"The "futures trader" extracting value from the system buying/selling futures has done no "real" work"
Small farmers hedging next years crop would like a word with you ...
... and there are one hundred examples just like that.
Did you ever convert foreign currencies in advance of an international trip when you saw the currency pair move favorably ? Have you ever bought an ETF ? Do you have a mortgage in the United States ?
All of these things are possible because of a highly liquid, regulated market with diverse participants ...
... which brings us to the obligatory Margin Call[1] quote:
"Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you're necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from."
"The bank in Margin Call was packaging MBS out of mortgages, not speculating on the price of commodities using derivatives to gain leverage."
Correct. That's my point.
It's not merely that you can't have one without the other ... it's that you very likely wouldn't want to eliminate the (margin call guys) even if you could.
Speculating on futures and other derivatives is basically what those rich guy's sons are doing in their hedge funds. Most hedge funds get worse returns than the S&P 500.
Small farmers hedging next years crop would like a word with you ...
... and there are one hundred examples just like that.
Did you ever convert foreign currencies in advance of an international trip when you saw the currency pair move favorably ? Have you ever bought an ETF ? Do you have a mortgage in the United States ?
All of these things are possible because of a highly liquid, regulated market with diverse participants ...
... which brings us to the obligatory Margin Call[1] quote:
"Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you're necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call