Why should Rosetta be the only one to rant? I put this in the comments, but thought maybe, just maybe, some retard here might have something to say on topic. Or on tapioca.
Markets are in the long term rational. Not in the short term, but over time, they act in a rational manner. That’s the effect of a large group of people each acting in their own self interest, for their mutual benefit. We must always remember that individuals often act irrationally, and so do groups over short terms, but that groups that choose to act together tend to act rationally over the long term. So, we will posit that markets act rationally. And thus, rational actors like to operate on the basis of information. We have two types of information- empirical, and inferred. Empirical information is always past history. That is, it is something we have measured that has happened in the past. Inferred information can be either past history, or a projection of the future, often based on past trends. Inferred information is imprecise. Call it a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess), or just a best estimation on the available information. In both cases, the market works better with information, rather than in its absence. Uncertainty breeds unhappiness in the markets. Some level of uncertainty is needed for the markets to work. Investors must have an idea that there is a potential for gain, or they wouldn’t invest. But there must be some risk involved, or there would be no need for rewards (dividends and capital gains). The natural level of risk is inherent to the market, and all the players are cognizant of that. What upsets markets greatly is outside influences on them. Anything that changes the accepted rules of the market had a detrimental influence on the market. Why? Because if the rules can change once, they can change again. It’s like playing baseball and finding out in the 9th inning that your side only gets two outs.
Any and all government intrusion into the markets has the effect of introducing uncertainty into the marketplace. If there is no government intrusion at all, that is a known level of interference, and there is thus no uncertainty introduced. But when the government intrudes in any way into the marketplace, that introduces a level of uncertainty into the market. If government intrusion is rare, the markets will stabilize around the new rule set, but still have a slightly higher level of uncertainty, as the market has seen that there is the potential for government intrusion. As a hedge against the intrusion of the government into markets, entities will assume government interference in the market, and hence work to influence that interference in ways that benefit them (at least in the short term) and work against their competitors. This is in effect market players working the referees to change the rules in their favor, in the middle of the game. {see Dodd, Christopher; and Frank, Barney}
Eventually, government interference leads to unfairness in the market, where some competitors have an advantage. And where an artificial advantage exists, eventually, the markets will cause a failure that should have been corrected earlier. When a mortgage is defaulted in this environment, we often see that it is a mortgage that was a bad risk from day one. We see the same thing with corporations that influenced the government to skew the market rules in their favor. They were able to operate for a while, but in the end, the fall was that much greater. If the corporation had not been able to change the ruleset to artificially benefit them, they never would have been in a position to have a catastrophic failure. Or rather, if they did fail, such failure would not have been catastrophic to the markets as a whole.
Virtually every single government intervention into a market is done with the intention of promoting fairness. Not just our government, but any intervention at all, throughout history. But make no mistake, the government has its own vested interest, to maximize revenues into its coffers. That’s no sin, in and of itself. I think we can all agree that the government needs some level of revenue to operate. But governments efforts to induce “fairness” into a market, where by definition, there are winners and loser (tho most interactions are actually between winners and winners to a lesser degree), is to artificially remove risk. When you artificially remove risk from a portion of the market, it just doesn’t go away, it is just defered. And worse, it isn’t just defered, it is more widespread. Pretty soon, the problem becomes systemic. And anyone who has worked on any centralized system will tell you that a problem in any portion of a system soon spreads to the entire system.
And of course, we have an entirely different level of government interference in the markets. Fannie and Freddie. Here, we have Government Sponsored Entities. These are supposedly private companies set up by the federal government that competed in the private sector.There was a polite fiction that they were not guaranteed by the government, but everyone knew that was a lie. As events proved, they government would indeed cover their assets. Given that they were sponsored by the very government that both set the legal rules of the marketplace, and printed the money, was there any way for a private company to compete with them? Of course not. Not surprisingly, may companies found a modus vivendi with them, either co-opting them, or being co-opted by them. As a final insult to the free market, these government sponsored entities used the fiction that they were not part of the government to actually lobby the government. To put it bluntly, they bribed the members of Congress responsible for their oversight with sums that private companies could not. Is it any wonder that the laws of the marketplace soon benefited Fannie and Freddie in an artificial way?
In a perfect, hypothetical world, there would be absolutely no government interference into the markets. Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world. But I think I’ve made the case that government intrusion in the markets should be limited to those actions that promote transparency, not fairness.
April 18, 2009
Categories: Books, conspiracy theory, No Drama, Old Person, people make me sick, personal junk, Politics . Tags: bushmcchimpyhitlerhalliburton, conspiracy theory, Obama OWNS this economy, right wing rethuglican, Sox? . Author: xbradtc . Comments: 89 Comments