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kleinbl00  ·  3138 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stocks Off Sharply as Market Upheaval Grows

Deeply involved or don't understand it sounds about right. I have a really foggy idea what "arbitraging leveraged equity derivatives" means. Jerome Kerviel? Lost $6.8 billion of Societe Generale's money doing it.

So you know how in the land of Econ 101 if you want people to borrow money, you lower the interest rate? And how if you want people to stop borrowing money, you raise the interest rate? Some teacher or pundit somewhere probably told you this is what central banks do. Unfortunately, you don't lower the interest rate lower than zero or shit gets spooky. Economists can't really agree on what flavor of spooky it is, but they all agree they'd rather not.

But you still want people to borrow money. You still want to increase lending because lending greases the economy and when the economy ain't greased, it seizes up. Since you can't drop the rate below zero, you have to do weird shit, like buy things from the banks. Literally notes on shit. Like, houses and boats and shit.

This can be viewed as driving wealth inequality because it's the government going

"Hey, Jamie Dimon - I know you're evil as fuck and you totally flew your bank into the ground. As a reward, how about I offer to buy a shit-ton of your troubled assets so that you still have money to lend?"

The argument against buying assets and securities from JP Morgan-Chase is that they're evil vampire squids that drove millions out of their homes and why the fuck are we rewarding such predatory behavior? Why don't we just give the stimulus to the citizens?

The argument for buying assets and securities from JP Morgan-Chase is that they're evil vampire squids that will shove that money right the fuck back into circulation where it will actually grease the economy, unlike Ma and Pa Carpetbagger who are going to use it to drive down their debts and freeze the economy up as tight as a drum.

Simply put? Yes. It creates wealth inequality through stimulating the wealthy. The alternative is creating wealth equality through wealth destruction and while that would be a lot more "fair" it would also probably be a lot more dystopian.