Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
I suppose that those "IBs" you refer to are some hedge-fund managers, but I am not exactly sure what you mean by the "scamming system".  |
No I precisely did not just include hedge-fund managers, they are often only a greedy (or stupid) necessity of the whole "scamming system".
The financial system with all the markets (e.g. stock exchange, real estate market, credit market, currency market...) has when you summarize it a lot of loop-holes and hence is misused where-ever possible. Unfortunately a comparison with a lottery cannot be made (since lottery promises high interest returns, but at the same time is honest and easy enough to understand in that only a selected lucky few get those returns... and it is purely based on luck, not on the money you can pump into the system to make it more benficial for you).
Many of the small IB fish are just... uh... jugglers, they think they know what they are doing and believe in a system that they do not fully understand. Its more like a religious cult of money less like serious business when you entrust them with your money. They are simply marionettes.
But there are also people who understand the system, but have not enough influence/money to make it work efficiently for them or simply do not care. Those I would put in another category of people who will happily trade critical thinking for a personal gain:
http://www.allposters.co.uk/-sp/Futu..._i2370652_.htm
And than you have the cult leaders...
What I basically wanted to say is, that every IB has at least his/her own little greed-driven function in that system (since I don't want to generalize I will admit that there might be a few exemptions - but they cannot be very succesful IBs... because their investment plans cannot keep pace with the much more promising high risk (begs the question for whom high risk anyway) plans of their colleagues who sell these things like it was virtually foolproof business (again begs the question for whom and what "virtually" means).
Anyway, I'ld still wouldn't call the whole system a scam if it were just that. The line where I call it scam is when the investment strategies are not allowed to fail (because there is a systemic risk) and the people who gained extra ordiniraly while being aware of the forseeable break down are not held accountable and hence make the strategy beneficial for a selected few (the scam masters) and bad for everyone else (including those who never agreed to take part in the whole high risk game - but are unlucky enough to have no choice but to shoulder the bailouts).