Saying that the financial sector provides no benefits to society is ill-judged, but saying that everyone should be absolved of wrong-doing just because the sector as a whole provides some benefit is equally ill-judged.
Generalizing the evil "speculators" without calling out specific sub-groups or behaviors was exactly what the OP did and why I was pointing out the reason we tolerate and encourage speculation in the first place.
>but saying that everyone should be absolved of wrong-doing just because the sector as a whole provides some benefit is equally ill-judged.
I certainly didn't say that or even mean to imply it if that's how you read it.
This privatization of profits and socialization of risk is what's at stake. If actual accountability (even if it's not entirely symmetrical) existed, I doubt anyone would care.
Right now, it's heads==they win, tails==we lose. That's a fools game, and we're the fools.
I spent some time doing futures trading a couple of years ago, so I was an evil "speculator". I could have sworn that the money that I lost when I placed a series of bad trades was my own. I really have to learn how to hedge my futures trades with options before I get back into it. :)
> This privatization of profits and socialization of risk is what's at stake.
I agree to the extent that the whole notion of "too big to fail" and government bailouts is socializing the losses. I would really prefer if we would let the free market work and allow the financial institutions that are that bad to just go out of business.
Besides the general market efficiencies that speculation has been shown to provide, sometimes the speculators drive prices down very sharply in anticipation of commodity devaluation. No one ever seems to complain about that.