Again: what size spread is "too" wide, Count? A dollar, a half, a quarter, a nickel?
What do you define as "street-wide"?
Well, there are something on the order of 5,000 broker-dealers in America today. And that doesn't count other equity market presences such as hedge funds, banks with investment arms, insurance companies, and the like. And since we're talking about equities, we can slice out most of those twenty or thirty firms' fixed income, derivatives, and other business departments.
The equity dealing desks of 30 firms indicate a "street-wide" phenomenon? LOL.
Should we include the street-sweeper and the homeless?
With your history of haughty posts, I wouldn't be surprised if you did. But since you're asking me - no, I wouldn't.
Your attacking me with emotional, personal language is inappropriate.
As is your self-appointment to Minister of Appropriateness on top of Most Worthy Viceroy of Spread Width (et al). There is, unfortunately, a promising career ahead of you should you decide to become yet another arbitrary, overcompensating regulator; the exact type of person for whom the saying, "[t]hose who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither" was penned.
It is symptomatic of those who feel they are above the law in this country.
I don't think anyone is above the law. In fact, your paternal, knee-jerking, interventionist approach is far more likely to provide exceptions to and loopholes around the administration of justice than mine would.
It is my personal belief that most forms of regulation are little more than inherently-biased propositions which, instead of evening things out as they purport to, merely redistribute wealth and opportunity: replacing that which is deemed by pols "unfair" with another, slightly different but at least equally skewed regime.
Instead, I believe that natural market forces - products of economic and behavioral laws - encapsulate and should be held as the highest law(s). Markets and social orders ultimately cannot be regulated to the benefit of a particular party without trampling others' freedoms in the process.
And that save for those meant to protect against fraud or physical harm/coercion - I'm saying that the former two are exceptions to the rule - virtually all that regulatory bodies focusing on markets, businesses and social orders really offer is a bureaucratic hole for taxpayers' dollars and a constantly grinding shellgame of individual liberties.
LP. |
