One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.
From Gary Weiss
Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.
The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.
Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.
Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves - such is the stuff of short-selling.
MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.
With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they cause have been exacerbated.
Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything.
No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders.
Beefs against debt collectors are consistently among the top complaints received by both the FTC and state attorneys general.
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