{"id":727,"date":"2012-05-15T19:01:28","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/?p=727"},"modified":"2012-05-15T19:04:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T00:04:08","slug":"the-roulette-wheel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/the-roulette-wheel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Roulette Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of digital ink has been spilled about JP Morgan\u2019s $2 billion trading loss. I don\u2019t want to add too much more, except to call out one issue that I think has been downplayed through all of this: the notion that JP Morgan \u201clost\u201d the money.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When most newspapers talk about the story, they use the words \u201closs\u201d and \u201close\u201d (search<\/a> for \u201c2 billion loss\u201d on Google News and you will get almost half a million results). But this is wrong. The money didn\u2019t get \u201clost\u201d. It didn\u2019t disappear down a hole, or get shredded, or get burned in a fire. It simply went to other people making the opposite bet than JP Morgan did. It was a pure transfer of money, and a lot of people are now collectively two billion dollars richer.<\/p>\n

This is the real issue here: this is nothing more than gambling. One set of rich gamblers lost a large sum of money to another, no more. Neither group, it should be said, is terribly interested in taking that money and creating jobs: it\u2019s about making more bets. Had the money been \u201clost\u201d such as by dropping bags of dollar bills at random in this country, allowing people to spend it, the economy would be a lot better off.<\/p>\n

What people should be upset about is not the nominal dollar amount, but that this kind of gambling exists at all with little oversight and in a way that destabilizes our financial system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of digital ink has been spilled about JP Morgan\u2019s $2 billion trading loss. I don\u2019t want to add too much more, except to call out one issue that I think has been downplayed through all of this: the notion that JP Morgan \u201clost\u201d the money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[276],"class_list":["post-727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-economics","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}