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"Working at Goldman Sachs isn't inherently unethical; but-"
-And that's when I clicked CLOSE TAB on the first article I randomly selected to read in the new non-profit magazine Good Men Project. However! Other parts of it look somewhat promising, so check it out if you are interested in man issues.
Capitalist.
Good piece by Benoit Denizet-Lewis – reminds that Larry Summers is only one chapter in a long line of Harvard embarrassments.
People:
It would help in the conversation to realize that "Derivatives," just like "Securities" (i.e. stock certificates) and "mortgage backed securities" are what they are: a form of money. That is, they are a means and form of exchange. People agree to trade them, hold them, and use them in exchange for other things– just like we do when we exchange paper certificates to buy a loaf of bread at the grocery store. There we can use not only paper money, but also coins, or an electronic exchange (as when we use our debit or credit cards).
What is "money" and these misunderstood "financial products" but a made-up and agreed-upon way to trade goods and services? So the existence of "Derivatives" and "Mortgage Backed Securities" and "money" all result from a simple need and human impulse– to have means of exchange. The items that we use in this exchange don't have an absolute value. The value of what is traded changes. When you go to Europe, you trade dollars for Euros, etc. The values of currencies change every second of the day.
So do we then impugn the character of someone who worked at Goldman Sachs for having had the temerity to have (GASP!) actually wondered and thought about the creation of this "new" means of exchange of value, when he communicated (at work no less!) in relation to what he was doing professionally: "When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a "thing", which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?'
Apparently, some do. But the basis of that scorn is not correct.
Granted, there are many ways of cheating others. Creating a new means of exchange can be one of them. But the act of wondering about that creation is not proof of it.
Get ready for the conversations about "Cap and trade"– the new currency that will be used to trade pollution. It too is made up– that is, the certificates that will be traded are a means of exchange. "Non-polluters" will be given the new coin, and they will sell it to the "polluters" … and the makers and traders of that coin will profit. It's the same game.
When you use money as a way to get something else, you participate in the exchange. That exchange is what makes our current global wealth possible. Otherwise we all be trading a fish for a coconut.
unless they are synthetic cdo's. in which case it is real money being traded on an imaginary product. kinda like trading fish for a story about coconuts.
Wait, when were men issued issues? All I care about is getting the wire on the north forty fixed before I take the herd up to the mountains for the summer and that's really more of a cattle/hardware issue than a man issue.