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Pastimes : Ask Mohan about the Market
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To: Mark Nelson who wrote (7445)11/8/1997 3:01:00 PM
From: Tommaso  Read Replies (1) of 18056
 
I think that probably most people on this thread have already decided that there is nothing wrong with rational self-interest. The only reason anyone gets into the stock market is to try to increase wealth, and the only morality that applies is to obey the laws so that you don't go to jail. If you make money according to the laws and regulations, you are doing so at the expense of other people who also hoped to make money and who are supposed to understand the risks.

To raise the issue of the morality of short selling in the middle of the investment game is like stopping a soccer game to discuss whether using an off-sides trap is ethical. There are threads in morality, philosophy, religion, and ethics where these issues can be taken up.

At this point the entire stock market is valuing the assets of the companies represented by the stock at about five times their monetary value. In 1982 and in 1974 many companies were valued at less than their monetary value. Unless you are currently holding shares, the only way to profit on this overvaluation is borrow stock and sell it. Alan Greenspan has tried two or three times to remind Americans that this overvaluation exists, and mostly he just gets abuse for having done so.

It is probably true that to devote too much of one's life to the stock market is immoral, in that it is damaging to the person who does it. I suspect that most people on this thread, however, have numerous other interests. Was delighted to find that a whole crew of people on the IRPPF (International Petroleum) are mushroom hunters.

But I suppose that Dante would have found a place in the Inferno for short sellers--either with the usurers and homosexuals, or else even further down with the fraudulent. Or maybe just on the terrace of avarice in Purgatory.
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