by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
How do you unrig a speculative rigged market? You don’t. It simply crashes into a putrid sinkhole.
Gamed speculation–using knowledge of how markets can be pushed to profit those doing the pushing–has long been decried. Declaring that the unproductive profiteering of greedy speculators will be the death of the Republic goes back to Rome, and in American history, to Alexander Hamilton’s battle in 1791 to pay the speculators who had bought up the new nation’s war bonds for pennies on the dollar full value plus interest.
Gamed speculation–and the cheery presumption that there will always be a liquid market of chumps willing to buy insiders’ pumped-up balloons–inflate and pop bubbles, with devastating consequences not just for the broken speculators but for conventional investors who naively believed “the market” was in fact a market (smirk) rather than a mechanism to enrich those who have the capital and knowledge to engineer profiteering behind the curtain. (Please see the still from The Wizard of Oz below.)