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The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.
The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.
I recognize that one is illegal, the other is not. That isn’t the important issue.
The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer what it was designed to be. Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings. What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days?
What Business is Wall Street In ? | blog maverick
“The hiring process is not nearly as important as the firing process. By this I mean: your skill as a manager is not based on your ability to get good people into your group, but on getting bad people out. The sooner you cull weaker players, the sooner you can replace them with stronger players (for relatively the same salary) and improve the human composite of your firm”.
There is no such thing as good hiring, only good firing | Fonality
For the “serious” trader. Go on you know you want too…
The Prediction Market where you can buy and sell “shares” in financial, political, weather and other important subjects. Intrade Prediction Markets
This Google Buzz thing is a total pain in the arse to kill, why on earth they defaulted the thing to “on” I do not know. The following link is useful because unfortunately killing the buzz isn’t as simple as hitting the off switch. Buzz off: Disabling Google Buzz
Unfortunately the essence of this article rings true with all my experiences about “control” in China. The Limits of Control: a skeptic’s view on China, Copenhagen, and Compliance | Shanghai Scrap
A ‘society of strangers’ is a commercial society which Smith identifies in the Wealth of Nations as one where ‘everyman is a merchant’. A commercial society’s coherence – its social bonds – do not depend on love and affection. You can coexist socially with those to whom you are emotionally indifferent. As Smith famously said:
“it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens”
Nothing in this means that Smith is denying the virtuousness of benevolence. When Smith came to write the Wealth of Nations he made it clear that the ‘wealth’ lay in the well-being of the people. This covered not only their material prosperity but also their moral welfare. Accordingly he thought to be in poverty is to be in a miserable condition and commerce is to be praised for improving human life.
The great achievement of the Wealth of Nations was to discern the principles of order in the seeming chaos of commercial or market behaviour – it wasn’t random, it could be reduced to some simple principles. It was for this reason that Smith was described as the Newton of political economy. It is no idle fact that the full title is Inquiry into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
He identifies basic principles such as the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ that he argues underlies the division of labour but says that this depends on a market and that requires some institutional structures like those that uphold justice such as government and how that in turn mutually relies on principles of public finance.
All of this is placed by Smith into a historical narrative. In his Glasgow lectures he had outlined an account of four stages of social organisation focused around the characteristic form of economic endeavour – hunter-gatherer, herder, farmer, commerce – and in the Wealth of Nations he gives a set-piece account of the transition from the farming to commerce. This process of social change was not brought about by deliberate human policy. This fact reveals for Smith a general truth about social life, namely, that it is pervaded by unintended consequences. This supports the widely-held view of Smith as an opponent of attempts to direct ‘the market’ but, in fact, what he really opposes is the attempt to direct individual’s activities, their ‘natural liberty’ to pursue their own ends in their own way. This is itself a ‘moral’ position and Smith never abandons that perspective.
Adam Smith | University of Glasgow
I’m going to say I’m in agreement on this article, the fun hasn’t started yet. World Out of Balance | NYTimes.com
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Hello If you like all kinds of random ideas, quotes, questions and miscellaneous links you're in luck because this is where I tend to stash them.
Enjoy.
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