I guess British politics must be a little slow this week for this to happen...

McDonald's: Tom Watson urges chain to drop Monopoly campaign
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47601307

I don't know why you think the health of the nation, especially its children, is unimportant.

Ill rephrase so it is easier for you to follow.

If you put any of those to a member vote at the next lib dem conference all win.

Interesting that you dodged the question about whether your beloved Tories will adopt these policies when they become "fully accepted popular positions".

I guess not giving a **** about the heath of the nation makes you a

I mean, I am on the record voting for Labour last election. I have never been a member of a political party, but I tend to vote for whoever has betrayed me least I guess.

yes imo it would make many transactions unprofitable.

The way to stop excessive risk taking and leverage in financial services, in any case, is to introduce the concept of insurable interest in derivatives. i.e you can only hedge against a risk if you own the primary asset.

This would mean that rather than mainly being a form of gambling these products would be now be insurance contracts with a value to society.

Lots of transactions in the financial markets add absolutely zero value and just wildly increase the variances, introducing deeper busts whilst artificially increasing the booms. This includes day trading, as well as modern high volume trading.

It functions solely to transfer dumb money into the pockets of bankers, including lots of pension schemes and other 'investment' vehicles.

Are you suggesting ending short selling of derivatives (you don't own)? Or something else?

Short selling is something else and theoretically the sellers own the share at the time of the selling.

Derivatives are errr derived from other instruments eg options in shares. They have a place in managing risk for people who have an interest in the instrument in question, but are simply gambling otherwise.

https://twitter.com/FionaOnasanyaMP/...12941346574338

Incredible.

Yep. This line of reasoning alone should be enough to disqualify someone from standing for Parliament.

Derivatives are always gambling, by definition it is a gamble on something performing well or not. There is some hedge value if you wanted to calc out a balanced portfolio, I'll give you, but their hedge value is easily replaceable.

The further finance gets from pure long term buy and hold of shares the less value it holds to wider society.

Where the line exists when things become negative value is hard to judge for anyone who isn't a literal expert/career criminal in these vehicles. Shorting for the most part is fine, its vulture capitalism in its purest form and the people who do it well should be looked down on as the scum investors they are, but that is the market that exists if we are going to over inflate with **** oversight and fraud we may as well reward those who spot that first.

But derivatives are pure dog **** that destroyed the world economy and should have been banned outright in all western countries off the back of it.

When these idiots can trade multiple trillions on the performance of assets worth a fraction something, all based on the promises of people proven to never beat the market and ratings agencies who were literally in on the scam while the regulators are instructed to be as blind and hands off as possible something is very very broken in finance.

(coming soon, why audits are complete dog **** and worthless and need a complete top to bottom rethink, something I have even more knowledge and experience in)

To big to fail is more damaging than any speculation (though obviously related if speculation causes failure), as is tools of monetary policy being channelled through the financial sector such as quantitative easing.

Often in speculation there is no real negative outcome as their are two sides in a trade, if one party ****s the bed, the other cleans up. Problems only arise when one party cant pay up.

Also as regards Lib Dems.

If they had not stained themselves for half a generation with the coalition, they would be cleaning up right now as there is massive demand for a moderate slightly left of centre centrist pipe and slippers political party given how Lab and Con are both becoming more partisan.

Also property speculation/BTL is an unremarked cancer on our economic and social system.

Caused by lack of regulation and the Thatcher buy-yer-council-house scam of the 80s.

Too big to fail is one of the big problems but the biggest problems of all is risk which no-one understood the size or ownership of. Risk is extraordinarily complicated.

The trouble with relying on preventing 'too big to fail' as the solution is that the biggest problems occur when players tend to have correlated risk.

The two sides of the trade risk sounds fine but one side is frequently us (often explicitly or implicitly insured by the government which, again, is us).

It's a symptom though. The scandal is lack of decent housing (very much including social housing) in places with decent access to the job market.

The failure to invest in housing and infrastructure has been going on for decades and underpins many of our problems.

This is naive imo, counter parties understand risk, but also understand that they can socialise losses, so take those risks.

Remove TBTF and there would be much less risk taking.

I work in an associated area (on the gamekeeper side) and to some degree you're both right.

Financial instruments grew so complex that few were capable of understanding the maths behind them and took it at face value that it was impossible for them to blow up because the Holy Grail of lending had been found, plus they were basically freerolling anyway because with few exceptions the banks were TBTF.

There is no way they understood the risks. Not a chance in hell.

You sound like you have no idea how incredibly complicated 'risk' is.

The gamekeepers had even less chance of understanding the risks. That was a huge part of the problem.

They had less chance in the sense that the gatekeeper institutions were switched off to the idea of a banking collapse because they'd also bought wholesale into the idea of risk-free lending that eminent economists had sold everyone.