. You look for high-entropy trades after receiving the filing announcing the corporate event.
So they find these dubious trades and then check the trader's trading history and personal wealth? Stuff like that?
Basically the trade is automatically flagged and then they notice, for example, that the dude hardly ever trades, never traded that stock, isn't familiar with $120K wins on a trade, etc.?
And if it all ticks, they then check which company he works for and it there's a relation with the company he traded?
I mean: it is amazing that they got him to me. But I find it also, in a way, quite spooky.
There's definitely a vibe in the comments in this thread, including from mine, about "going after the little guys".
> they find these dubious trades and then check the trader's trading history and personal wealth?
History and employment, as well as spouses’.
> isn't familiar with $120K wins on a trade, etc.
Most insider traders don’t make that much. There used to be a site where it showed you some insider information, and you tried to guess what the stock did the next day.
> a vibe in the comments in this thread, including from mine, about "going after the little guys"
SEC goes after anyone who insider trades. DoJ tends to only prosecute the big guys.
> I mean: it is amazing that they got him to me. But I find it also, in a way, quite spooky.
Yea it is spooky and chilling, and it would make me think twice about playing the stock market roulette wheel (not that I need more reasons to avoid gambling).
Say I’m just a normal mild mannered, middle aged investor with a basic 401k making 7% a year. I suddenly get a windfall bonus at work and figure I’ll use this “play money” to yolo into OTM GME options or something. Should I now be worried that the SEC is watching my ass? If I luck into 10Xing that bonus, am I going to have to prove my innocence to the SEC?
> I suddenly get a windfall bonus at work and figure I’ll use this “play money” to yolo into OTM GME options or something. Should I now be worried that the SEC is watching my ass?
They’ll flag the transaction and then look further. If this was your first YOLO, you may have some questions to answer. But the SEC can’t put you in jail. And they have to show how you got MNPI. TL; DR Unless you’ve been kissed by an angel, your law-enforcement cross section driving on a public road eclipses that with the SEC.
The biggest no-no for trading is when you get information about a tender offer, that being one company buying another. Even if you're in the bathroom and you hear the guy in the next stall over talking about it on his phone you're not supposed to trade on that information because everyone knows that a potential tender offer is material non-public information.
> a potential tender offer is material non-public information.
Matt Levine discusses this sort of thing quite often in his Money Stuff newsletter. Under US law, the problem of insider trading isn't market manipulation, it's theft. Material non-public information obtained with a duty of confidentiality is considered the property of the company, and thus trading on it is misappropriation/theft of the company's secrets.
If you overheard news of a merger because two executives were chatting loudly in a cafe, then you'd have no duty of confidentiality and could trade freely. Likewise, in this particular case one central issue at trial was that the defendant placed trades in violation of his company's policies against trading competitors' stocks. It's unclear whether he could have been prosecuted if the company's policies had no such restriction.
European law, however, can take a more rigid stance against insider trading, more closely matching the intuition that trading on the material nonpublic information itself is bad.
A potential tender offer isn't always non-public though. The ones which are non-public are presumably less likely to be discussed somewhere as public as over a bathroom stall. If you as a random Joe unaffiliated with the companies in question don't know it's material non-public information then you can trade on it.
The other facts might matter, like if you bragged to somebody about the non-public information you overheard (or, as in this case, where you were a member of the company in question), but it wouldn't be a slam-dunk case if the only facts were trading on bathroom stall intel.
I don't know how the courts can decide on any verdict about any case when nothing makes any sense.
The entire economy is a massive government-centered money laundering scheme. Citizens of nations are burdened with trillions of dollars of debt that can never be repaid. On the flip side, corporate stocks are pumping almost indiscriminately due to money printing. We have a class-based system that is literally based on how much stolen/laundered capital you have accumulated.
It's weird how some types of stealing is allowed but not others. How does society decide what kind of stealing is OK?
It looks like you lack some understanding of how economy and finance work. I think instead of getting angry, you should spend a bit of time _genuinely_ trying to understand how the financial system works.
I would recommend you (legally ofc) download and read the CFA level 1 curriculum. It's a good helicopter view.
I did. I studied the global monetary system in detail. It's a scam. Let me summarize (as best as I can as it's surely the most elaborate scam, with the most unwitting collaborators that has ever existed):
The governments of all countries 'print' new money at a steady rate; simultaneously devaluing all their currencies. They do this by issuing bonds, some of those bonds are bought up by the markets but most bonds are bought up by reserve banks using money that they printed out of nothing (mostly digitally). This issuance of new money devalues the savings of regular citizens and, most importantly, their salaries listed on their work contracts which are denominated in the national currency.
The government debts of all countries keep increasing ad-infinitum along with the interest on that debt. More debt with more interest means that the governments need to keep issuing more bonds to get even more money to use to pay back the old debts plus interest, which then increases the debt even more and guarantees that more future money printing/borrowing is necessary.
Countries don't strictly need to tax citizens since they can just print money, but the reason they tax citizens is to help keep inflation under control by reducing the supply of currency floating around the economy. The fiat currencies of all countries are inflating but this is not noticeable (to traders, economists, etc...) so long as all currencies inflate at a similar rate; the foreign exchange rates will be stable.
Governments give out increasingly large contracts to large corporations to produce systems, weapons, etc... that add no value to citizens' lives but merely exists to control and passify them. People who are in close proximity to government money printers have access to easy money. Those who do not have to work hard for it. Look up Cantillon effects.
At current tax rates, money cannot hop far from the government's money printer. Consider that every transaction between citizens is taxed at some rate... Say 30% (a mix of income taxes, sales taxes...) Start with $100, see how much money is left after just 10 hops between different people. After 1 hop, $70 is left to spend, after 2 hops $49 is left, after 3 hops $34 is left... After 10 hops, only $2.80 remains from that 100 dollars!
So not only is all money created by the government (or banks that are backed by the central bank which is also a government entity), but the taxation system ensures that money cannot travel too far from that government. It's a closed loop with monetary abundance near the source and extreme scarcity at the periphery. It puts the Cantillon effect on steroids. All artificial, little to do with the so-called free market. How can big cities afford to accommodate millions of people working bullshit office jobs that add no value? Big cities, by virtue of having millions of people, control huge amounts of collateral, which gives them access to bigger loans and bigger gov contracts, which puts them in the front row of the money printers; which makes their capital holders the biggest beneficiaries of Cantillon effects... With those powerful Cantillon effects, the business elite can afford to be inefficient and sustain millions of bullshit jobs.
This is barely scratching the surface. I could write a book about it... But nobody would buy it... Because the media is monopolized and nobody would know the book exists. Not only that, but nobody who has money to buy the book has an incentive to understand this information... And they certainly won't be recommending it to their friends...
The system is basically as unjust as it can possibly be while still just barely avoiding being exposed as such. Society has become an epic PsyOp; complete with eugenics and elite selection; selecting for increasingly delusional, hypocritical and/or oblivious leaders who can continue running the system while it becomes increasingly dysfunctional.
The moment when a business leader starts to notice that something is off is the moment that they get replaced by someone who is even more delusional/oblivious and who can take the company/organization to the next level, unimpeded by common sense or principles.
For the next phase, I predict AI is going to make the economy and the monetary system even more complicated. It's going to be even more unjust and even harder to explain. AI will be able to create alternative realities for us. It will control the flow of information in ways that will keep us trapped in hermetically sealed filter bubbles.
There are millions of people suffering in silence whose opportunities have been stolen from them and they don't even know what's happening. The current system is absolutely immoral. Please point out any flaw in my arguments.
You seem to have sampled a hodgepodge of modern monetary theory and neo-pacifist international relations theory. (Also, ignored the role of recession and default in money destruction.) That leads to a mix of correct and incorrect observations tied together incoherently. Within that context, you are right to be frustrated, but not by the state of the world but by your ignorance of it.
Introductory texts in money and banking (Mishkin) and international finance (Krugman or Pilbeam) would be advised. You may also benefit from reading Bagehot, who describes British central banking under the gold standard (and colonialism).
> given the current rate of AI progress, it's possible you may never read another contrarian comment like this again in your life and neither will any of your descendants
Given what AI was trained on, and its lack of understanding and tendency to hallucinate, I’d expect this to become the dominant form of AI-generated economics talk. It certainly is that way on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube already.
Exchange rates used to be pegged to labor. The futures market obfuscated that and is controlled by a central bank through government issued subsidies which cause food surpluses which “should” reduce the price of produce.. if not for the manipulated futures market.
I’m sure population density is a variable in this equation as well, I just can’t figure out where to pin it.
Diplomatic agreements between nations throughout history. Your land has water, mine has food, we set the value of trade and baseline the currency. The unavoidable cost is the minimum time and labor to transport and extract the resources.
The supply and demand indirectly adjust the transaction prices through multiple layers of exchange. Hence the border tariffs having an impact on exchange rate.
> Central bank != government in most developed countries
If the government can keep issuing more bonds, essentially any time it wants, and it knows that the central bank will always be there and can use its infinite money supply to buy all of the bonds which the government chooses to create, then we can safely say that there is no meaningful distinction between the government and its central bank from the perspective of citizens. From their perspective, it's just new money coming out of a big state-controlled money printer.
> Exchange rates are not stable for a variety of reasons that are not purely supply-related
Yes but it's a fact that all countries aim to keep inflation at around the 2% to 3% mark. If a country just stopped printing money and backed it with gold (for example), then that country's currency would almost inevitably go up in the long run. Consider that the US dollar has lost 90% of its value in the last 50 years or so to inflation. This would show up on the forex charts as a sustained, upward trend if any country did this.
Just look at fixed-supply cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and DogeCoin if you need more proof of this effect... I hope we don't need to make the argument that DogeCoin succeeded on the basis of its economic efficiency... Using the electricity of an entire country to process a mere 4 transactions per second... It would seem that the fixed supply of DogeCoins and BitCoins contributed to massive price increase in spite of economic inefficiency.
BTW, didn't Gaddafi of Libya try to introduce a Gold Dinar currency? I'm sure this bears no connection to what NATO did to him after.
Did any country manage to abandon their national fiat system without its leaders being assassinated or overthrown in a violent coup? Kind of suspicious. Name one country on earth which isn't on the same inflationary fiat monetary standard. Most have a central bank and work much the same way, those which don't just use some other country's fiat... Some countries aren't shy about going the hyperinflation route... but no country will dare try the deflationary route. Why? Why is it that only decentralized currencies without leaders were able to achieve this?
> it's a fact that all countries aim to keep inflation at around the 2% to 3% mark
False [1][2][3].
> didn't Gaddafi of Libya try to introduce a Gold Dinar currency
He also began using every other currency than dollars. That’s how rebalancing works.
> Did any country manage to abandon their national fiat system without its leaders being assassinated or overthrown in a violent coup? Kind of suspicious
Pegged currencies and currency boards exist. Also, what are you thinking of? Because we haven’t had a working economy with a fixed-supply currency since the Industrial Revolution, for obvious reasons.
> no country will dare try the deflationary route. Why?
Did you miss the Euro crisis? Austerity is forced deflation.
> Why is it that only decentralized currencies without leaders were able to achieve this?
Straw man. Every time crypto crashes, they’re hyperinflationary in real terms.
“Blyth argues that the case for increasing economic growth through austerity is overstated, is counterproductive when implemented during recessions, and has exacerbated the Eurozone crisis.”
Yup! Unless you’re rich, deflation is historically cursed. (That said, I repeat that it hasn’t been proven to be bad.)
1. “Governments of all countries 'print' new money at a steady rate”
Most money is privately created [1]. While America creates money somewhat steadily [2], many currencies are more volatile [3] and show distinct regimes [4]. And while that error can be covered by expanding the definition of steadiness, steadiness between countries’ monetary policies simply doesn’t exist. America is tightening while China is loosening, for example. (This is basic balance of payments. The claim about FX rates being constant is trivially false.)
2. “some of those bonds are bought up by the markets but most bonds are bought up by reserve banks”
Depository institutions hold few Treasuries, relatively speaking [5]. The Fed owns close to half of outstanding Treasuries, but it’s currently a net seller [6].
3. “Countries don't strictly need to tax citizens since they can just print money”
I’ll throw in a misleading statement versus outright error.
Sure, a country could MMT. But that means you can destroy money only through recession, default and selling government bonds. Since the comment rails against debt, that leaves an economic policy that requires—when inflation arises—intentionally forcing recession (likely via spending cuts) à la Volcker.
> They do this by issuing bonds, some of those bonds are bought up by the markets but most bonds are bought up by reserve banks using money that they printed out of nothing (mostly digitally).
The first sentence and second sentence are in contradiction: is money created by the government or the banks? And couldn't the money created by private banks (who are part of the reserve system) be used for other things like mortgages, business loans, etc?
If you're talking about central banks (like the US Fed) and 'quantitative easing' (QE), then they don't buy bonds from the government, but on the open market. And there's a decent argument to be made that QE is in fact deflationary:
In most of the world, QE wasn't really done except for COVID, where governments needed to support people during lockdowns and the resulting economic slow/shutdowns.
And when QE was running in the US during the 2010s the CPI (and PCE) was quite low (as it was in most countries during that it period), which is in stark contrast to the predictions that right-leaning, hard-money folks made:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
> Governments give out increasingly large contracts to large corporations to produce systems, weapons, etc... that add no value to citizens' lives but merely exists to control and passify them.
Also roads, bridges, health care, education. Certainly weapons (just ask Ukraine and Taiwan and any country around the South China Sea).
A lot of folks say that the US spends too much on the military, but perhaps it is that other countries spend too little. NATO members have a agreement/guideline/target to spend 2% of their GDP on defence, but most members have not done that for years (if not decades)—and suddenly they are:
Perhaps it was a matter of the US picking up everyone else's slack.
> So not only is all money created by the government, but the taxation system ensures that money cannot travel too far from that government.
What about "reserve banks"? Does all of that "money that they printed out of nothing" go to buying government bonds… or perhaps some is used in the private economy? (This goes back to the contradictions in the first paragraph.)
Also, how many people work directly for the government (including teachers, building inspectors, food safety, etc), and then spend in their community: how separated is the barber of a DMV employee from "money created by the government" (which it really isn't: see above).
> How can big cities afford to accommodate millions of people working bullshit office jobs that add no value? Now you know.
Where I live, when right-leaning candidate Rob Ford ran for mayor for Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2010 his rallying cry was about "stopping the gravy train" of waste. Turns out after an extensive audit he ordered, there's wasn't any:
Of course his brother, now the premiere of Ontario, Canada, still goes on about waste at Toronto, but (two) thrid-party audits have (yet again) not find much:
> This is barely scratching the surface. I could write a book about it... But nobody would buy it... Because the media is monopolized and nobody would know the book exists. Not only that, but nobody who has money to buy the book has an incentive to understand this information... And they certainly won't be recommending it to their friends...
OP could self-publish a book or start writing a weblog/newsletter. Plenty of folks that put forward ideas explaining the conspiracies that trap people have had best sellers:
> The system is basically as unjust as it can possibly be while still just barely avoiding being exposed as such. Society has become an epic PsyOp; complete with eugenics and elite selection; selecting for increasingly delusional, hypocritical and/or oblivious leaders who can continue running the system while it becomes increasingly dysfunctional.
Society is a victim to PsyOp where most of the sheeple^H^H^H^H^H^H^H people don't know what's happening. Yeah.
> The moment when a business leader starts to notice that something is off is the moment that they retire and get replaced by someone who is even more delusional/oblivious and who can take the company/organization to the next level, unimpeded by common sense or principles.
What does this even mean?
If you want to look at the "biggest errors" in the post consider breaking things down into the (semi-)rational and the conspiratorial, and consider how one may provide feedback into another.
The purpose of a currency is not for investment but to keep circulating in the economy. Low steady inflation ensures this happens. Inflation also clears up debts which would otherwise compound. Nobody forces you to store wealth long term using the currency and it would be dumb to do so.
If you disagree with the taxes being collected either vote to change how that government spends your money else vote with your feet and find another country. There are tax free jurisdictions. Why not go live there if the tax you pay bothers you?
You can't vote out oligarchy and dictators who owns the media. Two party system will never really care about average peoples problems. But they will together increase the debt limit of USA, fast. Because they are both in it for the money and power :) and to make Middle class smaller and smaller.
In a free economy decision power over wealth accrues to those under whose watch wealth compounds fastest. You may disagree with the inequality that results but history shows it is difficult to compete economically with groups that run free economies.
Hopefully you can vote politically during elections, you can vote economically with every dollar you spend and you can vote with your feet by switching countries.
If you have an idea about some paradise that will operate much better under the economic rules you believe in ask yourself why this paradise does not yet exist if it is so much better. If your economic paradise does exist why not just move there? Surely those having your "wisdom" will be highly valued there.
you just wrote all nonsense? moving to somewhere cost extra. your understanding of what I meant is almost none. Let's keep choosing old dudes to manage countries and senate
Well first it’s not most countries, it’s US specifically. Why US does it is because people still use dollars as a world base currency.
Now I would agree about the immorality point here, but it’s a product of religious foundations of US, not the Hayek vs Keynes. If anything, printing money is more enabling of solving inequality, it’s just US chooses not to do so
To add, in this scam system, now they are systemically important banks who can't lose :) Once stock market crashes, they can just wake up and say we have unlimited printerrrr. It's all just a scam
> now they are systemically important banks who can't lose
Reminds me of cryptocurrency like WorldCoin, where an overwhelming amount of all minted coins goes back into the developer's pockets no matter what.
Really, the biggest difference is that a treasury can coordinate it's workers to meaningfully resolve economic deficiency. Cryptocurrency comes with no governance guarantees, zero regulatory oversight on developers, and no incentive to stabilize value. When you consider the basic needs of a governed economy, it's plainly evident why mints do what they do. Shaking your fist and complaining about it is the extent of the anarchist pipe-dream; nobody is going to read this or the parent's comment and invest their 401k in Ethereum.
lol what? Anyone can invest in Ethereum or Bitcoin. Not anyone can be part of scam system that protects oligarchs and grand kids of slave owners :) Investment bankers keep and increase their wealth with scams and wars. Go read some books. Only exception is tech investors, founders and innovators.
Ironically, with strong regulations from a neutral government, the conflict between the privileged billing class and the poor working class would not erode our society.
> The entire economy is a massive government-centered money laundering scheme.
This kind of shifts the blame away from the private sector which is actively undermining democracies.
> Citizens of nations are burdened with trillions of dollars of debt that can never be repaid.
Incorrect. Where is the money that had beem loaned by central banks and is now needed to keep infrastructur and our society in general afloat? Our f̵i̵s̵c̵a̵l̵ monetary system is a zero sum game in the end. So where did the money go?
> Incorrect. Where is the money that had beem loaned by central banks and is now needed to keep infrastructur and our society in general afloat? Our f̵i̵s̵c̵a̵l̵ monetary system is a zero sum game in the end. So where did the money go?
Most of that money which the government created comes back to the government via taxes. High taxes keep the loop short. Like I said, after 10 hops, with just 30% tax, $100 ends up being taxed down to $2.80... So say a corporation receives a $1 billion gov contracts, pays their executives and employees, then their employees pay rent to their landlords, then the landlords pay builders for renovations, etc... 10 hops and only $28 million remains of that 1 billion... $972 million is back in the government's hands whence it originated.
It's just a matter of time before that full $1 billion dollars has hopped its way right back into the government's hands via taxes.
> Most of that money which the government created comes back to the government via taxes
Super wrong. (At tends of quadrillions of dollars wrong this might be the wrongest economic take I have ever seen.)
Total taxes in the U.S. in 2023 were $4.5tn [1]. GDP, a sum of transactions, $29tn [2].
More trivially: the money supply, at $21 quadrillion [3], dwarfs both the federal budget and the Fed’s balance sheet combined, and has almost-monotonously grown over the last century.
"Our fiscal system is a zero sum game in the end."
That would be news to me?
Money is created all the time and also lost. The central banks try to keep prices stable, by influencing the rate in which money gets created, so why should it be zero sum?
(not a US citicen, though, but I belive the US central banking system works this way)
>This kind of shifts the blame away from the private sector which is actively undermining democracies.
This. Rants of the GP's type are pretty common after one gets an intro to the monetary system with a little bias thrown in. These are readily available on a YouTube near you.
They tend to be vague and talk about "the banking system" or "the economy" or "the government" being somehow corrupt or rigged, as if by design.
Thing is, they're not wrong that something is amiss, but it's not the systems in general. It's private people and corporations that are doing the rigging. Free flow of money into politics courtesy of Citizens United, regulatory capture, a purchased SCOTUS that now openly represents anti-democratic ideals and defangs government in favor of oligarchs, etc.
And, it's accelerating. Who'll even need regulatory capture anymore when you can just have SCOTUS nix the government's power to regulate?
These are the actual issues and their source is pretty clear. Through that lens, vague ideas about "the system" seem so egregiously obvious a distraction, they read like disinfo.
Some observations. That guy must be a very decisive (or impulsive) person. He heard the news and decided on the alternate stock trick, found an alternate stock, found a suitable option on that stock and executed the trade all within seven minutes. Perhaps the merger was in the works for a while and he had been thinking and planning this for a while and just pulled the trigger when he heard the merger was approved.
Also, hners should know that they are getting a lot of value by reading that article. Apparently it was written by a team of eight lawyers, seven of which are partners! Considering the billing rates of toplaw partners, this humble article may easily represent 10k dollars of billable time!