World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[Pulsar_t]

Five big banks agree to pay more than $5 billion to settle regulatory charges

What is there left to say about those banking mafiosi that's not been already said? Lynching is too good for them, but the whole system is a rotten mess.

[marurun]

As an example, I spent $100 in 1999 to buy 18 shares of Nike stock(roughly $5.55 per share). A stock split occurred in the mid 2000s, so I now have 33 shares. It is now 2015, 16 years later. The US economy has been through a couple of economic bubble bursts, including the Great Recession. My Nike stock is now worth roughly $105 a share, meaning my $100 has become $3465, a 346.5% increase.

I see now, so when they say the economy is down it means its just down from its previous peak, it didn't reach a negative point. So your investment always fluctuated within the profit (above $5.5 a share) it never reached a point below $5.5 .

The over-reaction I see on TV has fooled me.

If someone on TV or media says the stock market is down, they will typically provide the context. On a daily broadcast they'll say the stock market is down and dropped whatever percent. That's just the change since yesterday. Other times they will indicate whether it's quarterly or yearly.

For someone with long-term investments, those sorts of things don't matter much, but some folks trade very short term. In fact, one big issue in US markets (and worldwide markets, for that matter) is what's called high frequency trading. These are trades make with computers handling a lot of the decision making. Computer algorithms will often watch news headlines and automatically make purchases as quickly as possible. This can make people lots of money when it works, but when it fails, it tends to fail spectacularly. For example, some trading algorithms can have minor errors that don't show up until market conditions are just right, and then you can have companies lose millions in value in a single day. More recently, a filing somewhere claimed a one company was looking to buy another. The problem is that the first company didn't actually exist, and the second company lost a lot of value because computer trading algorithms started treating the stock as if the company was being bought, which in reality it wasn't.

[ZeroAX]

Five big banks agree to pay more than $5 billion to settle regulatory charges

What is there left to say about those banking mafiosi that's not been already said? Lynching is too good for them, but the whole system is a rotten mess.

My problem with this it's that it's the banks themselves that are paying, and not the people who were running them when these illegal activities were taking place, which means they got their bonuses and now they won't pay a price.

[Ivo]

Five big banks agree to pay more than $5 billion to settle regulatory charges

What is there left to say about those banking mafiosi that's not been already said? Lynching is too good for them, but the whole system is a rotten mess.

My problem with this it's that it's the banks themselves that are paying, and not the people who were running them when these illegal activities were taking place, which means they got their bonuses and now they won't pay a price.

The article mentions some people were fired. Whether they really were to blame or are just taking the fall (and whether they are being fired with "golden parachutes") is a different story.

Even more than having individuals accountable, what is annoying is if something really big has been going on a daily basis for years, the fines that appear large aren't really effective because it was in total a win for the banks.

Would they prefer not paying the fines? Sure. But if they "banked" billions and are paying a fine of 5 billion they are still ahead, it just made their margin smaller and if the rules of the game are that, they would do it again (and while ethically one could blame them, from a emotionless logical perspective they acted rationally).

To get the desired behaviour the regulations and fines need to make the illegal activity an irrational choice.
The fines need to be proportionally large in order to really not lucrative (so if the bank gained X, they pay 10*X for example). It needs to be high enough to not even be worth the risk of getting caught, because I expect there is a lot of this stuff that isn't even detected. The fines then need to be higher if catching the banks doing stuff like this is hard, to account for all the times they get away with it.

The point simplified is that if they profit 10 billion every time they do it and only get caught 1 out of 10 times, even fining them 100 billion that one time isn't enough.

[ZeroAX]

The article mentions some people were fired. Whether they really were to blame or are just taking the fall (and whether they are being fired with "golden parachutes") is a different story.

Even more than having individuals accountable, what is annoying is if something really big has been going on a daily basis for years, the fines that appear large aren't really effective because it was in total a win for the banks.

Would they prefer not paying the fines? Sure. But if they "banked" billions and are paying a fine of 5 billion they are still ahead, it just made their margin smaller and if the rules of the game are that, they would do it again (and while ethically one could blame them, from a emotionless logical perspective they acted rationally).

To get the desired behaviour the regulations and fines need to make the illegal activity an irrational choice.
The fines need to be proportionally large in order to really not lucrative (so if the bank gained X, they pay 10*X for example). It needs to be high enough to not even be worth the risk of getting caught, because I expect there is a lot of this stuff that isn't even detected. The fines then need to be higher if catching the banks doing stuff like this is hard, to account for all the times they get away with it.

The point simplified is that if they profit 10 billion every time they do it and only get caught 1 out of 10 times, even fining them 100 billion that one time isn't enough.

Great points. But there is a lot of lobbying against such rules. One of the best arguments in favor of such measures that I've heard is an ethical/philosophical one. There's such a thing as an ethical crime when it comes to doctors, since finance influences/destroys so many lives, there should also be ethical crimes in the banking and finance industry (like giving on purpose a loan to someone who can't afford it).



On another topic: Ireland just became the first country to legalize gay marriage via popular vote...the country which only decriminalized being gay 22 years ago...

Great that just leaves us, Italy, Germany and Austria as the backwards people in western Europe....

[Sload Soap]

Interesting developments today as 8 high ranking FIFA officials are arrested on charges of money laundering, taking bribes and fraud. It's about time.

[Pulsar_t]

Not about time, more like too late haha. FIFA is one of the most corrupt "corporations" on earth..

[ZeroAX]

Interesting developments today as 8 high ranking FIFA officials are arrested on charges of money laundering, taking bribes and fraud. It's about time.

Hopefully this will bring back these tournaments to countries who's humans right record aren't a disgrace to sports and everything these events are supposed to stand for.....but it still won't help you guys do well mate

[Pulsar_t]

Being a politician doesn't excuse Aung San Suu Kyi from keeping mum on the humanitarian migrant crisis in her country.

[Pulsar_t]

Dragnets will never go away. In fact I believe only a catastrophic failure of all electronics on earth is the only solution to the omniscient eye of big brother. Sort of like what happened in that movie..