Quote from bears21:
Comment by Honest Capitalist â September 30, 2008 @ 8:46 pm
I forgot to add - thereâs a moral issue here too. One should not destroy the livelihood of a group of law-abiding people without a damned good reason. Daytraders and scalpers did not cause excessive leverage in banks and investment-banks, they did not cause people to speculate recklessly on real estate they couldnât afford, they did not drive house prices above the price Joe Sixpack could safely pay, they did not inflate serial asset price bubbles by recklessly loose monetary policy. All they did was collapse stock bid-ask spreads from 1/4 of a dollar to 1 cent over 10 years, reducing transactions costs on stocks by a factor of up to 25-fold, thus benefiting investors enormously. Many short-term traders have been warning for several years about excessive speculation in real estate and credit - we knew about it because we saw one asset-price bubble before, the ridiculous mania and overpricing of the dot.com boom, from which you Mark profited handsomely (unlike the people who bought your company).
So for providing a service to investors, earning an honest living, and warning about the current disaster 1-3 years beforehand out of pure altruism, why on earth should we be driven out of business by a bunch of limousine-liberal billionaires who can just sit back and collect their T-bill interest without having to earn a living or risk everything in the markets daily? Who are politicians or SEc officials, being paid their salaries from the taxes we pay, to outlaw our work or make it economically prohibitive through knee-jerk punitive legislation? Did you think you might be putting some guy out on the street with your proposal, before posting uup? No, in typical blog fashion an idea popped into your head, you thought about it for a short while, and posted it without even considering if you were educated enough about the subject to be fully aware of the consequences. Iâm very disappointed that someone like you could advocate a measure that will ruin lives, and not even mention that as a possibility, let alone give a morally defensible justification.
basically the parts of the equation a politician doesnt want to hear about but the service a trader provides is invaluable. of course us traders would adapt (nature of the business) if not exempt, offshore we will go. how would that benefit the US of A.