Occupy Wall Street

[davywavy]

A comment I left on a debate on facebook appears to have caused a fair amount of comment and also been picked up and reposted in several places, so I thought I'd repost it here.

"Okay, here's the deal. There's a movement to bring the occupy Wall Street idea to London and to disrupt trading at the stock exchange. They've even posted the date they plan to do so online.
If they do, I'll be opening a short on the FTSE that morning, and so will every other leveraged, sharp-suited fast buck merchant this group hate so much. They disrupt the opening of trading, the FTSE loses a hundred points in disarray, and I close my short and pocket a wad of cash.

The people who the protesters hate will make money from their actions, and they'll do it just like that. The people who will suffer are the savers and investors: The people who believe the 80's ideal of a shareholding population and have put their savings into stocks to get a long-term dividend return. The pension funds, who by their very rules MUST have a percentage of their holdings in the FTSE 100 and 250. As the FTSE drops, it's them losing money to the short-term traders. If you want to hurt savers and pensioners, disrrupt the stock market in it's normal operations.

Why would you do that then? Because you don't have the first clue where the money is going, or why you're losing it. All you see is people in smart suits going to work in the stock market and OMG THEY MUST BE TO BLAME. They're not. If you want to hurt the traders and leveraged speculators - who are actually the people you dislike - campaign to ban black-box trading, naked shorting and leveraged ETFS and CFDs. If you want to really hurt the financial institutions, campaign to end QE - another £75bn today - which you won't see a penny of but will cost you in inflation and reduced value of your savings and wages. Where will QE go? Straight out of the door and into fixed asset hedges which will hold value against the inflation QE will cause.

But you don't understand all that - and what's more, you don't want to. They're just greedy bankers in the stock market, right?"

Comments

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

I think the general principle is this: There is an awful lot of anger about this whole banking crisis thingy and not an awful lot most of us can do because frankly, I understand more about string theory than I do about the banking system and I'm not sure the difference between the two is as big as it should be.

Impotent anger tends to boil over into lashing out at the nearest suitable target. Money caused the problem, so lets hurt money. The idea that its a bit like buying lots of guns so you can shoot arms dealers is secondary - anger first, reality a slow second.

[(Anonymous)]

If you think you'll make a quick buck that easily, consider - everyone else will too.

Don't over leverage, it could go wrong.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

and that's why I keep out of this discussion entirely. I have very little knowledge about how the banking system or even just the economy in general works.

[ddraiggwyrdd.livejournal.com]

Well as a dyed in the product conspiracy theorist I would say it looks like the short traders came up with the whole occupy wall street idea. If you look at the perpetrators they don't look exactly short of anything - well anything tangible.

[sim-james.livejournal.com]

Linked here by cryx; thanks for a straightforward, sensible post on the subject!