Maybe if we let the speculators take the hit of losing it all when playing these games, they’d stop playing. But instead we stop it from happening and prevent the hard lesson from being learned.
I think you're severely misreading the history here. Most of the constraints on our modern financial system, including the SEC, were built after the Great Depression to try and prevent it from repeating.
If they lose it all, they don't have anything left to play with and now society has some new destitutes to support. People losing everything imposes costs on everyone else, so it's in all of our interests to put up some guard rails.
2008 is about people investing in AAA funds which contained subpar stocks, often fraudulently.
2008 is about mortgages given to people who didn’t even have the money to rent a house, with a variable interest based on market conditions.
GMS is about a hedge fund (a fund who uses market volatility to extract value, i.e. not producing value, just taking it from other investors), getting short-squeezed because they are immensely unpopular with the mass of the citizen, due to their shady business practices, and those citizen don’t care about taking money since it is about taking revenge. The desired outcome is that hedge funds cease business, and sticking it to perceived wealthy people, hoping to make the business of hedge funds unreliable and risky. One should wonder whether the SEC shouldn’t weigh on the consumer side and make stock markets atteactive to the lowly again. Otherwise stock markets are just an exclusive tools to make the rich richer again (not that I mind — I ended up in the rich side, but wealth is clearly not correctly distributed).
I’m not a fan of this practice but investing in an arbitrage fund or hedge fund is for wealthy companies/individuals who can afford to lose money or win big; It is an entirely separate market from index funds with long-term investors expecting AAA reliability.
> I’m not a fan of this practice but investing in an arbitrage fund or hedge fund is for wealthy companies/individuals who can afford to lose money or win big;
Or, you know, companies that want to hedge. This idea that hedge funds are pure evil is getting a bit old, should we all cancel all insurance?