How is it that a major market player can lose half a billion dollars in half an hour?
Terror attack?
Act of God?
Nope. A flaw in a computer trading software program.
Well there's an oopsie! Whoever wrote the code for that "proprietary trading algorithm" is busy hunched over their CV with a big bottle of White-Out these days.
That's the beauty of the Rumpelstiltskin economy. Billions made, billions lost, absolutely nothing useful provided to society at large.
And when things veer too far off the script the public will bail them out.
There was a time long ago when the markets could justify their existence by claiming to provide a capital pool that growing companies could tap into.
Now the markets are dominated by teams of computer programmers and mathematicians and straw-spinning wizards of every stripe seeking to get the better of one another in high-volume automated trading, where they can be in and out of a stock a dozen times in a second.
This provides what useful service to the rest of the economy?
A financial transaction tax would go a long way towards putting the brakes on this foolishness.
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