Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[viper37]

The stock market is brilliant and wonderfully regulated.

It's gambling with less rules

Not really.  If you're smart, you can bet and red and get almost the same long turn return as if you always picked the right number at the roulette.

[Zoupa]

The stock market is brilliant and wonderfully regulated.

[crazy canuck]

The stock market is brilliant and wonderfully regulated.

I think he is using brilliant in the sense that when things really fuck up they burn with the intensity of a supernova.  I cannot only guess that he's using the word wonderfully sarcastically.

[viper37]

The stock market is brilliant and wonderfully regulated.

It is heavily regulated.  Some countries more than other, but it isn't without rules.


Not that it matters anymore.

[The Minsky Moment]

The stock market is well regulated.
But it is also stupid.  So 1 out of 2 for both sides of the argument.

[The Minsky Moment]

As usual, Keynes, who was a very successful market investor, had the best take:

professional investment may be likened to those
newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces
from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice
most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that
each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those
which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are
looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those
which, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which
average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where
we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average
opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher
degrees.

[HVC]

Now add a couple million civilians with face blindness to the competition

[DGuller]

The stock market is well regulated.
But it is also stupid.  So 1 out of 2 for both sides of the argument.

One of the things that sometimes gives me hope and sometimes gives me despair is working in one of the "bad" industries, and seeing how the public narratives are so off-base.  As a citizen, I hear "regulation" and assume it has to be a good thing.  As an insurance professional, I can see how regulation is necessary (the business model is sustainable only if insureds know that there is a higher power than profit motive), but I can also see how regulation sometimes is a much worse solution than the problem being solved.  California fires recently just highlighted how grossly incompetent heavy-handed regulation can result in multi-faceted disaster.

It brings me hope, because if the public is so misinformed on the industry I know a lot about, then maybe my pessimism and cynicism is also badly misinformed on industries I know nothing about.  It brings me despair, though, because if the public is so misinformed on everything, then in a democracy how are we ever going to find effective solutions?

[The Minsky Moment]

Regulations are usually designed to achieve specific ends. Sometimes they are badly designed, but more often they are pretty well designed for their purpose, but maybe that purpose is not the most optimal, or it becomes obsolete. Throughout most of the 20th century, a key objective of financial regulation was to protect smaller, local banks and agencies from competition from big national combinations.  There are possible advantages and disadvantages to such a scheme, but the real reason those regs stuck for such a long time is that in an era long before big corporations pumped billions into political campaigns, Joe House Rep used to fund his campaign by cozying up to the players in the local chamber of commerce.

Federal regulation of the stock market is designed to make sure brokerages don't rip off customers, that market makers trade efficiently and get fair prices, and that issuers make important information available to investors.  It doesn't regulate the quality of the issuers or protect investors from making idiotic decisions. If an issuer is dogshit, and their S-1 and 10Ks are accurate, and people decide they want to buy the dogshit, the regulator does not interpose a dogshit detector.  The buyer gets what they asked for.

[Admiral Yi]

As usual, Keynes, who was a very successful market investor, had the best take:

professional investment may be likened to those
newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces
from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice
most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that
each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those
which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are
looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those
which, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which
average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where
we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average
opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher
degrees.

This only accurately describes momentum traders.

[crazy canuck]

I am going to push back on the notion that the state of financial regulation in the US could currently be characterized as being well regulated.

I think that claim could justifiably be made prior to 1999. But after that there was an erosion (well let's be frank - a complete disintegration) of the wall between banks, investment banks and insurers.

There is going to be another diluting (destruction) of regulatory restrictions under Trump as he repeals the effort Biden made to try to being some sensible regulation back into force through the merger guidelines.

Generally people talk about these things in terms of their ideological stances - regulation is bad and the market is good; therefore reducing of regulation must be good and creates a "well regulated" market.  But of course the opposite is true.

[Admiral Yi]

California fires recently just highlighted how grossly incompetent heavy-handed regulation can result in multi-faceted disaster.

How so?

[Syt]

Musk pinned this on his xchan profile:



It's the motto of Scotland ("No one provokes me with impunity"), not a qoute from Sulla, it seems.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Ah well, what do you expect from a guy who cheats at games.

[crazy canuck]

Musk pinned this on his xchan profile:



It's the motto of Scotland ("No one provokes me with impunity"), not a qoute from Sulla, it seems.

He found the quote using AI no doubt.