[jamieb]

I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first people to want an economic bounce back.

Hence your failure to understand OWS. Wall Street's job is to make money. Period. If it happens that it is effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market, then that is exactly what they will do.

Well, it turns out that it is extremely effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market.

If it happens that it is legal to pay government officials to pass laws covering your losses, and if it can be done for a reasonable cost, then they will do that too.

Well, it turns out that yes, this can be done for a very reasonable cost!

I find it amazing that any person on HN - HACKER news - is unable to imagine of hundreds of different ways to hack the government-economic system for fun and profit, or once having imagined them, to imagine that people with the necessary money would then not do so.

Our economy has been rooted.

[mappu]

I find the most interesting part of this 'hack' is how it's next to impossible to pull off a successful protest in civilised society: The greatest trick the upper echelon have pulled, is convincing the masses that using violence to achieve your ends is uncivilised.

As a non-US-er, we sometimes look down on the US for having a gun obsession, but there's no way anything OWS does would escalate to the point of seriously grabbing everyone's attention like, say, building an army, storming a building and forcibly arresting a CEO. They say OWS is inspired by the Arab Spring[1][2], but that would be a pretty tame example compared to the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. The people in OWS are upset, but not desperate, and I'm not sure this can lead to any sort of radical change unless the 1% agree voluntarily, which is obviously unlikely. It's very hard to think of a non-violent way to actually incite some change.

"The USA should invade the USA and win the hearts and minds of the population by building roads, bridges and putting locals to work." - Paul Myers

As a postscript, the amount of copycat protests are also slightly embarrassing. It's great to show solidarity, but for instance I don't think there needs to be one for my town. It's just awkward and trivialises the situation, since our economic problems are negligible compared to the US.

________

1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Arab_Spring

2. http://occupywallst.org/about/

[antihero]

"The greatest trick the upper echelon have pulled, is convincing the masses that using violence to achieve your ends is uncivilised."

Bam.

I amazes me that when 500,000 people marched in London on the 26th of March, people were dumb enough to ignore the messages being sent, and instead focus on some superficial property damage.

[forensic]

Next time, the 500,000 should forcibly take over the media outlets ala V for Vendetta.

[JoshTriplett]

That sounds like a good way for the people calling themselves the "99%" to lose what little support they might have from the 98.999%.

[mseebach]

> If it happens that it is effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market, then that is exactly what they will do.

The two crashes of the past decade were painful exactly because "they" expressly failed to make money. They caused a lot of pain to a lot of 1%ers. If you think the financial sector likes, and purposefully causes, crashes, well, you're wrong.

> Our economy has been rooted.

Thing is, the box was left with numerous unpatched known vulnerabilities for the better part of half a century. Whenever it got sluggish, the sys admins eagerly added memory and processors, not bothering to consider what might be wrong. And when the box finally collapsed the sysadmins are more than happy that all the anger is directed at the hackers.

[jamieb]

They caused a lot of pain to a lot of 1%ers. If you think the financial sector likes, and purposefully causes, crashes, well, you're wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

George Soros made $1bn in a day. The UK Gvt lost 3.3bn UKP.

Some people believe that Norman Lamont rose to the highest office of economics in the united kingdom without the knowledge of how currency markets work, and that he could not possibly have known that his actions would be to hand George Soros, and others, 3.3bn UKP. But let us pretend that this was incompetence so that we can answer your point.

Did George Soros purposefully crash the value of the UKP? Yes.

I use this example, rather than other more recent examples like [1], because it highlights the role of government in the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In short, if the government were to say to the common man "We must give this rich person one trillion dollars and you and your children will pay for it", there would be revolution.

But if the government says "Look! The stock market has crashed! We must give one trillion dollars to the banks so that the financial system does not collapse, so that children and dogs do not roam the streets, oh dear God we must give one trillion dollars to the banks now!" And nobody complains.

Better yet, give one trillion dollars in a highly recognizable bill, lets call it TARP. Make sure that all of that money is paid back. Then, when someone says "But we gave you all that money", the rich can claim "TARP? No! We paid all that back! Look!".

But also give several trillion more in completely one-off, non publicized, totally forgettable transactions. For example, give citibanks $25bn in TARP funds - and also give them $275 in non-TARP funds. Then have them pay the $25bn back. Amazingly, if you ask the average american about citibank, they will say "Yes, they got $25bn! Bastards". "No! They gave that $25bn back! Look it up!" "Oh you are right!" And that will be the end of it. Fox News will tell you almost daily, "Look who paid back their TARP funds! TARP has made a profit!". TARP is the hand they want you to look at, while they make your future vanish with the other.

You have to admit, its really impressive.

  [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135846486/how-some-made-millions-betting-against-the-market

[viggity]

And yet, curiously, George Soros and #Occupy are both leftists

[viggity]

I don't mind getting down voted, but you could at least leave a comment on why.

[nknight]

I didn't vote you down, but I'd say you were missing the point. You think OWS is exclusively left? Did every ordinary right-leaning American suddenly decide massive government spending is OK so long as it's to bail big corporations out of their own f'ups?

[jamieb]

Whenever it got sluggish, the sys admins eagerly added memory and processors, not bothering to consider what might be wrong. And when the box finally collapsed the sysadmins are more than happy that all the anger is directed at the hackers.

This would be a reasonable analogy if the hackers (bankers) hadn't spent the last decade paying the sysadmins (congress) to remove the safeties and add vulnerabilities.

Indeed you say this as if in the computer world, the idea of hackers just paying a sysadmin for access would be unimaginable. Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

[mseebach]

And of course the analogy is flawed, as analogies tend to be.

Yes, what has happened essentially amounts to corruption. How do you usually approach corruption, by going after the corrupted officials or the people paying the bribes? Both, especially at this scale, but no-one expects corruption to go away while there are corruptible officials.

> Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

It might appear so, but appearances can be deceptive. By all means, lets have a debate based on what the other side appears to think.

[jamieb]

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

You responded with a statement that the bankers did not do so, and that in fact the politicians had caused the damage, and then blamed the bankers. A direct contradiction of my assertion.

You are now claiming that "of course the analogy is flawed". No sir. The analogy was effective. It was the logical conclusion that you made using the analogy that was wrong, and you now admit so.

I stand by my analogy. Our economic system has been rooted.

How to fix it? How can we do that, when the people writing the laws are the ones who would be jailed by them?

[CWuestefeld]

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

It seems to me that it was mutual, sort of a ouroboros snake swallowing its tail. Just as we could say that bankers offered promises to politicians in order to secure favorable regulations, so did the politicians offer favorable regulation in order to secure their own re-election. As far as I can see, they're two sides of the same coin.

That being the case, it doesn't make sense to demand that the politicians wield great power in order to exercise greater control over the bankers. We know that the politicians are corrupt, so why would we give them more power?

[ArchD]

If you were a purely profit-minded trader in a situation where you have the chance to make a million with 50% chance and lose a thousand with 50%, and in the scenario where you lose a thousand, other members of society take a collective loss of hundreds of millions, what would you do? My numbers are not indicative of the historical reality but are just to illustrate the idea of socialized costs. Anyway, I think your choice is clear.

This trader is not intentionally causing crashes, but is increasing systemic risk of crashes. 'Purposefully' causing crashes is not necessary for actually causing crashes.

The problem is both the sysadms and the hackers. I don't think, though, that the anger is directed 100% at the hackers, though the location of the protest, apart from the actual message you see on the signs if you bother to examine them, may suggest otherwise.

[mseebach]

What you're describing is so common when government embrace an industry that it is it's own field of economic research. It's called moral hazard.

I try not to draw too many conclusions from signs or any individual expression of opinion. But I do note that the protesters marched to the home of the J.P. Morgan CEO as well as the J.P. Morgan headquarters, even though J.P. Morgan didn't bet the house on sub-prime mortgages and didn't need bail-out. That's location and action indicating anger focused on Wall Street.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020349970457662...

[forensic]

It's more like the hackers bribed the sysadmins to give them root access, and the users couldn't afford big enough bribes for the sysadmin to care about them.

[bdunbar]

Well, it turns out that it is extremely effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market.

I am not an economist[1]. Boom and bust cycles - I have read - happen as a natural result of millions of people making informed choices in their own self interest.

Simplistically: Cost of X perks up a bit. People buy in, seeing a trend. Price perks up a bit more. And so on. Rational actors see a bubble - X is valued now way above what it is actually worth. These guys are also paid to make money for their investors - fail to get in the market for X and you'll simply be fired and replaced with a guy who will.

Multiply that by millions and you get booms and busts.

How does one cause a boom and bust cycle, absent a grand cabal of Rich Guys and their cronies? How would _they_ do it?

[1] Would it be lame to say IANAE or has that kind of thing cycled back to cool, yet?