London traders hit $500M jackpot when oil went negative

Re:London traders hit $500M jackpot when oil went negative by neximo64 on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @03:51AM (#24058273)

Actually with the lag it changes everything, because you can earn interest/dividends on the amounts. You can die in the meantime so its someone elses. The variations are endless. When someone discusses it as being zero-sum there is always just a scenario you can describe where it isn't, and if even just $1 can't be accounted for the whole argument breaks apart.

It is never really instantaneous and can take more than months, years. You would have thought printing 6 trillion would have changed something but not really.

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Re:London traders hit $500M jackpot when oil went negative by baconandeggs on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @06:05AM (#24059032)

The interests and the dividends come from someone, they don't magically appear from the heavens. That person had to add value to the system in order to be able to pay the interest, maintaining the zero sum.

> You would have thought printing 6 trillion would have changed something but not really.

I know these are crazy times, but that money did something: it delayed the inevitable by keeping alive zombie companies that should've gone bankrupt the minute the crisis started, if not before. The whole point of printing 6 trillions was to maintain the status quo, not change it, to maintain it and not face economic reality. It didn't work 100% as a lot of that money went directly into assets such as TSLA, AAPL and HTZ(??), some of it went to gold and bitcoin and a lot of it went into bribes and corruption, which prevented companies who could've used that money to stay afloat for a few more months to do so. But because it's a zero sum system it will crash eventually, just that for now it appears to be holding if we stay completely still and don't make any sudden moves.

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