Nonvoters implicitly consent to the outcome ahead of time. Which means that they can carry part of the blame--if they didn't like it they could have voted against it.
Hot take: if <80% of eligible voters show up, nobody wins and the same politicians stay in office for another year, even if term limits would normally apply.
That means the politicians currently in power only need 20% to stay in power, instead of 50%.
It should be mandatory voting like in Australia instead. You don't cast a ballot, you get fined, and voting day is a mandatory national holiday. If you really don't want to cast a ballot, you cast a blank or invalid one.
Yes, in Australia we have compulsory voting, but no national holiday. Polling day is on a Saturday, so most people can get to their local polling booth pretty easily.
And since COVID, pre-poll postal votes have become even more popular and the Australian Electoral Commission has a really secure and streamlined process for these, proved over decades.
True. I'd support national holiday for it in US. Also the fine I would support, but it might require a constitutional amendment (seems unlikely these days).
Slightly less left field proposal: failure to pass a budget should immediately force fresh elections (both houses plus presidency), as it would in a Parliamentary system. None of this "shutdown" nonsense.
A lot of Trump supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith, voted for him because of his anti-war stance during campaigning. I’m not defending their poor judgement of an infamous con artist (I didn’t vote for Trump) but we should ask ourselves how democracy can function if candidates can just make things up during campaigns and do the complete opposite when they’re elected. We should also ask ourselves who really wanted this war and how they have so much leverage over our country to instigate it when 50-60% of Americans do not support it. We should ask how it’s possible that such unpopular wars always seem to have bipartisan support. We should also ask ourselves how Congress failed to stop this war which has been illegally executed without congressional approval. It’s all very curious if you think about it.
We can’t just keep finger pointing at the other party whenever things go wrong. There are systemic issues and outside influences destroying this country. Some people think this will all be fixed when democrats take over again in November but they’re wrong and the cycle will continue just with a more presentable veneer of decency.
I'd just like to remind everyone that this guy got fired from Fox News for being too extreme an idealogue.
> I’m not defending their poor judgement of an infamous con artist
At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
> ask how it’s possible that such unpopular wars always seem to have bipartisan support
Americans love war and guns! This is like, #1 national characteristic as observed by other nations. Especially because America always wins in the movies! The reason Americans are complaining about the Iran war and not the illegal Venezuelan invasion or whatever is because they are losing.
> Well, he did win Democrat votes as well because the party put up such horrible candidates twice.
In the last cycle, the Democratic Party stumbled egregiously, no question; but the functionally binary choice was between a predictable, if unoriginal bureaucrat vs. a documented prodigious liar and adjudicated rapist. I suppose for some tiny number of self-identifying progressives that would be toss-up, but I would love to understand the value system that could produce such a decision.
"But ultimately Carlson’s escalating toxicity, which included an undercurrent of white supremacy and a penchant for demeaning women and minorities, led Lachlan Murdoch, the then chief executive of Fox Corp, to pull the plug, the book says."
The article says too big for his boots and part responsible for a $787m libel judgement. Also called Senior Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications a cunt. Doesn't mention idealogue.
>At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
The challenge is that with a 2-party system it was take a chance Trump wouldn't be worse than he was the first time, or continue with the Democratic platform, which is not necessarily in alignment with a LOT of people. My personal feeling is that this administration has driven the country off a cliff in a spectacularly fast order. I also think the Democrats positions had us heading for a cliff, but it was at least further away.
Trump ran on solving SOME of the right problems. He and all the Republican leadership unfortunately have NONE of the right solutions. I fear the Democrats will think that a rebuke of Trump this election would be a mandate for many of their polices. It isn't, it is a rebuke of the horrible job Trump has done.
Tax the rich, solve healthcare, take note that our country is in an economic battle with other countries, and realize the best form of freedom is when everyone has economic opportunity and stability. Both parties "say" they want these things, the Republicans outright lie about it and the Dems do nothing.
> but we should ask ourselves how democracy can function if candidates can just make things up during campaigns and do the complete opposite when they’re elected.
Education. Actually teaching people how to think critically about what they see and hear needs to start as soon as they get a phone in their hand, if not sooner. That education in critical thinking needs to come from family, school, social clubs and religious institutions. I don't think that'll ever happen in America though. Our economy depends on people not thinking critically.
Time and time again, I keep finding that the people insisting schools teach "Critical thinking" were the exact people who didn't pay attention in English class when that was taught.
Like when people used to say that "Schools should teach useful things like balancing a checkbook or paying your taxes". Which is funny, because the skills required to do those two things are addition, subtraction, and reading.
Americans don't learn because Americans are adamant that they shouldn't have to pay attention to learn, that school is a liberal scam, that broad willful ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, that they have more important things to care about.
Families who value education have always gotten a good education in the USA, and that isn't about choosing a private school either. It's about the person needing an education getting personally invested in gaining that education.
Meanwhile Bush Jr gave us an educational regime where schools cannot at all hold back someone who really needs to be held back. So the curriculum needed to be dumbed down to accommodate people.
> Americans don't learn because Americans are adamant that they shouldn't have to pay attention to learn, that school is a liberal scam, that broad willful ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, that they have more important things to care about.
That's why it can't just be school. It needs to be a societal thing that goes beyond schools to all the other places people get socialized and learn. I mean maybe churches, social groups, and families are all teaching the willful ignorance you're talking about, but if they are that's what needs to change. People need to hear the same thing from different places before they'll believe it sometimes.
This comment contains so many different issues that it is impossible to say why it is downvoted. My guess is that any comment that mentions bipartisanship is going to be downvoted.
US foreign policy is and has always been bipartisan. One side is a bit more restrained and has better manners, the other overtly says what is going on.
Yes, Tucker Carlson should have known what was going to happen because he has been in politics for so long. For the average voter who is busy with other things, it takes at least 8 years of intensely following one Democrat president and one Republican. The mainstream media is of little use, since they report daily statements and political theater.
You need to read the think tank papers and follow bipartisan hearings like the Senate Armed Services Committee where there is no difference between R/D except for blaming the other side for current events.
"lying is free" and it has no consequences for these people. whether it is WMDs or war or fiat money printing with trillions or killing millions. What you people call justice is, well it's obv. so no need to write about it. These facts dont change with two party or three party, it's cultural btw.
We all know how some cultures are violent and backwards to each other? some or like this, just different culture
> A lot of Trump supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith, voted for him because of his anti-war stance during campaigning.
That was just their nice-sounding excuse for voting for him. It's not like they are going to go out and say that they like him because of his jingoistic machismo authoritarian 'strong'-man bullshit.
They'll performatively grumble for a bit, but are all ready to vote for the guy a fourth time in 2028.
Well the simple reason they voted for him is that they are all extremely rich capital owners who wanted his tax cuts. That's the same reason that farm megacorps voted for him even though he destroyed tens of billions of farm revenue with his stupidity in trade wars.
Rich people would rather the country burn than pay 1% more in taxes. It's purely ideological too, as they regularly spend tons to save a little in taxes.
No, the "quote" (more like anonymous anecdote) is quite literally about blood running in the streets presenting an opportunity to buy assets at reduced cost.
As if anything in the executive branch of the US still works properly.
Isn't the FBI already raiding the homes of political opponents for intimidation?
The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
> The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
If we're being completely honest, the checks and balances in the constitution ended within the first decade. They were only designed to work in the case that the three branches of government were truly separate and adversarial with one another.
The creation of political parties largely eliminated them, both because they cross-cut branches and because the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system virtually guaranteed the parties would have nearly even representation most of the time.
That it's greatest likelihood of collapse comes between 236 and 243 years later (depending on whether you count from the end of the revolutionary war or ratification of the constitution) is a goddamn miracle.
I dont think the problem is parties by themselves. I think it's more the fact that the US system cannot accomodate more than 2 parties.
Plenty of other democracies have parties, including cross government branches.
What makes the US unique, and fragile, is that no party other than democrats and republicans can realistically exist.
It over emphasizes partisanship above anything (including honesty, morality) because career politicians in one party just have nowhere to go if they are dissident.
You can see that in plain sight currently, with republicans being in the total incapacity of contradicting their party line on anything, even the most obvious of lies.
In most other democracies, dissidents would have just created a new party and moved on, that wouldnt be "carrier ending" for them.
To be fair, you could also be a real world user of a commodity and productively use futures markets. For example, an airline or trucking company using them to hedge fuel prices.
Look in the general sense that retail traders lose money you are right but that applies to all markets, sports betting and casinos. However I and many of my friends live in houses paid for with profits made from futures trading and none of us have inside info or supply commodities. It takes discipline, skill, risk management, emotional management and drive to make it happen but it does happen.
There's a <50% chance you'll make money off of it because it's zero-sum, and if insiders make money on average then other traders (i.e., you) have to lose money on average.
The issue is that the odds aren't actually 50/50 on you buying either side of the trade; one half will look like a better deal (and given public information, it is a better deal) so you'll buy that half. Then when the market resolves, it'll turn out that insiders knew some piece of information that made the other half of the trade a better choice.
So then the person who uses public information is actually the bigger fool than someone who uses no information whatsoever and just picks a side of the bet. If insiders know that a volcano is going to erupt and offers a 50/50 payout, people who know the historical improbability will bet that is will NOT erupt, thinking it is an easy payout. But there will be some idiots out there that bet that it will erupt based on dumb luck.
The insiders don't consistently have opportunities to profit from their information. It's not every day that the war against Iran changes direction, and that whale has to wait for the next 180 degree turn to make their move.
It kind of can, but trading futures is trading termed contracts, kind of like options, but a bit stranger (and you can buy options for futures contracts too!) For a retail trader, you definitely are not in a buy and hold/invest mindset. Often people use futures as a hedge or for locking in prices for physical delivery- it serves a very real world problem.
If you consider 'trading' to be short term buying and selling of stocks, then yeah. Holding stocks long term is nothing like trading commodities though.
The scary thing for me is that in the US, the President and by extension the DoJ has a lot of power to override any legal protections that exist in most countries. In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
> In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
I would not rely on that. The Attorney General can withdraw prosecutions, and is a government minister (although not technically in the Cabinet).
Parliament can do anything, it just usually doesn't. This includes retroactive legislation to decide that you did not win a lawsuit that you actually did win (Reilly and Wilson v Secretary of State, although that itself was eventually ruled unlawful). The infinite delay of Bloody Sunday prosecutions is probably the biggest example in UK discourse.
No country is safe from this if enough authoritarian-collaborator political appointments are made (such as happened to SCOTUS). It should really be viewed as a form of coup.
Yep; I think the above comment took the wrong lessons.
What actually happened in the US is that "common norms and expectations" were thrown out the window, so instead of the question being "What is traditionally done?" it became "What can legally be done?" And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
UK politics, more than most younger countries, is particularly susceptible to this. Norms, traditionally, and commonly understood standards make up a scary amount of constraints on the powers of government. If anyone gained power that only feels limited by the letter of the law (i.e. throws out norms, traditions, and standards), the UK is in serious trouble and Parliament hasn't moved to address it.
Somewhat ironically (given how unpopular it is), the Lords may be the best back-stop the UK has. Particularly the 30%~ which do not originate from politics.
People in the US have been bemoaning the ceding of power of Congress to the Executive branch for a long time. I think what's happening now is validating that rights laws are all subject to the whims of the people in power. There is nothing keeping Congress from reasserting their power and getting a grip over things, but they won't for the political risks involved. Heads would roll, nobody wants to be one of them.
> And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
It's not even constrained by the letter of the law. The current administration has done quite a few things which are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
Trump has done so, safe in the knowledge that the impeachment process can't work so long as the Republican party holds a majority in the House, and a conviction can't occur so long as the Republican party controls at least 41 seats in the Senate.
Furthermore, due to the presidential immunity power created out of thin air by the Supreme Court in US v. Trump, he is shielded even from investigation so long as it can be successfully argued any potential crimes were done as part of official duties.
Lastly, his advanced age virtually guarantees he'll die long before any such prosecution could clear the legal hoops required for conviction after leaving office (assuming he ever does), even in the rare circumstances a Democrat could be found with enough spine to actually move forward with one.
What if the whole point of the war was planned to generate trading opportunities? Every crazy tweet or announcement another cash out.
It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.
Heard of the documentary, "Everything is a Rich Man's trick"? It's quite eye opening, and makes this similar conclusion with evidence pointing to the Rich Men through history. Highly recommend a watch.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. If you look at effects of geopolitical events and who profits and loses, rather than stated intentions. This global oil crisis, the Ukraine crisis, tariffs ect. It's the equivalent of the "the purpose of the system is what it does".
Oil crisis: Trumps friends profit on insider info, US oil industry (also his friends) profits, Russia profits because they are another big oil producer, USD dominance is harmed (also helps Russia), everyone else in the world eats the costs
Ukraine: Russia bleeds, Ukraine bleeds, arms industry profits, politicians in general get something to grandstand on in front of the voters. Personally I believe that this conflict has been artificially prolonged just to amplify the effects
Tariffs: US public eats the costs, Trump profits politically by appearing strong, Trumps friends profit on insider info
While I don't think trump and co are smart enough to plan big stuff like this, I think it is pretty obvious they are trying to benefit oil companies and I have no doubt oil companies were involved in the decision to bomb Iran to some degree.
What I mean is Trump and Co probably spoke to oil execs before making the Iran decision to ask if they would raise production. Then they lied and said yes, while knowing they would drag their feet as prices rose.
Trump is a stoog. The folks around him treat him like an idiot. There's no way they weren't involved here. They've been around his entire presidency.
How is this at my expense? It's at the expense of the hedge fund they bought the oil futures from before the price went up. I don't see why I should assume that some hedge fund manager is more on my side than some insider trader.
I don't see many comments here about the actual topic. Such is the case with anything Trump related.
Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.
No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.
I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.
Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.
The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
Welcome to the world of commodity trading. There is no SEC here, and this is business as usual. You can look at T&S to see this for yourself, but this is (like it or not) how this typically goes in commodity markets.
Look at Adobe stock 10 minutes before the Claude Design announcement came out… the volume spike there is out of the ordinary and I find it hard to believe it’s a coincidence, someone knew something. The level of blatant insider trading at the moment is pretty wild
same, without context it is speculation. even with context, if the person creating the story controls the window, a window can be found which supports the story.
This, as a generality. There are plenty of multi-billion-dollar Wall Street firms doing algorithmic trading. Your prospects for being smarter or faster than them are very poor.
I've heard of this working in other kinds of markets, where if you can identify the traders who consistently beat the market, and you can emulate them with precise timing, then you can beat the market too.
> At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news... At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is “close” to a “memorandum of understanding” to end the Iran War.
Depends on what your brokerage allows, see timestamps.
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
So, basically, over the last century or more or so, we've learned:
- our laws, the ones that supposedly keep society stable and safe, don't apply to particular groups of people
- we can catch them, and maybe, just maybe, we will hold someone accountable for those people, though often they just distract and trick everyone from holding them accountable
- the majority of people are getting stolen from, treated like slaves and tricked and abused, and they will tolerate this abuse because of <fear???>
Am I to accept this frame of reality in which the universe and the earth, and the leaders currently making decisions for me and holding influence over the worlds' military powers, are this hostile towards me?
I refuse. I think we have more power than we think. In America at least, we still have an amendment that has yet to be repealed (created for scenarios in which abusers hold leadership positions and refuse to be accountable): the 1st amendment and parading guns legally, safely, and responsibly is a powerful reminder of what accountability and dignity looks like.
edit: I advocate for parading guns peacefully with an intention and purpose: go with a group standing for rights, safety and dignity
Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.
"The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that it had charged 30 people allegedly linked with a decade-long insider trading scheme involving high-profile law firms."
Let me guess, these guys said something bad about Trump?
Not that it means that they didn’t do it, just that they would not have gotten charged otherwise.
Honestly, insider trading laws should be removed since they manipulate markets. If you know things, make moves that are public, that would price things _more_ accurately.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
It's a tax. I don't know if you specifically are one of the "taxation is theft" types, but it's absolutely wild how many of these are totally cool with the tax if it's funding insider trading payouts but not if it's paying for poor person healthcare or whatever.
In the absence of the insider trader selling you oil futures on the basis of his insider knowledge, what would you do?
You'd buy oil futures at broadly the same price from someone else (maybe a worse price! Because the presence of the insider selling is already driving the price down). So how exactly do you lose?
The only people who lose out are those whose limit orders don't get filled because the insider outbid them. The counterparty benefits from trading with the insider.
This is completely ignorant of market microstructure. For big swaths of the market, most parties interacting with the market do so by trading with a market maker who ensures that everyone's trades clear immediately in exchange for a fee that covers the risk of getting caught offsides. If you're big enough, it makes sense to take that risk in house, but the risk and its very real financial cost remains. In both cases, trades that increase the risk increase the fee. So no, corruption is a tax and everyone pays the tax even though the mechanics have fallen through the rather large cracks in your understanding.
If you think this tax is de minimis, great, glad to hear it, let's put a government tax of similar magnitude in there and resume the peanut butter rations to starving african kids that DOGE cut.
I'd say the entire market loses out on insider trading except for the two parties involved in the insider trade. The insider trades take away a part of the profit margin that other good faith future providers need to justify the risk they take on by offering the futures. This leads to future providers needing to raise the prices of futures to remain profitable.
If market makers figure out that a handful of market participants are being fed inside information, they’ll widen the bid/ask, leading to increased transaction costs for everyone.
It also discourages speculators from entering trades if they suspect they’ll be run over by insiders trading on non-public information.
Fewer market participants leads to worse price discovery.
If a store sells a TV for $500 and they know they are going to run a sale the next day. The next day the customer may feel like they missed the sale, but the TV was still worth >$500 to him else he would not have bought it in the first place.
>The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The only stop gap we have is for the states to start investigating and prosecuting these cases. And they don’t, I can I only suppose there are issues of jurisdiction even if the opposing party controls the apparatus. Too bad the the Georgia DA Fawny Willis was so inept; that election stealing RICO case had teeth.
At least here he is just looting counterparties. It's way better than selling off national parks and using tax dollars on no-bid contracts to gild the presidential tanning bed.
The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
I think you’re giving Trump too much credit. If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out. There is no chess game here. It’s not even checkers. He is just trying to not have to admit he made a mistake - just with billions of dollars and lives on the line. Such sad.
This administration literally told congress that it has a right to bomb Iran again without congressional oversight specifically because there's a cease fire in place. I wish I was kidding. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4xexy4w7o
> If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out.
There's at least two other belligerents in this war who get a say, as well as a large number of other countries which count as victims (everyone from Lebanon to UAE). No US decision can stop Israel and Iran from fighting.
He has operational control of the armed forces. This has never been disputed recently; he can order whatever shots he wants. The armed forces funding is in one whole pot which is guaranteed even against a "shutdown". He also has total legal immunity for official acts.
He will just say it's a different operation. That's what they've been doing and it's working. Republicans have no desire to stop Trump. Democrats don't care either cuz they want this power once they're elected.
It's worse than having no desire to stop him. Republicans want to compete to bow down to Trump like a gaggle of serfs. It is a debasement of human dignity to watch them grovel.
This topic keeps coming up so I'll summarize some points I've alrady made [1].
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
The whole retail theft epidemic (and the ensuing Union Pacific cargo theft ) was a corporate scam perpetrated by local news and law enforcement PR departments.
It wasn't at all. There's still a serious problem with shoplifting. Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign.
At my local CVS, they just started locking up the bulk candy. You don't take the the sales hit and the expense of those locking cabinets unless you have a real shrinkage problem.
>Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign
They absolutely would.
Shrink has not gone up
The National Retail Federation, which publishes those numbers yearly, has stopped publishing those numbers to hide that fact.
There are real shoplifting problems but they are extremely local. Your local police department needs to stand up and do their fucking jobs to identify and take down the organized crime perpetuating it.
Have you ever read any investigative journalism about those crime stories? Or about local crime news via papers and television? Those two news sources are starved for news stories and law enforcement agencies have well funded PR arms (one should wonder why this is) and their associated affiliated unions/associations are quite eager to become the primary(only sometimes) sources for news (one should wonder why this is true for stories even from supposedly neutral reporting like AP and NPR). Theft has existed since there has been trading - we see plenty of examples of this with nesting/courting animals with rocks and sticks, but this "crime wave" whenever the USA status quo of law enforcement/prison industrial complex is threatened or new prisons/private prisons need to be justified is blatantly obvious.
> You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
It’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
> t’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people
There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.
I would say that many people with better options take up sophisticated crime as a vocation. Obviously poor and rich people choose vocations a little differently.
There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too. Poor people do not benefit from stores closing, or having the stores closest to them have everything locked up.
> There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.
People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.
> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.
Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).
Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.
> enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores
Yes and no. Enforcement deters career criminals by increasing the cost of doing business. Improving society means fewer honest people have to turn to crime.
> insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
My point is, increasing enforcement will not help against petty crime, because you gotta feed yourself somehow. The people on the lowest rungs of society dealing crack cocaine or acting as the front men for fencing rings - they got nothing to lose. In fact there's more than enough reports of people letting themselves get caught at some petty crime before winter hits so they got a few months in jail where they're at least fed and have a roof over their head.
But it can and will massively help against large scale white collar crime. When you got dozens of millions of dollars in wealth, now you have the means to make more out of it (honest or not), the incentive to make more out of it - and also, a lot to lose, should they get caught.
> It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
I'm a fan of an idea I ran across recently. Instead of calling Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, etc the richest people in the world, we should call them the greediest.
"Greediest man in the world Elon Musk promises robotaxis" hits different than the "Richest man" version
Don't say "Billionaire Jeff Bezos does <thing>", say "Champion of Greed Jeff Bezos..."
The article displays a laughably out of date view of futures markets, too
There are people and institutions, such as oil producers, who will need to sell oil at a future date. They want to lock in the price today on those future sales. There are also people and institutions, such as airlines, who have a future need for oil and would like to lock in the price today.
Airlines haven’t hedged fuel in a long time and generally run a policy now of just adjusting fares whenever fuel prices change.
Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.
The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.
Southwest was famously killing it during the oil shocks of the 1990s and 2000s because they had the foresight to buy futures when spot prices were low. See https://southwest50.com/our-stories/the-southwest-jet-fuel-h... - I used to joke that Southwest was a futures trader disguised as an airline.
SWA was the last major airline to engage in strategic hedging, and came under considerable investor pressure to stop doing that (since it means they can’t lower fares as much when oil is cheap). So they stopped, and investors apparently don’t want airlines to be futures traders disguised as airlines. They prefer credit card referral marketing agencies disguised as airlines.
Now the airlines simply raise fares in lockstep when oil gets expensive, or simply go out of business, like Spirit did last week.
It doesn’t work that way. Canceling flights has significant business-impacting downstream effects that go beyond mitigating the loss caused by a bad bet.
Metals (miners <> manufacturers) and agricultural (farmers <> food makers) futures are still non-speculative. There are industries that still buy materials from these markets, for delivery, as in they want to see the physical product in their hands. I was surprised to find that out as well
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
Oh I agree - the most likely scenario is someone within the inner circle trading on this insider info but my comment was more of a devil's advocate comment. If you are NK and you have hacked some Trump adjacent staffers phone, and you see the ability to make a ton of money, would you take it? The staffers aren't known for their grade A security practices.
Keep your salt shaker handy because he produces opinions at a prodigious rate.
That personality type- highly verbal but able to produce talk to fit anything from a 5 second sound bite up to 2 hours, superficially bright but not actually thoughtful, full of spicy opinions, prone to predictions that sound interesting but don’t come true - is all over TV and now podcasts. Alex Jones is the same type.
It's more evidence if any was needed that the US is now definitively in a late imperial phase of decline - US elites have become corrupt. This is classic decline of empire stuff.
So no you can't stop it, but knowing that does at least let you make decisions with more clarity in your own life
I'm just glad I'm alive to witness it. Ww2 is what finally sank Britain's declining empireafter ww1, I'm hoping Iran and maybe a global war finally knocks them off that top spot and the east takes over
You’re literally doing what you’re railing against. In fact it’s worse, because it’s not even about the thing itself, but about the commentary on the thing.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
The American people knew who they were electing. They knew it, and they elected him anyway. Whatever damage results from that collective decision is our cross to bear.
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
>Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
>Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
I did and that's not at all what TFA argues. It argues that it's the corruption that's the problem, which is exacerbated by the lack of legal enforcement by the current administration -- mostly because many in that administration are either actively involved in said corruption, or happy to cover it up/pooh pooh it.
I suppose you might think that some folks who haven't read TFA might buy your analysis, even though it's pretty much the opposite of what Krugman argues.
If you assume the referee is actually playing the game then yes, the difference between a referee making a call to advantage their own bets to make the other team win and an opposing team making a play to make themselves win is one of those entities is engaging in corruption.
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Yes, I'm sure Robinhood or Schwab will allow me to open a $2M short position when my portfolio is $[sufficiently small that I'm debating the costs of a couple of thousand for a helicopter charter].
It's easy enough to synthesize 100x leverage by synthesis through options. If you have $25k for a margin account you could do it no problem. Of course, your funds would be rapidly vaporized if you were even a little bit wrong on timing or you needed more margin for volatility to keep it from getting called before it dips.
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
If those hedge funds are doing something that stops the market from functioning then of course there should be intervention but it doesn't seem clear to me at all that hedge funds trying to get an edge (especially in a way that's replicable by other funds) has the same effect as rampant insider trading in regards to destroying the market.
>Wait, those big oil tanks don’t have lids? Doesn’t that mean rain would mix with the oil??
Modern tanks have floating lids. The lid is as much for keeping the volatiles in as keeping water out. Water gets into all sorts of places in oil refining anyway. It wouldn't really matter anyway since oil and water being famously good at mixing. You can just draw water off the bottom, filter it or boil it off depending on the situation and amount. Obviously they don't want more water (you're wasting money processing everything that you can't sell) but some isn't a big deal.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
You keep saying this, when it is counter to the actual text of the article.
> Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question....What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
That is what the article is about. It's saying that this is corruption, and discussing what the effect of this corruption is. "Beyond just corruption" is wholly your invention. I don't even know what it would mean?
Corruption is the cause. The article discusses the resulting effect.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).
The worst part is the sharp changes in the price being traded aren't achieved by magic but rather with guns & actual human suffering
The war must continue in order to bring us to the status quo that was in place before we started the war.
I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
> I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
As if the people responsible actually feel the impact of their choices to that degree.
Maybe at least the people that put them in power (voters). But being honest, it wasn't just voters.
Nonvoters would win the Electoral College if that was a thing.
Nonvoters implicitly consent to the outcome ahead of time. Which means that they can carry part of the blame--if they didn't like it they could have voted against it.
Hot take: if <80% of eligible voters show up, nobody wins and the same politicians stay in office for another year, even if term limits would normally apply.
That means the politicians currently in power only need 20% to stay in power, instead of 50%.
It should be mandatory voting like in Australia instead. You don't cast a ballot, you get fined, and voting day is a mandatory national holiday. If you really don't want to cast a ballot, you cast a blank or invalid one.
Yes, in Australia we have compulsory voting, but no national holiday. Polling day is on a Saturday, so most people can get to their local polling booth pretty easily. And since COVID, pre-poll postal votes have become even more popular and the Australian Electoral Commission has a really secure and streamlined process for these, proved over decades.
True. I'd support national holiday for it in US. Also the fine I would support, but it might require a constitutional amendment (seems unlikely these days).
How about instead it immediately triggers another new election and the people who ran previously are not eligible to run ever again
Slightly less left field proposal: failure to pass a budget should immediately force fresh elections (both houses plus presidency), as it would in a Parliamentary system. None of this "shutdown" nonsense.
Arguably people who voted for Trump are somewhat responsible, and include a lot of car drivers.
(Not to imply that many Democrat politicians aren't also owned by AIPAC and big business.)
A lot of Trump supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith, voted for him because of his anti-war stance during campaigning. I’m not defending their poor judgement of an infamous con artist (I didn’t vote for Trump) but we should ask ourselves how democracy can function if candidates can just make things up during campaigns and do the complete opposite when they’re elected. We should also ask ourselves who really wanted this war and how they have so much leverage over our country to instigate it when 50-60% of Americans do not support it. We should ask how it’s possible that such unpopular wars always seem to have bipartisan support. We should also ask ourselves how Congress failed to stop this war which has been illegally executed without congressional approval. It’s all very curious if you think about it.
We can’t just keep finger pointing at the other party whenever things go wrong. There are systemic issues and outside influences destroying this country. Some people think this will all be fixed when democrats take over again in November but they’re wrong and the cycle will continue just with a more presentable veneer of decency.
> Tucker Carlson
I'd just like to remind everyone that this guy got fired from Fox News for being too extreme an idealogue.
> I’m not defending their poor judgement of an infamous con artist
At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
> ask how it’s possible that such unpopular wars always seem to have bipartisan support
Americans love war and guns! This is like, #1 national characteristic as observed by other nations. Especially because America always wins in the movies! The reason Americans are complaining about the Iran war and not the illegal Venezuelan invasion or whatever is because they are losing.
(who on earth is Dave Smith?)
> At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
Well, he did win Democrat votes as well because the party put up such horrible candidates twice.
> Well, he did win Democrat votes as well because the party put up such horrible candidates twice.
In the last cycle, the Democratic Party stumbled egregiously, no question; but the functionally binary choice was between a predictable, if unoriginal bureaucrat vs. a documented prodigious liar and adjudicated rapist. I suppose for some tiny number of self-identifying progressives that would be toss-up, but I would love to understand the value system that could produce such a decision.
> ... because they are losing.
The pnly unforgiveable sin in USA politics.
> I'd just like to remind everyone that this guy got fired from Fox News for being too extreme an idealogue.
Do you have any evidence that this was the reason?
I don’t think we need to be providing proof that the sky is blue at this point but here you go.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/oct/31/tucker-carlson...
The article doesn't even include the words "ideologue" or "extreme" or make a similar claim.
Very weird and defensive response.
It really isn’t. The fact that it seems like people can’t use descriptive adjectives on HN is always so bizarre to me.
You should try using better description adjectives, like "rude", "racist", "uppity" instead of spreading misinformation.
"But ultimately Carlson’s escalating toxicity, which included an undercurrent of white supremacy and a penchant for demeaning women and minorities, led Lachlan Murdoch, the then chief executive of Fox Corp, to pull the plug, the book says."
How obtuse are you being?
You are being deliberately obtuse. Unbearably rude and "extreme ideologue" are completely different things.
There are many Nice & Respectable people who are extreme ideologues. Words have meaning.
The article says too big for his boots and part responsible for a $787m libel judgement. Also called Senior Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications a cunt. Doesn't mention idealogue.
>At some point you have to hold adult Republicans accountable for their actions. They were warned repeatedly; they chose to ignore the warnings.
The challenge is that with a 2-party system it was take a chance Trump wouldn't be worse than he was the first time, or continue with the Democratic platform, which is not necessarily in alignment with a LOT of people. My personal feeling is that this administration has driven the country off a cliff in a spectacularly fast order. I also think the Democrats positions had us heading for a cliff, but it was at least further away.
Trump ran on solving SOME of the right problems. He and all the Republican leadership unfortunately have NONE of the right solutions. I fear the Democrats will think that a rebuke of Trump this election would be a mandate for many of their polices. It isn't, it is a rebuke of the horrible job Trump has done.
Tax the rich, solve healthcare, take note that our country is in an economic battle with other countries, and realize the best form of freedom is when everyone has economic opportunity and stability. Both parties "say" they want these things, the Republicans outright lie about it and the Dems do nothing.
> but we should ask ourselves how democracy can function if candidates can just make things up during campaigns and do the complete opposite when they’re elected.
Education. Actually teaching people how to think critically about what they see and hear needs to start as soon as they get a phone in their hand, if not sooner. That education in critical thinking needs to come from family, school, social clubs and religious institutions. I don't think that'll ever happen in America though. Our economy depends on people not thinking critically.
Time and time again, I keep finding that the people insisting schools teach "Critical thinking" were the exact people who didn't pay attention in English class when that was taught.
Like when people used to say that "Schools should teach useful things like balancing a checkbook or paying your taxes". Which is funny, because the skills required to do those two things are addition, subtraction, and reading.
Americans don't learn because Americans are adamant that they shouldn't have to pay attention to learn, that school is a liberal scam, that broad willful ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, that they have more important things to care about.
Families who value education have always gotten a good education in the USA, and that isn't about choosing a private school either. It's about the person needing an education getting personally invested in gaining that education.
Meanwhile Bush Jr gave us an educational regime where schools cannot at all hold back someone who really needs to be held back. So the curriculum needed to be dumbed down to accommodate people.
> Americans don't learn because Americans are adamant that they shouldn't have to pay attention to learn, that school is a liberal scam, that broad willful ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, that they have more important things to care about.
That's why it can't just be school. It needs to be a societal thing that goes beyond schools to all the other places people get socialized and learn. I mean maybe churches, social groups, and families are all teaching the willful ignorance you're talking about, but if they are that's what needs to change. People need to hear the same thing from different places before they'll believe it sometimes.
How do you do that when the ruling class has a vested interest in preventing it?
This comment contains so many different issues that it is impossible to say why it is downvoted. My guess is that any comment that mentions bipartisanship is going to be downvoted.
US foreign policy is and has always been bipartisan. One side is a bit more restrained and has better manners, the other overtly says what is going on.
Yes, Tucker Carlson should have known what was going to happen because he has been in politics for so long. For the average voter who is busy with other things, it takes at least 8 years of intensely following one Democrat president and one Republican. The mainstream media is of little use, since they report daily statements and political theater.
You need to read the think tank papers and follow bipartisan hearings like the Senate Armed Services Committee where there is no difference between R/D except for blaming the other side for current events.
"lying is free" and it has no consequences for these people. whether it is WMDs or war or fiat money printing with trillions or killing millions. What you people call justice is, well it's obv. so no need to write about it. These facts dont change with two party or three party, it's cultural btw.
We all know how some cultures are violent and backwards to each other? some or like this, just different culture
> A lot of Trump supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith, voted for him because of his anti-war stance during campaigning.
That was just their nice-sounding excuse for voting for him. It's not like they are going to go out and say that they like him because of his jingoistic machismo authoritarian 'strong'-man bullshit.
They'll performatively grumble for a bit, but are all ready to vote for the guy a fourth time in 2028.
Well the simple reason they voted for him is that they are all extremely rich capital owners who wanted his tax cuts. That's the same reason that farm megacorps voted for him even though he destroyed tens of billions of farm revenue with his stupidity in trade wars.
Rich people would rather the country burn than pay 1% more in taxes. It's purely ideological too, as they regularly spend tons to save a little in taxes.
they earned millions off it, how would they even feel fuel price ?
Someone has taken the Rothschild motto too literally:
“Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if it is your own.” — Baron Nathan Rothschild
https://medium.com/@douglasp.schwartz/buy-when-theres-blood-...
That was referring to equities. The modern version should be short oil when there is blood in the street and the president truths.
source?
That’s not what that quote means. It means even if your portfolio is down you should keep buying.
That's what they meant by "too literally."
No, the "quote" (more like anonymous anecdote) is quite literally about blood running in the streets presenting an opportunity to buy assets at reduced cost.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YXivtoSkuVQ
Criminal probe into this started last month.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-probes-suspicious...
As if anything in the executive branch of the US still works properly.
Isn't the FBI already raiding the homes of political opponents for intimidation?
The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
> The famed US constitution with all its 'checks and balances' they would never shut up about turned out to be papier mâché and completely trampled by the first person that tried.
If we're being completely honest, the checks and balances in the constitution ended within the first decade. They were only designed to work in the case that the three branches of government were truly separate and adversarial with one another.
The creation of political parties largely eliminated them, both because they cross-cut branches and because the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system virtually guaranteed the parties would have nearly even representation most of the time.
That it's greatest likelihood of collapse comes between 236 and 243 years later (depending on whether you count from the end of the revolutionary war or ratification of the constitution) is a goddamn miracle.
I dont think the problem is parties by themselves. I think it's more the fact that the US system cannot accomodate more than 2 parties.
Plenty of other democracies have parties, including cross government branches.
What makes the US unique, and fragile, is that no party other than democrats and republicans can realistically exist.
It over emphasizes partisanship above anything (including honesty, morality) because career politicians in one party just have nowhere to go if they are dissident.
You can see that in plain sight currently, with republicans being in the total incapacity of contradicting their party line on anything, even the most obvious of lies.
In most other democracies, dissidents would have just created a new party and moved on, that wouldnt be "carrier ending" for them.
>constitution ... turned out to be papier mâché
Give it time.
I think they made off with at least $200M
that is "too big to prosecute against extremely creative and well paid law firm" territory
If you are trading in the futures market and you don't have inside info or are not an actual supplier of the commodity, you are the sucker.
To be fair, you could also be a real world user of a commodity and productively use futures markets. For example, an airline or trucking company using them to hedge fuel prices.
Sure, and increasingly those people are being played for suckers. The article makes that point.
Less so than those buying it for spot? They need oil one way or another, whether from a future contract or the spot market (or downstream thereof).
Then your average price is higher than average. I heard airlines don't use futures any more because they need to keep costs low.
Future exists to stabilize instantaneous commodity prices.
They also allow some insights on future demand, which can help you plan production of your commodity.
Look in the general sense that retail traders lose money you are right but that applies to all markets, sports betting and casinos. However I and many of my friends live in houses paid for with profits made from futures trading and none of us have inside info or supply commodities. It takes discipline, skill, risk management, emotional management and drive to make it happen but it does happen.
Isn't there a 50% chance you are betting on the "insider" side of it?
There's a <50% chance you'll make money off of it because it's zero-sum, and if insiders make money on average then other traders (i.e., you) have to lose money on average.
The issue is that the odds aren't actually 50/50 on you buying either side of the trade; one half will look like a better deal (and given public information, it is a better deal) so you'll buy that half. Then when the market resolves, it'll turn out that insiders knew some piece of information that made the other half of the trade a better choice.
So then the person who uses public information is actually the bigger fool than someone who uses no information whatsoever and just picks a side of the bet. If insiders know that a volcano is going to erupt and offers a 50/50 payout, people who know the historical improbability will bet that is will NOT erupt, thinking it is an easy payout. But there will be some idiots out there that bet that it will erupt based on dumb luck.
It's often true - index investors tend to do better than people who follow corporate prononcements.
If that was the case you'd start consistently buying the side that looks worse, which would align with insiders and you'd make money.
The insiders don't consistently have opportunities to profit from their information. It's not every day that the war against Iran changes direction, and that whale has to wait for the next 180 degree turn to make their move.
Yes. It's a conditional probability.
P(W | You're a sucker) = 0.5
actually futures market is hardest to rig compare to options and stocks but markets are also efficient they say.
hard to win at a game where 97% fail in the long run.
That logic would also extend to individual stocks, wouldn’t it?
It kind of can, but trading futures is trading termed contracts, kind of like options, but a bit stranger (and you can buy options for futures contracts too!) For a retail trader, you definitely are not in a buy and hold/invest mindset. Often people use futures as a hedge or for locking in prices for physical delivery- it serves a very real world problem.
If you consider 'trading' to be short term buying and selling of stocks, then yeah. Holding stocks long term is nothing like trading commodities though.
I suppose if you're shorting or trading options generally, yes to some extent.
The scary thing for me is that in the US, the President and by extension the DoJ has a lot of power to override any legal protections that exist in most countries. In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
In the US, for some reason, if you are a danger to the President's friends, you can be fired/your department can just be shutdown executively and this isn't just about Trump, it is about a serious weakness in the systems of governance.
> In the UK, the Prime Minister or the Home Office cannot ring up any of the enforcement agencies and tell them to drop a corruption case - the law is supposed to apply to everyone.
I would not rely on that. The Attorney General can withdraw prosecutions, and is a government minister (although not technically in the Cabinet).
Parliament can do anything, it just usually doesn't. This includes retroactive legislation to decide that you did not win a lawsuit that you actually did win (Reilly and Wilson v Secretary of State, although that itself was eventually ruled unlawful). The infinite delay of Bloody Sunday prosecutions is probably the biggest example in UK discourse.
No country is safe from this if enough authoritarian-collaborator political appointments are made (such as happened to SCOTUS). It should really be viewed as a form of coup.
Yep; I think the above comment took the wrong lessons.
What actually happened in the US is that "common norms and expectations" were thrown out the window, so instead of the question being "What is traditionally done?" it became "What can legally be done?" And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
UK politics, more than most younger countries, is particularly susceptible to this. Norms, traditionally, and commonly understood standards make up a scary amount of constraints on the powers of government. If anyone gained power that only feels limited by the letter of the law (i.e. throws out norms, traditions, and standards), the UK is in serious trouble and Parliament hasn't moved to address it.
Somewhat ironically (given how unpopular it is), the Lords may be the best back-stop the UK has. Particularly the 30%~ which do not originate from politics.
People in the US have been bemoaning the ceding of power of Congress to the Executive branch for a long time. I think what's happening now is validating that rights laws are all subject to the whims of the people in power. There is nothing keeping Congress from reasserting their power and getting a grip over things, but they won't for the political risks involved. Heads would roll, nobody wants to be one of them.
It sailed straight past "What can legally be done?" to "What can be done without me going to jail?"
> And, as it turns out, when you're only constrained by the letter of the law the executive branch is insanely powerful.
It's not even constrained by the letter of the law. The current administration has done quite a few things which are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
Trump has done so, safe in the knowledge that the impeachment process can't work so long as the Republican party holds a majority in the House, and a conviction can't occur so long as the Republican party controls at least 41 seats in the Senate.
Furthermore, due to the presidential immunity power created out of thin air by the Supreme Court in US v. Trump, he is shielded even from investigation so long as it can be successfully argued any potential crimes were done as part of official duties.
Lastly, his advanced age virtually guarantees he'll die long before any such prosecution could clear the legal hoops required for conviction after leaving office (assuming he ever does), even in the rare circumstances a Democrat could be found with enough spine to actually move forward with one.
What if the whole point of the war was planned to generate trading opportunities? Every crazy tweet or announcement another cash out.
It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.
https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...
Heard of the documentary, "Everything is a Rich Man's trick"? It's quite eye opening, and makes this similar conclusion with evidence pointing to the Rich Men through history. Highly recommend a watch.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. If you look at effects of geopolitical events and who profits and loses, rather than stated intentions. This global oil crisis, the Ukraine crisis, tariffs ect. It's the equivalent of the "the purpose of the system is what it does".
Oil crisis: Trumps friends profit on insider info, US oil industry (also his friends) profits, Russia profits because they are another big oil producer, USD dominance is harmed (also helps Russia), everyone else in the world eats the costs
Ukraine: Russia bleeds, Ukraine bleeds, arms industry profits, politicians in general get something to grandstand on in front of the voters. Personally I believe that this conflict has been artificially prolonged just to amplify the effects
Tariffs: US public eats the costs, Trump profits politically by appearing strong, Trumps friends profit on insider info
Tarriffs: SOP is to take away something in an outrageous amount and manner, then sell it back to the victim. It's basically state extortion.
While I don't think trump and co are smart enough to plan big stuff like this, I think it is pretty obvious they are trying to benefit oil companies and I have no doubt oil companies were involved in the decision to bomb Iran to some degree.
What I mean is Trump and Co probably spoke to oil execs before making the Iran decision to ask if they would raise production. Then they lied and said yes, while knowing they would drag their feet as prices rose.
Trump is a stoog. The folks around him treat him like an idiot. There's no way they weren't involved here. They've been around his entire presidency.
How is this at my expense? It's at the expense of the hedge fund they bought the oil futures from before the price went up. I don't see why I should assume that some hedge fund manager is more on my side than some insider trader.
I think insider trading is robing the market, which affects everyone.
All the more reason to consider small hybrid vehicles and full-electric vehicles where charging is plentiful (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI)
So, what should we buy next? There can be bread for all of us :D
I don't see many comments here about the actual topic. Such is the case with anything Trump related.
Needless to say, though I consider Krugman to have failed at practically every prediction he made in his NYT columns, his point is very valid.
No one should stand for this. Unfortunately a very bad precedence has been set by many politicians in the US.
I find it hard to see that this would ever change if the governing authorities are as tame and neutered as they seem to be.
Ultimately it is a question of how to root out corruption. And it must be a path 90% agree on. I don't see it as helpful to become emotive.
The real curious part to me is why there are such large reactions when neither the US nor the Iranians seem to be truthful and seem to agree even on what they disagree on...
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
I think this sums it up.
The inside trader made no real effort to crack down on themselves
The Ouroboros is smart enough to not get annihilated by biting its tail. Mind the gap, eh?
If only the NYMEX somehow knew who ordered a trade
Indeed, since 2016.
Why would they turn off the tap for easy money?
Welcome to the world of commodity trading. There is no SEC here, and this is business as usual. You can look at T&S to see this for yourself, but this is (like it or not) how this typically goes in commodity markets.
Commodity trading is managed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission CFTC and a criminal probe into this started last month.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-probes-suspicious...
Does the SEC even matter anymore with the current administration?
I'd like to see the base rate. Ie were there similar bets at similar times when Trump did not make an announcement
Look at Adobe stock 10 minutes before the Claude Design announcement came out… the volume spike there is out of the ordinary and I find it hard to believe it’s a coincidence, someone knew something. The level of blatant insider trading at the moment is pretty wild
same, without context it is speculation. even with context, if the person creating the story controls the window, a window can be found which supports the story.
Can you watch what happens on a market just before the press conference and do the same?
By the time you’ve reacted, it’s already too late.
This, as a generality. There are plenty of multi-billion-dollar Wall Street firms doing algorithmic trading. Your prospects for being smarter or faster than them are very poor.
You'd risk amplifying every fluctuation. It's often impossible to know what's a shift vs. what's noise until it's well under way (if not over).
I've heard of this working in other kinds of markets, where if you can identify the traders who consistently beat the market, and you can emulate them with precise timing, then you can beat the market too.
> At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news... At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is “close” to a “memorandum of understanding” to end the Iran War.
Depends on what your brokerage allows, see timestamps.
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
Eager to make bank off the back of civilisation, too? My IT colleagues continue to impress!
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
> far from immune from this...
Its a pre-requisite for the job
> C suite and founders
You missed "VC backed" in front of "founders". Most founders are good people.
Unfortunately insider trading happens all the time in commodities and isn’t necessarily illegal. It depends.
So, basically, over the last century or more or so, we've learned:
- our laws, the ones that supposedly keep society stable and safe, don't apply to particular groups of people
- we can catch them, and maybe, just maybe, we will hold someone accountable for those people, though often they just distract and trick everyone from holding them accountable
- the majority of people are getting stolen from, treated like slaves and tricked and abused, and they will tolerate this abuse because of <fear???>
Am I to accept this frame of reality in which the universe and the earth, and the leaders currently making decisions for me and holding influence over the worlds' military powers, are this hostile towards me?
I refuse. I think we have more power than we think. In America at least, we still have an amendment that has yet to be repealed (created for scenarios in which abusers hold leadership positions and refuse to be accountable): the 1st amendment and parading guns legally, safely, and responsibly is a powerful reminder of what accountability and dignity looks like.
edit: I advocate for parading guns peacefully with an intention and purpose: go with a group standing for rights, safety and dignity
Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.
"The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that it had charged 30 people allegedly linked with a decade-long insider trading scheme involving high-profile law firms."
https://www.newsweek.com/premier-law-firms-spy-ring-11920914
Let me guess, these guys said something bad about Trump? Not that it means that they didn’t do it, just that they would not have gotten charged otherwise.
The list doesn't corroborate that. The international component seems important.
Honestly, insider trading laws should be removed since they manipulate markets. If you know things, make moves that are public, that would price things _more_ accurately.
It's easy to know something accurately when you are the one causing it.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
It's a tax. I don't know if you specifically are one of the "taxation is theft" types, but it's absolutely wild how many of these are totally cool with the tax if it's funding insider trading payouts but not if it's paying for poor person healthcare or whatever.
In the absence of the insider trader selling you oil futures on the basis of his insider knowledge, what would you do?
You'd buy oil futures at broadly the same price from someone else (maybe a worse price! Because the presence of the insider selling is already driving the price down). So how exactly do you lose?
The only people who lose out are those whose limit orders don't get filled because the insider outbid them. The counterparty benefits from trading with the insider.
This is completely ignorant of market microstructure. For big swaths of the market, most parties interacting with the market do so by trading with a market maker who ensures that everyone's trades clear immediately in exchange for a fee that covers the risk of getting caught offsides. If you're big enough, it makes sense to take that risk in house, but the risk and its very real financial cost remains. In both cases, trades that increase the risk increase the fee. So no, corruption is a tax and everyone pays the tax even though the mechanics have fallen through the rather large cracks in your understanding.
If you think this tax is de minimis, great, glad to hear it, let's put a government tax of similar magnitude in there and resume the peanut butter rations to starving african kids that DOGE cut.
Sometimes trading with people who have better information than you is part of the risk you take on when you run a market-making strategy.
I'd say the entire market loses out on insider trading except for the two parties involved in the insider trade. The insider trades take away a part of the profit margin that other good faith future providers need to justify the risk they take on by offering the futures. This leads to future providers needing to raise the prices of futures to remain profitable.
If market makers figure out that a handful of market participants are being fed inside information, they’ll widen the bid/ask, leading to increased transaction costs for everyone.
It also discourages speculators from entering trades if they suspect they’ll be run over by insiders trading on non-public information.
Fewer market participants leads to worse price discovery.
It’s probably bad.
Yes but it is being said about a manipulated movement, not any negative price movement.
If a store sells a TV for $500 and they know they are going to run a sale the next day. The next day the customer may feel like they missed the sale, but the TV was still worth >$500 to him else he would not have bought it in the first place.
Is this an oligarchy or a kakistocracy?
The Venn Diagram isn't a circle, but you need a magnifying glass to tell it from one.
> Is this an oligarchy or a kakistocracy?
Yes. Also a klepotocracy
The world will remember who you Americans chose to vote in.
And then we'll do nothing anyway because the wealthy and corrupt run every single country on the planet. Money talks.
And people are too easily preoccupied with trivial policy squabbles to care about how badly we've all been fucked by the last 50 years or so.
>The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.
Yeah that's because IT's HIM.
Jesus how much more proof do you people need that the Trumps themselves are looting the country.
The only stop gap we have is for the states to start investigating and prosecuting these cases. And they don’t, I can I only suppose there are issues of jurisdiction even if the opposing party controls the apparatus. Too bad the the Georgia DA Fawny Willis was so inept; that election stealing RICO case had teeth.
At least here he is just looting counterparties. It's way better than selling off national parks and using tax dollars on no-bid contracts to gild the presidential tanning bed.
The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema...
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
I think you’re giving Trump too much credit. If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out. There is no chess game here. It’s not even checkers. He is just trying to not have to admit he made a mistake - just with billions of dollars and lives on the line. Such sad.
This administration literally told congress that it has a right to bomb Iran again without congressional oversight specifically because there's a cease fire in place. I wish I was kidding. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4xexy4w7o
> If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out.
There's at least two other belligerents in this war who get a say, as well as a large number of other countries which count as victims (everyone from Lebanon to UAE). No US decision can stop Israel and Iran from fighting.
He has operational control of the armed forces. This has never been disputed recently; he can order whatever shots he wants. The armed forces funding is in one whole pot which is guaranteed even against a "shutdown". He also has total legal immunity for official acts.
> If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal.
Whos gona prosecute america? Germans ar still waiting for somebody to go to jail for Dresden, and rightly so
He will just say it's a different operation. That's what they've been doing and it's working. Republicans have no desire to stop Trump. Democrats don't care either cuz they want this power once they're elected.
It's worse than having no desire to stop him. Republicans want to compete to bow down to Trump like a gaggle of serfs. It is a debasement of human dignity to watch them grovel.
No mistakes, public largely forgot about Epstein files with the Iran war.
This topic keeps coming up so I'll summarize some points I've alrady made [1].
1. The size of this market manipulation can be measured by the gap between spot or physical oil prices (which generally aren't public) and the future or paper price [2]. Historically these have tracked each other so close it was a non-issue. Now it's a huge issue;
2. Part of the gap can be attributed to the financial markets being in denial [3] and the market itself being in extreme backwardation. That simply means the spot price is significantly higher than the future price. It indiciates some sort of market dysfunction (or delusion). We saw this in the silver market last year.
All credit for this wanton insider trading goes back to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity out of thin air [4][5] and a Congress that has completely abdicated any kind of constitutional responsibility.
You might think there might be some kind of criminal prosecution or at least investigation by government agencies of the players involved. Well, sycophants and crackpots have put in charge of those agencies (eg Michael Selig of the CFTC [6]).
And if that fails, just buy a pardon [7].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955623
[2]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-interpret-wartime-oil-pric...
[3]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-Reality-Finall...
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/supreme-co...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
[6]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/12/michael-selig-predi...
[7]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...
I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
The whole retail theft epidemic (and the ensuing Union Pacific cargo theft ) was a corporate scam perpetrated by local news and law enforcement PR departments.
It wasn't at all. There's still a serious problem with shoplifting. Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign.
At my local CVS, they just started locking up the bulk candy. You don't take the the sales hit and the expense of those locking cabinets unless you have a real shrinkage problem.
>Wal-mart would not be removing self-checkout if this were just a PR campaign
They absolutely would.
Shrink has not gone up
The National Retail Federation, which publishes those numbers yearly, has stopped publishing those numbers to hide that fact.
There are real shoplifting problems but they are extremely local. Your local police department needs to stand up and do their fucking jobs to identify and take down the organized crime perpetuating it.
I heard it was organised crime loading up on stuff it could sell at informal locations.
This is willful (intentional) ignorance.
Have you ever read any investigative journalism about those crime stories? Or about local crime news via papers and television? Those two news sources are starved for news stories and law enforcement agencies have well funded PR arms (one should wonder why this is) and their associated affiliated unions/associations are quite eager to become the primary(only sometimes) sources for news (one should wonder why this is true for stories even from supposedly neutral reporting like AP and NPR). Theft has existed since there has been trading - we see plenty of examples of this with nesting/courting animals with rocks and sticks, but this "crime wave" whenever the USA status quo of law enforcement/prison industrial complex is threatened or new prisons/private prisons need to be justified is blatantly obvious.
No, it really was a hoax perpetuated by companies that want to sell security services to retail chains and other groups that want more police funding. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/01/the-shoplifting-...
Like how Cloudflare wants you to think every unprotected website gets DDoSed.
> You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
It’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
> t’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people
There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.
I would say that many people with better options take up sophisticated crime as a vocation. Obviously poor and rich people choose vocations a little differently.
There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too. Poor people do not benefit from stores closing, or having the stores closest to them have everything locked up.
> There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.
"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.
People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.
> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.
Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).
Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.
> enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores
Yes and no. Enforcement deters career criminals by increasing the cost of doing business. Improving society means fewer honest people have to turn to crime.
> insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
Right, so career criminals. See above.
My point is, increasing enforcement will not help against petty crime, because you gotta feed yourself somehow. The people on the lowest rungs of society dealing crack cocaine or acting as the front men for fencing rings - they got nothing to lose. In fact there's more than enough reports of people letting themselves get caught at some petty crime before winter hits so they got a few months in jail where they're at least fed and have a roof over their head.
But it can and will massively help against large scale white collar crime. When you got dozens of millions of dollars in wealth, now you have the means to make more out of it (honest or not), the incentive to make more out of it - and also, a lot to lose, should they get caught.
> increasing enforcement will not help against petty crime
I disagree. Career criminals also do petty crime.
> It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them
I'm a fan of an idea I ran across recently. Instead of calling Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, etc the richest people in the world, we should call them the greediest.
"Greediest man in the world Elon Musk promises robotaxis" hits different than the "Richest man" version
Don't say "Billionaire Jeff Bezos does <thing>", say "Champion of Greed Jeff Bezos..."
The warring parties greatly influence the price of oil futures but they are not the only influences, and there are other markets
The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market
I read all of the cases in the article
The article displays a laughably out of date view of futures markets, too
Airlines haven’t hedged fuel in a long time and generally run a policy now of just adjusting fares whenever fuel prices change.Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.
The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.
Airlines are absolutely still hedging fuel:
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/airline-fuel-hedging-iran...
Southwest was famously killing it during the oil shocks of the 1990s and 2000s because they had the foresight to buy futures when spot prices were low. See https://southwest50.com/our-stories/the-southwest-jet-fuel-h... - I used to joke that Southwest was a futures trader disguised as an airline.
Unfortunately they ditched the strategy last year, claiming the costs were no longer worth the benefits: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-southwest-airlines-finally-... and http://www.wsj.com/articles/airlines-pull-back-on-hedging-fu...
I bet they’re regretting that decision now.
SWA was the last major airline to engage in strategic hedging, and came under considerable investor pressure to stop doing that (since it means they can’t lower fares as much when oil is cheap). So they stopped, and investors apparently don’t want airlines to be futures traders disguised as airlines. They prefer credit card referral marketing agencies disguised as airlines.
Now the airlines simply raise fares in lockstep when oil gets expensive, or simply go out of business, like Spirit did last week.
Airlines can't raise the prices of tickets sold months ago. There is still financial reason to hedge.
"All the airlines cancelling flights and adding extra charges amid jet fuel crisis"
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/jet-fue...
You have to read more than the clickbait headline
> While this figure might appear significant, it constitutes a mere 1.5 per cent reduction in total worldwide aviation capacity,
The article cites airlines which raise the prices of already sold tickets. I agree, the impacts of the current jet fuel shortage are still small.
Hedging at this point is basically done to cover the cost of tickets already sold.
The trick is to sell tickets based on the cost at time of sale, and just cancel flights when it's convenient.
When airlines cancel flights, they usually put you on a similar itinerary, not just refund your money and hope you rebook at a higher price.
That said, I don't know a lot of people that book that far in advance, even when their travel plans are well settled.
It doesn’t work that way. Canceling flights has significant business-impacting downstream effects that go beyond mitigating the loss caused by a bad bet.
> The rest of the market is speculation
Metals (miners <> manufacturers) and agricultural (farmers <> food makers) futures are still non-speculative. There are industries that still buy materials from these markets, for delivery, as in they want to see the physical product in their hands. I was surprised to find that out as well
Yeah. Pretty much anyone that wants to buy a commodity for delivery at a future date will use a futures market.
Some markets don’t have a futures market like hay, so people have to buy at spot prices and store it themselves.
It's done by Truthsocial IT team, they are tracking when he opens the app.
Good for them, I guess.
Well, the entire global monetary system is a scam, so this is nothing by comparison.
brb, directing ai to build an app notifying me of oil futures volume spikes
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
Apply Occam's Razor to your statement and try again.
Oh I agree - the most likely scenario is someone within the inner circle trading on this insider info but my comment was more of a devil's advocate comment. If you are NK and you have hacked some Trump adjacent staffers phone, and you see the ability to make a ton of money, would you take it? The staffers aren't known for their grade A security practices.
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's
- Paul Krugman, 1998
Excuse me if I take the Krug-o-tron's opinions with a grain of salt.
Keep your salt shaker handy because he produces opinions at a prodigious rate.
That personality type- highly verbal but able to produce talk to fit anything from a 5 second sound bite up to 2 hours, superficially bright but not actually thoughtful, full of spicy opinions, prone to predictions that sound interesting but don’t come true - is all over TV and now podcasts. Alex Jones is the same type.
Five years later, still mourning the dot-com bubble
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/2005...
for a view of the internet's impact on the economy in 2005.
internet delivered massive value post 2005, but that is outside of the window K called out.
So everyone who was wrong once 20 years ago should have their well presented insight dismissed without further reasoning?
Okay but what of this particular opinion?
The insider trading is pretty obvious right now.
Thinly veiled reddit thinking its not reddit. amazing
Yes, the article is right.
And every time an article like this is published, HN predictably goes into the same tirade.
What are you actually going to do about it? Nothing. So keep complaining and hoping things change without changing.
Maybe if you had some suggestions or wanted to lead by example?
> What are you actually going to do about it?
Discussing it is against this website's TOS and the law in most countries
It's more evidence if any was needed that the US is now definitively in a late imperial phase of decline - US elites have become corrupt. This is classic decline of empire stuff.
So no you can't stop it, but knowing that does at least let you make decisions with more clarity in your own life
I'm just glad I'm alive to witness it. Ww2 is what finally sank Britain's declining empireafter ww1, I'm hoping Iran and maybe a global war finally knocks them off that top spot and the east takes over
The lesson from the British empire is it's a slow process, death by a thousand cuts.
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" and all that.
We'll be watching it for the rest of our lives, mostly in slow motion with occasional rapid periods of decline like the one at the moment
Be careful what you wish for.
You’re literally doing what you’re railing against. In fact it’s worse, because it’s not even about the thing itself, but about the commentary on the thing.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
> The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
They are elected officials that are supposed to be working in our best interests, or at least the interest of their supporters.
Are they making decisions in our best interests or what makes their pocket book fatter? Poisons the whole system.
The American people knew who they were electing. They knew it, and they elected him anyway. Whatever damage results from that collective decision is our cross to bear.
Many of them will insist that they didn't know. Another group of "many" will insist that this is all somewhere between "not that bad" and "great".
The problem is that everyone else on earth has to suffer the consequences of those choices.
Again, that's bad, but still under "corruption", which is not what I, or the article is addressing.
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
>Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
>Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
I did and that's not at all what TFA argues. It argues that it's the corruption that's the problem, which is exacerbated by the lack of legal enforcement by the current administration -- mostly because many in that administration are either actively involved in said corruption, or happy to cover it up/pooh pooh it.
I suppose you might think that some folks who haven't read TFA might buy your analysis, even though it's pretty much the opposite of what Krugman argues.
You go, girlfriend!
Nope. TFA does not adopt the extremely narrow focus you are trying to force. Nice try.
If you assume the referee is actually playing the game then yes, the difference between a referee making a call to advantage their own bets to make the other team win and an opposing team making a play to make themselves win is one of those entities is engaging in corruption.
The pacing of strategic military decisions being modulated to allow leading the futures market would be the very definition of "blood money".
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
Businesses require investment and a helicopter charter is probably less than a year of office space.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Okay so what are you trying to say with this quote? Are you arguing that businesses don't require investment and risk?
That the idea of a level playing field is nonsense.
The wealthy can afford to continually leverage their wealth to accumulate even more wealth. This expresses in many different ways.
The wealthy man can afford the helicopter to get an edge at the global casino.
It's a structure designed to concentrate wealth and power and it won't end well for anyone involved, top or bottom.
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
You can’t make millions from shorts unless you’ve already got millions to risk.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Yes, I'm sure Robinhood or Schwab will allow me to open a $2M short position when my portfolio is $[sufficiently small that I'm debating the costs of a couple of thousand for a helicopter charter].
It's easy enough to synthesize 100x leverage by synthesis through options. If you have $25k for a margin account you could do it no problem. Of course, your funds would be rapidly vaporized if you were even a little bit wrong on timing or you needed more margin for volatility to keep it from getting called before it dips.
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
If the market wants to incentivize flying a helicopter to bring it information about the real world, that's somewhere between ok and good.
If the market wants to incentivize pumping and dumping the American economy by releasing a stream of fake news from the US President, that's bad.
We should tilt the arbitrary rules away from the bad things and towards the good things.
If those hedge funds are doing something that stops the market from functioning then of course there should be intervention but it doesn't seem clear to me at all that hedge funds trying to get an edge (especially in a way that's replicable by other funds) has the same effect as rampant insider trading in regards to destroying the market.
> like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are
Unless the helicopter is dropping a bomb on a school on the way there (or back) I am not sure that the comparison is fair.
HN will never stop surprising me with it's takes on how it's okay to make money at anyone else's expense regardless of laws, ethics or harm done
It’s really only a few people who believe this, and they’re always replied to by people vehemently disagreeing with them.
Wait, those big oil tanks don’t have lids? Doesn’t that mean rain would mix with the oil??
AFAIK the lids "float" on top of the oil, probably to prevent vapors from building up if the tank is half full.
>Wait, those big oil tanks don’t have lids? Doesn’t that mean rain would mix with the oil??
Modern tanks have floating lids. The lid is as much for keeping the volatiles in as keeping water out. Water gets into all sorts of places in oil refining anyway. It wouldn't really matter anyway since oil and water being famously good at mixing. You can just draw water off the bottom, filter it or boil it off depending on the situation and amount. Obviously they don't want more water (you're wasting money processing everything that you can't sell) but some isn't a big deal.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
I think Matt Levine’s take on this is best, in that the problem here is _theft_: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
>This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
You keep saying this, when it is counter to the actual text of the article.
> Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question....What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
That is what the article is about. It's saying that this is corruption, and discussing what the effect of this corruption is. "Beyond just corruption" is wholly your invention. I don't even know what it would mean?
Corruption is the cause. The article discusses the resulting effect.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).