Computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume. Increasingly, the market’s ups and downs are determined not by traders competing to see who has the best information or sharpest business mind but by algorithms feverishly scanning for faint signals of potential profit.
Don’t misunderstand me, I value standard economics and I think it provides important and useful insights into human endeavors. But I also think that it is incomplete, and that accepting all economic principles on faith is ill-advised and even dangerous. —Dan Ariely
Testing reality vs Promoting belief.
“Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything yet now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.” —Paul Krugman
The Rise of the New Global Elite: If you are looking for the date when America’s plutocracy had its coming-out party, you could do worse than choose June 21, 2007.
The good news—and the bad news—for America is that the nation’s own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy.
In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter.
“His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled. —Chrystia Freeland