Fifty-eight years ago, I wrote this all down...
The money-pundits are full of themselves this morning. Fox' usual Saturday-morning gang, are blasting the very heavens with "Three Trillion Dollars Lost to the Economy"...
That's bullcrap. Yes, the total losses WERE that high, but only if you also consider the failed gambles of derivatives trading the same as stock losses.
Nowhere do I see the figures on the losses of the actual market value of companies such as Caterpillar, US Steel, Ford Motor Co. etc.
This wild sell-off see-saw started with Investment Bankers tinkering with Derivatives, especially Goldman's Vix funds. There is NO earthly reason that actual investment funds should EVER be spent on wild gambles such as betting how wide the sweeps between losses and gains will be in certain time frames (that's "Vix", or in long-form, Variability-factor X).
Vix is a calculated factor used in the Arbitrage Theory of predicting price variations in equities, but it's only one such factor of many. Paying for "Vix Shares", or guesses where the swings will wind up, makes no more sense that betting on the daily "Handle" (total amount bet at the betting windows) for a horse or dog-racing track.
I don't follow the pricing of Vix Shares a sold by Goldman, but I DID hear a blurb on the news about a week ago which said that GS had somehow jacked up the price of those shares to over three thousand dollars per share, and their scarcity is one of the things that started this sell-off.
Yours Truly went to a private high school in DeeCee, the Maret School, and as a Junior, my Annual Thesis (long term-paper, got A-minus on it) was about how Goldman Sachs created the Crash of 1929 by introducing a CHAIN of three investment banks so as to allow highly leveraged trading. By running your funds through this chain, you could buy on 10% margin, so 0.1% actual cash went into your stock purchases (ten percent of ten percent of ten percent). They did this AGAIN with Derivatives trading in 2009, and now they have their Vix Bank (CBOE) trying it again, right on the heels of messing with the cryptocurrencies, which RAISED the Vix and helped them make their Vix shares so expensive. It's all in here.
If the entire brain trust of Goldman Sachs were frog-marched off to Gitmo tomorrow, first, they would be in the right place, and second, that would leave fiscal-advisor vacancies on the Trump Team, another benefit, because we can ALL do without the historic fiscal meddling of this cabal of bankers.