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The Market is Like Gambling, And That's a Good Thing

by Larry Jankens 4/29/2010 - 11:28 am   |


The Goldman Sachs Senate Hearings turned out to be crappy, sh*tty, one might say, over and over again while giggling inside that you just said sh*tty on C-SPAN.  If you are going to curse at least throw a f*ck in there.  It’s the difference between campy PG-13 horror movies and gory R horror movies.  If you are going to go for it, go for it.  Had Senators truly wanted to prove their points they could have asked better questions, not just do a sh*tty rendition of a high school principal chewing out unruly students.  


If you'd been playing a drinking game and taken a shot every time Senator Jon Tester, Republican, Arizona asked what exactly “is” a CDO by the end of his squiggly line of questioning you would have had liver poisoning.  If I were a gambler, I’d bet that either he has a learning disability or his staff couldn’t muster the brain power to learn about CDO and relay it to the Senator.  At one point he equated Goldman Sachs investments to gambling.  Well, duh.


Of course it’s gambling you idiot!  Just like gambling, a free market is built on risks and rewards, that’s what keeps it going.  It’s not the fun type of gambling like in Vegas, but if you know the right stuff and right people, your win a lot of money, and that is pretty entertaining.  I’m not saying its always fair or that it’s always right, but there is no denying that because it involves calculated risk based upon possible yield it's by definition gambling.  


I’m sure Goldman Sachs does some shady stuff to make a lot of money, I can tell because they make a lot of money.  If the government really wanted to stop Wall Street from destroying our economy or prevent Wall Street from doing it again, they would have done it or be doing it right now.  Holding a hearing and pussyfooting around the real issue of restructuring the financial sector to reward prudent risk and not wild speculation doesn’t solve anything.  


And for Senator Tester and his staff, a CDO is a bundle of loans bought and sold between financial institutions.  


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