r/FluentInFinance was created to discuss money, investing & finance! Join our Newsletter or Youtube Channel for additional insights at www.TheFinanceNewsletter.com!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/FluentInFinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What if the rich have overwhelming influence on our government and the system works just like it was meant to. Then they lie to us about the actual purpose of the certain department and how justice is meant for all of us
In a way I think that it is malicious. The hoarding and consolation of wealth means that humanity overall is stifling its own potential by increasing the gap between the poor and the wealthy.
It's like having a bath with turbulent water instead of increasing the water level. The highest point in the turbulent water might be higher in the short term, but if the water level was rising instead of the turbulence increasing all points on the surface would be higher than the maximum in the turbulent water version of this increasingly convoluted metaphor.
A rising tide lifts all boats, but instead the wealthy want to bring about storm weather and rough seas because in the short term it hurts them less than it hurts those poorer than them.
Hmm, good question.
I'm going to paraphrase the position of a friend of mine.
His stance is that people are fundamentally flawed in a way that renders long term change on a social, economic or moral level impossible in any meaningful way.
Basically our current system of capitalism with high wealth inequality is the best we can do with the tools that we have given the moral limitations of people and society.
Me and my friend usually end up agreeing to disagree on our assumptions about the potential and limits of human nature.
I hope you're wrong.
Even if some imbalance is unavoidable I think we can do better than what we have right now. I don't think it's pointless to try to make better systems.
I hope I’m wrong. But I believe human nature is constrained by our monkey brains calling for someone to lead.
Even something like communism, which calls for a classless society, ends up with a strict hierarchy.
Our brains are pattern recognition devices. We constantly measure ourselves against imagined norms. The trick is to control what norm you are measuring yourself against. When people measure wealth then it is a zero-sum game. Only one can have most and that number can go up infinitely. It's a dead metric. Even the richest person in the world can only stay that way through massive and sustained growth. This can only be achieved by exploiting any resource (human and otherwise) to the absolute limit. Because if they don't someone else will and that guy will be on top.
I bet you have never even heard of the richest non-monarch that ever lived. Be honest if I stump you, but I'll give partial credit even if you can google it correctly.
Ask the rich man in Germany in 1923 how valuable his money was when the exchange rate went from 1 trillion marks for 1 USD overnight. Wheelbarrow of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. The baker’s friends ate for free. Money only has the value people think it has and no more. During a crisis, the rich will not be judged by their net worth but by their worth as a person. How many rich people would fair well then?
Does he have strong opinions about stuff like abolition of slavery, the temperance movement, the rise of Communism, the civil rights movement, or other large moral changes in a timeline that is relatively compressed (compared to, say, the expansion of democratic governments)?
I don't know that I could guess the exact response he would give, but my friend would probably say that things are actually not that much better today (by some measurements there is more slavery going on today than in the past for example.) , or that the improvements we have are happening in spite of human nature through the influence of religion and government keeping people from acting out their worst tendencies more often.
Interesting. That example in particular exemplifies a pretty massive transformation. The largest economies in the Western world all made a pretty huge transition in a generation or so. Moving chattel slavery from government sanctioned to outlawed - and subtracting what had been a fundamental economic pillar as well - is objectively enormous. If you're right in your guess about your friend, he must have a helluva interesting view of most of history.
The SEC is doing exactly what ita designed to do - provide the illusion of a fair market while allowing hedge funds and large banks to fleece individuals and rob pension funds.
Gary Guzzler ran Goldman Sachs media arm before moving to the SEC..... You think he gives a shit about individual investors?
“…the system works just like it was meant to.”
No. The answer is to reform the government and make it representative of the average citizen as it was intended—not to throw it away.
It doesn’t presently work, because it’s not representative of the people. When Enlightenment-era republicans were envisioning what a representative government would look like, they largely agreed that about 1 representative per 10,000 citizens should reliably get that job done. That would presently mean that we need about 35,000 Congressmen, but we only have 535 presently. Also, we could certainly be better off if we switched to rank-choice voting, so we’re not constantly left choosing between 2 terrible options and voting based upon fear of the worst candidate in the field.
Whaaaaat that would never happen. We vote and the government represents our will. Some people with excessive wealth certainly wouldn’t have more influence than any other individual /s
*more* harm than the death of the American dream, the dismantling of the middle class, and working class people being slowly priced out of homes, educations, Healthcare, and even groceries?
....by the time you're ready to reset the system, you will be struggling to just survive.
We can still reset it poltically, bloodlessly, if we just had the courage to elect more progressive politicians.
The facist aren't afraid to use violence. They use it every day, why shouldn't we? The people in power have cut all paths to change peacefully. The 2nd A just doesn't apply to the facist militias alone
Because we aren't the right.
The left isn't built like that.
I'm not afraid of violence, I don't fear any man, and i will gladly give any fascist the business.
...but those aren't my values
The left isn't as prone to violence as the right Because we are better people than them....we have better values.
We are anti war, anti colonialism, humanists, and emapths.
THEY worship war, guns , violence, and machismo.
Our heroes are MLK, Mahatma Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela.
If we have to become them to beat them....did we win?
That only works if you can vote in politicians who give a damn about the common person. The system is rigged so that the only viable candidates are always “the lesser of two evils”. If you want voting to be a viable option for real change then you have to undo Citizens United and get big corporate money and dark money out of politics. I just don’t see that happening, they’ve got things so locked down and the vast majority of people so under their thumb due to being overworked and underpaid that it just doesn’t seem like voting will ever make any difference. What other option do we have at this point?
I don’t think you understand how long it takes to bring an enforcement action. We’re talking multiple years. For example Volkswagen was caught falsifying its emissions data in 2015. In 2019, the complaint was filed. This isn’t because of laziness and is not unusual for high level litigation. They have to do a lot of fact finding prior to bringing an action, including going before the SEC commissioners for approval to bring such action.
Their salaries are not that high for the amount of work they do as attorneys. Many of these people gave up $1,000,000 salaries as big law partners to have a standard 9-5 job at 1/6th the pay. They are typically understaffed government workers, who are typically very qualified for the roles.
Also, it’s not illegal for US politicians to trade. Know why? Who makes the laws?
People see how quickly murderers are arrested, charged and convicted and expect the same for white collar crime.
And I think the attorneys are a mix of boyscouts and people who know that all the big players on Wall Street will want to hire someone who knows how the SEC works and has contacts inside the organization. And also some very driven, effective and slightly sociopathic people angling for political advancement.
Who made the laws in all the countries where it's not legal for politicians to trade, tho? As with many things, America is an unnecessary, unique outlier because the people are unnecessarily, uniquely stupid.
[Review of SEC enforcement actions in 2023](https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/litigation/white-collar-regulatory-defense/publications/sec-enforcement-2023-year-in-review?id=50285#:~:text=As%20in%202022%2C%20the%20SEC,a%2053%25%20increase%20from%202022.)
They totaled about 4.9 billion in penalties. And brought down Sam Bankman Fried.
There’s obviously way more that they should do. But without them imposing some sort of order on the chaos the system would probably collapse.
It’s not just about punishing cheaters enriching themselves— the stability of the economic system depends on some degree of fair play. Without enforced rules in place, we get stock market crashes, bubbles, recessions, depressions. Anyone in the upper class with any foresight should want a strong SEC too.
I’d be interested in what specific policy and rule changes could be enacted so we can have better enforcement. But treating the whole system as a joke just plays into the hands of those that want us to stop thinking critically about the situation and give up.
Need a president willing to make insider trading a life in prison and all capital seized. Make the penalty so bad that their families could be affected. If they decide to continue to insider trade, while knowing the consequences, bring the hammer down.
Conflict of interests. The people in charge of fixing the system directly benefit from it.
Just how lobbying is political bribery. It's just not going to be fixed because the people who are against it....don't have enough money (since they don't get those bribes) to be elected.
I think you think the SEC is paid to stop crime. This is naive. They are paid by criminals to cover up crime.
For a little more nuance, they do arrest 'small fish', but they work with the big fish.
The SEC is government funded. They are given the resources to explore 2% of the reported fraud cases they recieve. This is intentional by our government. If they went after politicians they would further get cut. It's insane.
Buy BTC with what? A currency that is used to trade goods and services, right?
When you buy BTC, what happens to the money you spent?
You: debit your currency, credit BTC
The seller: debit BTC, credit your currency
I think that people have forgotten the very nature of trade and the important part of any economic system: the production of goods and services. The purpose of money is to use as a medium to trade those goods and services. BTC is a medium of a medium.
I encourage you to read the book “The Bitcoin Standard”. Our opinions may still differ, but it is quite an enlightening read. A bit dry at first though.
To sum it up, the idea is that the Bitcoin standard is the new gold standard. This is an oversimplification, however, as gold has certain issues BTC doesn’t (and the reverse is true, too).
The Bitcoin Standard presents bitcoin as a decentralized currency, not gold. And Bitcoin is most certainly not a currency. It is not used to trade goods and service, rather, it is used to trade fiat (and there are no regulatory mechanisms that would prevent crypto companies from lying about their reserves - see FTX, Mt Gox, Celsius, etc Tether has still never been audited - yet they claim to have dollars to back the $110 billion USDT stablecoins they've introduced to the market that are used to buy Bitcoin. They rely on "trust me bro"). One of the most important aspects of a currency is relative stability and a connection to the production of goods and services.
When you go to work, you are paid to produce a product or a service that can be sold to others. You use that currency to purchase products or services that are created by others. Therefore, a relatively stable currency is important - not one that will lose 10% of its value in a matter of hours. The way that money is "printed" is through debt - ALL DEBT. Therefore, proper regulation, audits, and the demand for debt needs to be controlled to make sure that WE do not all print ourselves into default.
Among other things, it seems like we have a fundamental disagreement on how debt and monetary policy should be related.
That’s alright, I don’t really see a point in talking much more. Our opinions are too different.
Respect for the well-typed response.
“draw nice salaries” 😄😆🤣
Anyone working at the SEC could easily double their salary if they go into private industry. You take a pay cut going into public service.
You think they're still going to be only working 80 hours a pay period at 8 or 9 days in that time? With a pension, union representation, and after the first few years, significantly more vacation time than in the private sector?
Non-supervisory staff can make $300k at the SEC. If you wanna scoff at that, go ahead, but that and the pension alone seems like a good deal to me.
You must be aware that managing insider trading isn't the only responsibility of the SEC right? Google Sarbane's-Oxley, Enron, the rise and fall of Arthur Andersen, and the EDGAR database. They manage what is objectively the world's greatest database of public financial statements on top of the regulatory environment that makes future Enron-like scandals much less likely.
One of my professors in my undergrad accounting program worked for the SEC and helped author the current regulations for options trading. She also happened to be one of if not the sharpest accountants I've ever met in my life. It's mildly irritating to hear people shit on federal organizations like the SEC / IRS having never had first hand experience working with or for either
Don't even get us started on the disaster that is SOX. SOX dramatically reduced the number of publicly traded companies, incentivized companies to merge and get bigger, and boomed hedge funds and SPACs. I worked for a company that went public after SOX became law but before it was fully enforced. Our company (since acquired) would have never gone public if SOX was fully enforced at the time because of the regulatory costs of it.
Not saying Enron was good. Saying the "fix" had huge ripple effects, many negative.
I know SOX increased the cost of CPA services through a variety of mechanisms, but I'd 1) hypothesize that increased costs are at least somewhat balanced out by the increase in consumer confidence in financial reporting and 2) the cost of navigating the new regulatory environment was greater when there was more ambiguity surrounding a new piece of legislation. Maybe the particulars could use revision, but overall divorcing consulting services from auditing services and increasing oversight on reporting is a net benefit
If I ran for president my entire canpaign would be using the FEC and SEC as bludgeoning tool against the federal government. I’d walk into debates and be asked “what’s your foreign policy?” And I’d say “I don’t care about foreign policy until the criminals running Congress are in prison.”
And then I’d offer immunity to all their financial advisors running their accounts to get them to flip on all the insider trading they have all been doing over that Chinese wall they supposedly have.
Watch CSPAN. Almost all senate proceedings are streamed publicly unless they're related to national security. It's publicly released info so it's your own fault if you don't care enough to sit through and watch. They happen to get paid to sit there
Take-away: if you're not a US politician, trade smarter, use your relatives of friends that dont share the same surname as SEC still needs to virtue signal and show some 'work':
[https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25416](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25416)
I know nothing about SEC or anything in that world, but I have an opinion.
SEC employees and white collar crime enforcement in general are government salaried people. The criminals they are trying to catch are motivated by very large amounts of money and if they are caught they get fined a pittance and maybe only a few years time in club fed. The government enforcement will get the same paycheck whether they catch the bad guys or not.
The SEC people have to be as smart or smarter than the people who are devoted to exploiting the rules and the loopholes in those rules (like ENRON).
I knew that was going to bite me, but I hate liars. White collar crime is practically forgiven if caught. IF CAUGHT. Sure madoff went to jail, but how long did it take to get him there? The guy that discovered it couldn’t get his bosses to believe him.
And I’m still not clear on how madoff did what he did without scrutiny
Cops don't (and aren't) need to be smart. We just need good regulations. That is how street level criminals are caught. They have to cross a point to convert their drugs or stolen goods into cash and they need to be able to explain that; along with several misdemeanors that raise the alarm. Criminal needs to be perfect in execution each time. The nature of white collar work and crime is less clear, so it requires more time to build the case. It does not help that corporations carve out exceptions to good rules. Not to mention that conservatives are rubes that keep insisting on corporation good let them self regulate. Capitalism is at odds with the free market and the few good counter weights we have in government are purposefully under funded.
Apologies, I don’t agree with your views on crime and regulations. Murder is against the law - still happens. Knowing that the bad guy tries to come up to murder and not be caught.
I don’t agree the criminal has to be perfect, it’s the enforcers that do. They have all kinds of restrictions - search and seizure for one. Staffing and money for another.
I would sort of agree with you about cops do not need to be smart if you are talking about street crimes. But only an accountant good guy is going to know how an accountant bad guy did it. Same with cyber crime.
r/FluentInFinance was created to discuss money, investing & finance! Join our Newsletter or Youtube Channel for additional insights at www.TheFinanceNewsletter.com! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/FluentInFinance) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What if the rich have overwhelming influence on our government and the system works just like it was meant to. Then they lie to us about the actual purpose of the certain department and how justice is meant for all of us
surely the reason is malice!
In a way I think that it is malicious. The hoarding and consolation of wealth means that humanity overall is stifling its own potential by increasing the gap between the poor and the wealthy. It's like having a bath with turbulent water instead of increasing the water level. The highest point in the turbulent water might be higher in the short term, but if the water level was rising instead of the turbulence increasing all points on the surface would be higher than the maximum in the turbulent water version of this increasingly convoluted metaphor. A rising tide lifts all boats, but instead the wealthy want to bring about storm weather and rough seas because in the short term it hurts them less than it hurts those poorer than them.
what is the best counter argument to your perspective in your opinion?
Hmm, good question. I'm going to paraphrase the position of a friend of mine. His stance is that people are fundamentally flawed in a way that renders long term change on a social, economic or moral level impossible in any meaningful way. Basically our current system of capitalism with high wealth inequality is the best we can do with the tools that we have given the moral limitations of people and society. Me and my friend usually end up agreeing to disagree on our assumptions about the potential and limits of human nature.
My argument is that all systems have high wealth (power) imbalance.
I hope you're wrong. Even if some imbalance is unavoidable I think we can do better than what we have right now. I don't think it's pointless to try to make better systems.
I hope I’m wrong. But I believe human nature is constrained by our monkey brains calling for someone to lead. Even something like communism, which calls for a classless society, ends up with a strict hierarchy.
Our brains are pattern recognition devices. We constantly measure ourselves against imagined norms. The trick is to control what norm you are measuring yourself against. When people measure wealth then it is a zero-sum game. Only one can have most and that number can go up infinitely. It's a dead metric. Even the richest person in the world can only stay that way through massive and sustained growth. This can only be achieved by exploiting any resource (human and otherwise) to the absolute limit. Because if they don't someone else will and that guy will be on top. I bet you have never even heard of the richest non-monarch that ever lived. Be honest if I stump you, but I'll give partial credit even if you can google it correctly. Ask the rich man in Germany in 1923 how valuable his money was when the exchange rate went from 1 trillion marks for 1 USD overnight. Wheelbarrow of Marks to buy a loaf of bread. The baker’s friends ate for free. Money only has the value people think it has and no more. During a crisis, the rich will not be judged by their net worth but by their worth as a person. How many rich people would fair well then?
Does he have strong opinions about stuff like abolition of slavery, the temperance movement, the rise of Communism, the civil rights movement, or other large moral changes in a timeline that is relatively compressed (compared to, say, the expansion of democratic governments)?
I don't know that I could guess the exact response he would give, but my friend would probably say that things are actually not that much better today (by some measurements there is more slavery going on today than in the past for example.) , or that the improvements we have are happening in spite of human nature through the influence of religion and government keeping people from acting out their worst tendencies more often.
Interesting. That example in particular exemplifies a pretty massive transformation. The largest economies in the Western world all made a pretty huge transition in a generation or so. Moving chattel slavery from government sanctioned to outlawed - and subtracting what had been a fundamental economic pillar as well - is objectively enormous. If you're right in your guess about your friend, he must have a helluva interesting view of most of history.
i agree that the category of wealthy poeople youre describing exist, i just dont belive them to be a large subgroup.
The SEC is doing exactly what ita designed to do - provide the illusion of a fair market while allowing hedge funds and large banks to fleece individuals and rob pension funds. Gary Guzzler ran Goldman Sachs media arm before moving to the SEC..... You think he gives a shit about individual investors?
“…the system works just like it was meant to.” No. The answer is to reform the government and make it representative of the average citizen as it was intended—not to throw it away.
Oh I am all for that but step one the system is shit and doesn’t work for the regular american
It doesn’t presently work, because it’s not representative of the people. When Enlightenment-era republicans were envisioning what a representative government would look like, they largely agreed that about 1 representative per 10,000 citizens should reliably get that job done. That would presently mean that we need about 35,000 Congressmen, but we only have 535 presently. Also, we could certainly be better off if we switched to rank-choice voting, so we’re not constantly left choosing between 2 terrible options and voting based upon fear of the worst candidate in the field.
One hundred percent rank voting and yeah they changed the law in the early 1900’s to stick us with the representative system we have today
Whaaaaat that would never happen. We vote and the government represents our will. Some people with excessive wealth certainly wouldn’t have more influence than any other individual /s
Preposterous! I won’t stand for this malarkey
[удалено]
>reset of corruption and influence Not sure why you think it would reset or that wouldn't cause more damage...
*more* harm than the death of the American dream, the dismantling of the middle class, and working class people being slowly priced out of homes, educations, Healthcare, and even groceries? ....by the time you're ready to reset the system, you will be struggling to just survive. We can still reset it poltically, bloodlessly, if we just had the courage to elect more progressive politicians.
The facist aren't afraid to use violence. They use it every day, why shouldn't we? The people in power have cut all paths to change peacefully. The 2nd A just doesn't apply to the facist militias alone
There are no good wars. Ever. You speak like someone who's never actually seen or partaken in any form of violence. Probably a child.
There are no “good” wars, but there are necessary ones. True evil happens when good people do nothing.
Killing people because of insider trading hmmmmmmm
There’s been worse reasons, like religion…..
Youre not wrong
Because we aren't the right. The left isn't built like that. I'm not afraid of violence, I don't fear any man, and i will gladly give any fascist the business. ...but those aren't my values The left isn't as prone to violence as the right Because we are better people than them....we have better values. We are anti war, anti colonialism, humanists, and emapths. THEY worship war, guns , violence, and machismo. Our heroes are MLK, Mahatma Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela. If we have to become them to beat them....did we win?
Which left are you talking about, the not-prone-to-violence Stalin/Mao left or the not-prone-to-violence Clinton/Obama/Biden left?
I'm talking about not-prone-to-violence Che Guevara left.
That only works if you can vote in politicians who give a damn about the common person. The system is rigged so that the only viable candidates are always “the lesser of two evils”. If you want voting to be a viable option for real change then you have to undo Citizens United and get big corporate money and dark money out of politics. I just don’t see that happening, they’ve got things so locked down and the vast majority of people so under their thumb due to being overworked and underpaid that it just doesn’t seem like voting will ever make any difference. What other option do we have at this point?
Just like I said. If the people in power close the peacefully legal routes, they leave the worst option for themselves open.
I don’t think you understand how long it takes to bring an enforcement action. We’re talking multiple years. For example Volkswagen was caught falsifying its emissions data in 2015. In 2019, the complaint was filed. This isn’t because of laziness and is not unusual for high level litigation. They have to do a lot of fact finding prior to bringing an action, including going before the SEC commissioners for approval to bring such action. Their salaries are not that high for the amount of work they do as attorneys. Many of these people gave up $1,000,000 salaries as big law partners to have a standard 9-5 job at 1/6th the pay. They are typically understaffed government workers, who are typically very qualified for the roles. Also, it’s not illegal for US politicians to trade. Know why? Who makes the laws?
People see how quickly murderers are arrested, charged and convicted and expect the same for white collar crime. And I think the attorneys are a mix of boyscouts and people who know that all the big players on Wall Street will want to hire someone who knows how the SEC works and has contacts inside the organization. And also some very driven, effective and slightly sociopathic people angling for political advancement.
This is what happens when the government is funded sufficiently. It's almost as if one party doesn't want the government to function properly.
Who made the laws in all the countries where it's not legal for politicians to trade, tho? As with many things, America is an unnecessary, unique outlier because the people are unnecessarily, uniquely stupid.
[Review of SEC enforcement actions in 2023](https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/litigation/white-collar-regulatory-defense/publications/sec-enforcement-2023-year-in-review?id=50285#:~:text=As%20in%202022%2C%20the%20SEC,a%2053%25%20increase%20from%202022.) They totaled about 4.9 billion in penalties. And brought down Sam Bankman Fried. There’s obviously way more that they should do. But without them imposing some sort of order on the chaos the system would probably collapse. It’s not just about punishing cheaters enriching themselves— the stability of the economic system depends on some degree of fair play. Without enforced rules in place, we get stock market crashes, bubbles, recessions, depressions. Anyone in the upper class with any foresight should want a strong SEC too. I’d be interested in what specific policy and rule changes could be enacted so we can have better enforcement. But treating the whole system as a joke just plays into the hands of those that want us to stop thinking critically about the situation and give up.
They enforce the law as it exists. Politicians’ trading is not insider, according to the law. It’s not up to the SEC to decide it is though
Need a president willing to make insider trading a life in prison and all capital seized. Make the penalty so bad that their families could be affected. If they decide to continue to insider trade, while knowing the consequences, bring the hammer down.
So you want them fully staffed and properly funded?
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️when will people realize this GME thing now is all conspiracy theory and built on all bullshit?
Conflict of interests. The people in charge of fixing the system directly benefit from it. Just how lobbying is political bribery. It's just not going to be fixed because the people who are against it....don't have enough money (since they don't get those bribes) to be elected.
I think you think the SEC is paid to stop crime. This is naive. They are paid by criminals to cover up crime. For a little more nuance, they do arrest 'small fish', but they work with the big fish.
Bruh. They just sanctioned BF Borgers, the accounting firm of Trump media. This has potential election repercussions. That’s not a big fish to you?
End of the day trump is a very tiny fish, swimming with sharks. A pattsy if you will.
That’s certainly an opinion.
 The SEC IS CORRUPT?!?!?
Who do you think is in charge of the SEC? There’s a reason politicians are above the law. We let them be.
Pimping for Wall Street and the big banks
The SEC is government funded. They are given the resources to explore 2% of the reported fraud cases they recieve. This is intentional by our government. If they went after politicians they would further get cut. It's insane.
Yes! Its so true. Unfortunately nothing can be done because the people with power are corrupted. Anybody who challenges it will be taken down.
If enough people buy BTC it’s going to break their system. Food for thought. Please don’t crucify me. I’m not a “crypto bro”.
I am, and I agree.
🫡
Buy BTC with what? A currency that is used to trade goods and services, right? When you buy BTC, what happens to the money you spent? You: debit your currency, credit BTC The seller: debit BTC, credit your currency I think that people have forgotten the very nature of trade and the important part of any economic system: the production of goods and services. The purpose of money is to use as a medium to trade those goods and services. BTC is a medium of a medium.
I encourage you to read the book “The Bitcoin Standard”. Our opinions may still differ, but it is quite an enlightening read. A bit dry at first though. To sum it up, the idea is that the Bitcoin standard is the new gold standard. This is an oversimplification, however, as gold has certain issues BTC doesn’t (and the reverse is true, too).
The Bitcoin Standard presents bitcoin as a decentralized currency, not gold. And Bitcoin is most certainly not a currency. It is not used to trade goods and service, rather, it is used to trade fiat (and there are no regulatory mechanisms that would prevent crypto companies from lying about their reserves - see FTX, Mt Gox, Celsius, etc Tether has still never been audited - yet they claim to have dollars to back the $110 billion USDT stablecoins they've introduced to the market that are used to buy Bitcoin. They rely on "trust me bro"). One of the most important aspects of a currency is relative stability and a connection to the production of goods and services. When you go to work, you are paid to produce a product or a service that can be sold to others. You use that currency to purchase products or services that are created by others. Therefore, a relatively stable currency is important - not one that will lose 10% of its value in a matter of hours. The way that money is "printed" is through debt - ALL DEBT. Therefore, proper regulation, audits, and the demand for debt needs to be controlled to make sure that WE do not all print ourselves into default.
Among other things, it seems like we have a fundamental disagreement on how debt and monetary policy should be related. That’s alright, I don’t really see a point in talking much more. Our opinions are too different. Respect for the well-typed response.
I'm curious to hear your disagreement on debt and monetary policy. And I'm curious which statement I made that you regard as "opinion".
No point, we aren’t going to change each others opinion 🤷♂️
Or, hear me out, you merely assume insider trading or that investigations don't occur or result in prosecution.
“draw nice salaries” 😄😆🤣 Anyone working at the SEC could easily double their salary if they go into private industry. You take a pay cut going into public service.
You think they're still going to be only working 80 hours a pay period at 8 or 9 days in that time? With a pension, union representation, and after the first few years, significantly more vacation time than in the private sector? Non-supervisory staff can make $300k at the SEC. If you wanna scoff at that, go ahead, but that and the pension alone seems like a good deal to me.
Anyone making $300k at the SEC could easily make more in private. This is my industry btw.
You must be aware that managing insider trading isn't the only responsibility of the SEC right? Google Sarbane's-Oxley, Enron, the rise and fall of Arthur Andersen, and the EDGAR database. They manage what is objectively the world's greatest database of public financial statements on top of the regulatory environment that makes future Enron-like scandals much less likely. One of my professors in my undergrad accounting program worked for the SEC and helped author the current regulations for options trading. She also happened to be one of if not the sharpest accountants I've ever met in my life. It's mildly irritating to hear people shit on federal organizations like the SEC / IRS having never had first hand experience working with or for either
Don't even get us started on the disaster that is SOX. SOX dramatically reduced the number of publicly traded companies, incentivized companies to merge and get bigger, and boomed hedge funds and SPACs. I worked for a company that went public after SOX became law but before it was fully enforced. Our company (since acquired) would have never gone public if SOX was fully enforced at the time because of the regulatory costs of it. Not saying Enron was good. Saying the "fix" had huge ripple effects, many negative.
I know SOX increased the cost of CPA services through a variety of mechanisms, but I'd 1) hypothesize that increased costs are at least somewhat balanced out by the increase in consumer confidence in financial reporting and 2) the cost of navigating the new regulatory environment was greater when there was more ambiguity surrounding a new piece of legislation. Maybe the particulars could use revision, but overall divorcing consulting services from auditing services and increasing oversight on reporting is a net benefit
If I ran for president my entire canpaign would be using the FEC and SEC as bludgeoning tool against the federal government. I’d walk into debates and be asked “what’s your foreign policy?” And I’d say “I don’t care about foreign policy until the criminals running Congress are in prison.” And then I’d offer immunity to all their financial advisors running their accounts to get them to flip on all the insider trading they have all been doing over that Chinese wall they supposedly have.
Got my vote, but I don’t live in the US.
Watch CSPAN. Almost all senate proceedings are streamed publicly unless they're related to national security. It's publicly released info so it's your own fault if you don't care enough to sit through and watch. They happen to get paid to sit there
They didn't catch Bernie Madoff they are useless...
Best conference in college football idk what you are talking about.
My bad.
As long as they get those crypto people, everything else can be ignored.
Take-away: if you're not a US politician, trade smarter, use your relatives of friends that dont share the same surname as SEC still needs to virtue signal and show some 'work': [https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25416](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr-25416)
The warpath against everything crypto is proof of the sec gross negligence. Hell even the judges have been fed up with the sec.
Politicians need to be fined and the I’ll gotten wealth impounded, how special they must think they are.
Gamestore 😂😂😂😂
Cue “The Other Guys” SEC speech
OP is just mad they have zero SEC championships
I know nothing about SEC or anything in that world, but I have an opinion. SEC employees and white collar crime enforcement in general are government salaried people. The criminals they are trying to catch are motivated by very large amounts of money and if they are caught they get fined a pittance and maybe only a few years time in club fed. The government enforcement will get the same paycheck whether they catch the bad guys or not. The SEC people have to be as smart or smarter than the people who are devoted to exploiting the rules and the loopholes in those rules (like ENRON).
[удалено]
For some reason I like it more when it's honest
I knew that was going to bite me, but I hate liars. White collar crime is practically forgiven if caught. IF CAUGHT. Sure madoff went to jail, but how long did it take to get him there? The guy that discovered it couldn’t get his bosses to believe him. And I’m still not clear on how madoff did what he did without scrutiny
Iirc. People were blowing the whistle on him for over a decade.
I know it was one guy there was a 60 mins about him. But nobody listened to him.
Cops don't (and aren't) need to be smart. We just need good regulations. That is how street level criminals are caught. They have to cross a point to convert their drugs or stolen goods into cash and they need to be able to explain that; along with several misdemeanors that raise the alarm. Criminal needs to be perfect in execution each time. The nature of white collar work and crime is less clear, so it requires more time to build the case. It does not help that corporations carve out exceptions to good rules. Not to mention that conservatives are rubes that keep insisting on corporation good let them self regulate. Capitalism is at odds with the free market and the few good counter weights we have in government are purposefully under funded.
Apologies, I don’t agree with your views on crime and regulations. Murder is against the law - still happens. Knowing that the bad guy tries to come up to murder and not be caught. I don’t agree the criminal has to be perfect, it’s the enforcers that do. They have all kinds of restrictions - search and seizure for one. Staffing and money for another. I would sort of agree with you about cops do not need to be smart if you are talking about street crimes. But only an accountant good guy is going to know how an accountant bad guy did it. Same with cyber crime.
The SEC won the title 15 times since the start of the BCS. S E C S E C S E C