frank miller

[Michael Bailey]

well, life is fraught with risk, and we all deal with it as best we can.

Like Pascal's wager.  which doesn't make sense to everybody, either.
Me, I kind of buy into that one.

But the stock market leaves me cold.

buncha people all frenziedly speculating on the efforts of others, and
speculating on the speculations.  Doesn't lay one brick.  Doesn't
prove one theorem.  Doesn't cure one disease.
Even reading about it isn't as much fun as reading a decent thriller
or romance...

imho, of course.

Reef and Vibe I guess are the exemplars of the gambling/stock market
meme in AtD.

Reef, well, he drifts into that and allows it to distract him from
destruction. So I guess in that respect it isn't all bad.  Plus, a
really nifty chick like Yashmeen melds with Reef and produces
offspring, as well as helping him win at times.  Hideous waste of her
talents, I'd say, but Pynchon may be implying otherwise.

Vibe is just plain nasty.  Somehow the market tycoon seems to be the
capitalist successor to the nobility - did I get that right?  I don't
hold much brief for the nobility either, all those wars and stuff.  Is
Vibe's ilk a net improvement over having a hereditary nobility?  They
are much of a muchness, on first glance...




On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> Imagine a poker game, and the players are betting on the game.
>
> Now imagine that there are a bunch of people around the game, who are not
> playing, but who are betting with each other on the game.  Those side bets
> are derivatives.  (They're derivative of the action in the game.)
>
> There are legit reasons for businesses to want to hedge risk with
> derivatives.  For example, you might have own a bunch of General Electric
> bonds.  You want to protect yourself from the risk that GE will default on
> those bonds, so you buy credit default swaps, which work like insurance.
> You make regular payments to whomever you're dealing with, and they agree to
> pay you a larger sum in the event that GE defaults on the bonds.  You've
> just hedged your exposure to a default by GE, at the cost of the regular
> payments, and with the caveat that you have some risk that the counterparty
> you're dealing with with fail, rendering the insurance worthless.
>
> Or suppose you run a US business that sells lots of stuff in Europe, and you
> are exposed to the risk that the Euro will drop in value before you can turn
> your European earnings back into dollars.  You might enter into FX
> derivatives structured so that you will make money if the Euro drops in
> value and lose money if the Euro gains in value.  This isn't a credit
> default swap, but again you've found a way to hedge some risk, and perhaps
> by dealing with a party that has the opposite problem.
>
> Not to say (not at all) that they have no downsides -- they allow financial
> institutions to greatly increase their leverage, with massive systemic
> risks. Still, they exist because they have some legitimate uses.
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  alice wellintown  wrote:
>> >
>> >  Also, you
>> > don't know what a derivitive is. do you?
>> >
>>
>> I would love to read an explanation by you.  You have an interesting
>> prose style.
>>
>> I have read up on them a little but, because I'm not a deep thinker,
>> they seem to me to be the type of thing that embodies the worst
>> aspects of capitalism:
>>
>> they are basically gambling (which I don't approve of)
>>
>> they are a zero sum game: for every winner there's a loser
>>
>> they are prone to manipulation and speculation, allowing people for a
>> minimal investment to damage or even destroy companies that otherwise
>> could fill human needs
>>
>> they feed an effete corps of profit-takers who produce nothing, but
>> whose money competes for things and services that are actually worth
>> having in their own right
>>
>> they produce profits disproportionate to the amount of value (if any)
>> that they add - which distorts the marketplace for everything else and
>> draws talented people who could be gainfully and probably more happily
>> employed in ever so much more useful pastimes
>>
>>
>>  how wrongheaded and stupidl am I, to think such things?
>
>