[jessaustin]

Wealth is the only credential required for investing. If some or all of today's investors crash and burn, loads of other wealthy people will find better opportunities with reduced competition from today's foolish investors. (Maybe they aren't investing now because their risk profiles require better opportunities to get the cash out of the mattress.) If one hasn't somehow hitched her wagon to the fools, their poor investments can't hurt one at all.

This "somewhere, someone is losing money!" concern trolling fallacy is one "usefully idiotic" source of our repeated bailout follies, so I'd like never to see it again.

[hiou]

The Dot Com and Real Estate crashes(both fueled by very poor investment choices) didn't hurt anyone? Interesting take.

[jessaustin]

The particular crashes you cite didn't hurt me. We're not all in this together when Jaimie Dimon is enjoying his luxuries. Why would we all be in it together when he makes a dumb investment?

[eloff]

Because when lots of people collectively make dumb decisions, then the whole macroeconomic picture goes bad and people like you and I, otherwise not involved find ourselves out of work because of general layoffs in a down economy.

One bad decision here or there won't make much of a difference, because it doesn't dent the whole, and it likely doesn't affect anyone directly connected to us. But many bad decisions is a whole other ballgame.

[jessaustin]

At the top of this thread, one could see the goalposts. At that point a "live and let live" attitude toward speculative investing was advocated, appropriately for a site like HN.

Here the argument seems to be that a transportation project in Dubai is somehow the same as Goldman purchasing CDSs from AIG.

[eloff]

And I agree with that argument. Where I must respectfully disagree is when you say the previous two major economic upheavals didn't affect you personally, as if implying they shouldn't affect anyone else either, which is silly. You probably didn't mean to imply that, but that's what people are going to read (myself included.)

[jessaustin]

I'm not against helping out "little people" who need help. A cursory examination of the bailouts, however, makes clear that nothing of the sort was ever contemplated. All payments were to giant financial firms. Briefly, certain shameless pundits claimed there would be some sort of "trickle down" effect, but no one really expected it.

When the general welfare is invoked to justify extraordinary action, but the action itself doesn't contribute to that at all, the original argument ceases to convince. Cui bono?

[linkregister]

> This "somewhere, someone is losing money!" concern trolling fallacy is one "usefully idiotic" source of our repeated bailout follies, so I'd like never to see it again.

I had trouble parsing this, is there an idiom in here that I'm not familiar with?

Thanks!

[jessaustin]

Maybe more than one such idiom? I probably skipped some commas. Also, I'm a bit of a nut, so most people will disagree with at least part of that sentence. Piece by piece:

"somewhere, someone is losing money": Any functioning market in securities will have winners and losers, so it isn't automatically a problem that someone has lost in any particular situation.

"concern trolling": This is when e.g. I pretend that I'm worried about something bad that might happen to you, but in reality the advice I'm giving is meant to help myself instead. We see this typically when a consultant from one political party claims to be worried about consequences for the other political party.

"fallacy": Something lots of people believe, that isn't true.

"usefully idiotic": A "useful idiot" is someone who believes the bullshit peddled by class enemies to such an extent that she'll repeat that bullshit in all seriousness, to her own detriment.

"bailout follies": We've had lots of economic downturns, but somehow only those overseen by Goldman alumni as Treasury Secretaries have required the taxpayer to give Wall Street lots of money.