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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (800598)	8/9/2014 6:07:26 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578341

Back to unskewing the polls, I see.The Heritage Foundation is hardly an objective source. While there are no doubt some nonproductive activities in finance How does high frequency trading benefit anybody but the ones doing it? It does drive up the costs for everyone else. Some estimate that half of all stock and bond transactions are through HFT. If you take the FIRE(finance, insurance and real estate) as a whole, they actually produce nothing. They manage resources. Yet they take an ever growing slice of the economy. Mainly they have increased the complexity to no real reason but to benefit themselves. Take the futures market. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act lifted most of the important restrictions on trading futures. As a result, commodity prices have been rising ever since. From aluminum to food, prices have been driven up for no other reason but speculation. Now the futures market has always been a little scammy and prone to manipulation, but now it has exploded. Want to know what triggered the Arab Spring? Food prices due to speculation. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs bought up a significant portion of the aluminum production in this country, driving prices up. The only problem is they had taken delivery of the metal and had it squirreled away in Detroit. So when their inventory got too large and Congress had started an investigation because companies like Coke weren't happy, the resulting sell-off cratered the aluminum market. Still, their warehousing cost the US economy an estimated $3 billion.