It's nothing to do with morality or any justification, it's just what it is. Since there's an instrument to gauge supply and demand, that instrument can also be wanted, so there can be supply and demand of the thing that measures supply and demand.
You can also do "bad" things on first order by hoarding the items themselves.
There is more to economics than supply and demand. This unnecessary gambling has too many negative externality and IMO no positive effects other than making some people some money with no work.
Necessary gambling is what helps the market figure out the real long term availability of something. I have not seen any necessary gambling in my years in manufacturing. So in my view all speculation on commodities seem unnecessary.
> I have not seen any necessary gambling in my years in manufacturing.
You need to manufacture a widget and it must cost no more than $5. You have a few inputs to your widget, some made with steel and some with plastic. If steel and plastic prices increase, your inputs cost more than $5 and you’re making a loss on every widget you sell.
So you go to the futures market and take a bet that the input prices will increase. If you’re right, you win $, which makes your widget manufacturing profitable and you’re still in business. If prices fall you lose the bet, your profits are lower. But hey, at least you’re still in business.
A responsible, well run manufacturing business benefits from the existence of such a market because it allows them to de-risk.
What’s the person on the other side of the trade up to?
This debate reminds me of the lead up to the Onion Futures Act, where moral outrage over speculation led to a ban and subsequent lack of insurance (and higher price volatility) for onion farmers. To the point that the son of the farmer who first lobbied for the ban returned to Congress to ask for its repeal.
> "What’s the person on the other side of the trade up to?"
The same thing: hedging/insuring against price changes. The supplier (ultimately, a farmer, steel mill, gold miner, electricity generator, etc) is getting a guaranteed price for the commodity they're selling, reducing risk.
Virtually no hedging happens between natural buyers and sellers precisely because they approach the market at different times, and don’t have the in-house pricing expertise to discern good and bad bids and offers ex ante. This is why, absent financial participants, the natural participants get hosed. (And why they use financial markets versus direct purchases and sales.)
Again, these aren’t theoretical considerations, we’ve always had naïve Puritanical elements seeking to ban speculation, and in some assets and jurisdictions they have succeeded. Reducing market participation has never worked.
> So you go to the futures market and take a bet that the input prices will increase. If you’re right, you win $, which makes your widget manufacturing profitable and you’re still in business.
This isn't remotely how manufacturing works. Manufacturers are focused on making the widget, for them the most important thing is that material is available, not a paper contract.
Opening a new mine is nothing but speculation, for example, and price signals from markets play a role in such decisions.
More narrowly, the ability to forward sell or buy things allows financing of production but in turn it needs people willing to take the other side. Derivatives money is a thing.
Essentially you are saying 100% of bad things are bad. Which is true, but also meaningless statement. Since it would still be true in a utopia with no bad things.
I can give you a great example of the positive aspect of speculation.
Look at the futures market. Speculators are a big part of the liquidity of the futures market.
Price of wheat is $60/bushel. Farmer won't harvest for another 6 months and is worried prices will drop. They can secure a future and lock in the price now.
Wheat purchasers aren't on the other side of that trade, because why would they lock in a higher price? A lower price benefits them.
Speculators come in and bet on the price of wheat, creating a deep pool of futures that can be bought and sold.
When speculators were allowed into the oil markets rather than actual buyers, the price jumped to like $120 barrel in like 2007. They had to stop it because hedge funds could just drive the price up indefinitely. See Bitcoin.
Speculation didn't suddenly exist in 2007. I do recall several regulations being changed at that time which _relaxed rules_ around the market. Is it possible that these regulations had more to do with the outcome than mere "speculation" in and of itself?
"speculation" was a bit improper, but prices are intertwined.. demand in one sector will affect demand in other, so forecasts cause price fluctuation that reaches afar.
commodities suppliers (miners, farmers, distributors) use futures market to hedge against their inventory everyday. Trade exchanges serve a very important function in this ecosystem.
Supply demand doesn't, but this rampant gambling is morally detrimental as it has unnecessary negative externality in society. They don't want to accept that their jobs are just a leech on society and has no other benefit than to fill their own pockets.
I certainly agree there are many morally degenerate speculators whose presence is an overall net negative, but I think speculating on a commodity’s price is pretty much required to make any sort of long term plans involving that commodity. It all depends on the specific circumstance really.
I work in manufacturing, in the high end of the tech. Our products have perhaps the most complex supply chain. I have talked to the industry best about this. I have never once heard an expert cite speculation as helpful for there 5 year or 20 year plan. But I don't want to make an argument from personal incredulity, can you cite a source on how speculation helps long term planning? Not pop sci stuff, something concrete like a trade article a manufacturing trade or something written by a supply chain engineer?
To ask for an expert quote on a thread on hackernews sounds like a little bit overkill for me, and for me (and probably parent), it does feel a little obvious.
Let me try to answer this though: one example out of many is how Kodak speculated that the transition to digital cameras would lead them to lose profit over the long run, so they chose not to pursue the route. This was a long term plan that lead them to bankruptcy. (of course, they changed course once they realized that digital cameras were competitive options, but the original long term goal was to continue the film camera route, shown by their unwillingness to even try to produce digital cameras as an possible option)
> can you cite a source on how speculation helps long term planning
Unless you lock in all commodity costs, how is long term planning even possible without speculation? If you plan to open a distribution center somewhere, the optimal location depends on e.g. fuel costs. You can’t do anything but speculate about the costs of those commodities. So I don’t even see the need to track down sources. Do you not see that you just need to guess at the (future) cost of certain things?
I see you didnt reciprocate the courtesy of not making an argument from personal incredulity. These things are complex af. When the people who optimize supply chains all day every day tell me that speculation market is more of an hindrance than help, I'm not going to take your random argument to be worth anything.
The futures market is the only thing that allows you to lock in a price to buy something 12 months from now at a reasonably consistent price. How is that a hindrance?
The existence of the futures market does not prevent a copper provider from entering into an exclusive sales contract to sell 12 months from now to a specific consumer. However, unless they match the current 12 month contract price, one of them is taking a bad deal with what they can get on a much more liquid market. Additionally, their counter party risk is now much more significant because they are tied to one other party.
Maybe you could actually offer something specific about how “the speculation market is more of a hindrance than a help”?
So far whenever I see this, it’s people who don’t like that the price changes on them but their solution is to remove participants from the market to a point where it is so illiquid the lack of trading looks like the price isn’t moving.
To me it seems, you both are rather debating semantics.
Of course it is "speculating" trying to estimate fuel prices, but this is not meant, when people condemn "gambling" on the stock market. What they mean is people with lots money investing wherever short term profits are possible and often gaming the market while doing so. So creating unexpected price changes for the actual industries needing those supplies and they obviously don't like that. But I couldn't draw a clear line between "necessary gambling" and "unnecessary gambling".
I see. Your claim that it it is entirely negative is fine to make without any support whereas my claim that there are some situations that could be positive (only one suffices) is not okay even when support has been given (any mine that is opened or distribution center that is opened employs speculation).
You are just making a bunch of claims with no support but “people I trust say so so the claims are true”. Now I really will bow out.
I am taking the null position here. That the speculation market doesn't help. If something isn't helping and is extracting value from the market its by definition detrimental. The onus is on you to provide the proof for positive positions, that the speculation market does help.
Nobody is forced to use the futures markets. The onus is on you to explain why it’s negative despite all of the sellers and buyers choosing to participate there.
I’m not a huge fan of taxes, but they are absolutely about morality. Society as a whole deciding to discourage consumption of harmful/unhealthy things like sugar, soda, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
It’s not a requirement for consumption taxes to driven my morality as a first order effect.
It’s entirely reasonable for law to take the moral stance that people should broadly pay for the benefits as participating in organised society, so to ensure the long term upkeep and maintenance of that organisation they derive benefits from.
At which point consumption taxes have nothing to any moral judgement about the consumption of various products, but simple calculus that the voluntary consuming those products increases the cost of running our society, and so you should pay a bit more for engaging in these activities.
But none of that is judgement on the morality of activity. I personally couldn’t give a shit what drugs you or anyone else consumes. But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in. So if you pay some extra taxes to cover to cost of additional healthcare, then feel free to consume whatever the hell you want.
> But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in.
The repeated grouping of morality/ethics into purely religion/judgement throughout this thread really bothers me. IMHO your argument is an argument of moral propriety of making people pay for others choices. You’re semantically choosing to not call it that is all.
Nah I’m more than happy to agree that I’m making an argument of moral propriety. There has to be some consistent basis for forming laws, and some sort of coherent social order.
But my point is there’s a difference between moral basis for having laws and taxes, and their specific implementation. Consumption taxes are just one approach for implementing a social system build on the basis “fair contribution/usage”, or whatever we want to call it (my views on “moral” behaviour are too nuanced and confused to fit into an internet comment, so let’s just work with something simple). But the taxes themselves aren’t a direct expression of moral judgment themselves, but rather an implementation detail of a broader governing moral system that provides legitimacy to laws and the states rights to enforce them.
It might be a distinction without a difference. But if someone is going to call out consumption taxes as somehow more inherently driven by moral judgments than any other part of a system of law, then I think making the distinction is reasonable.
Morality seems more of a subjective call, e.g. "Thou shalt marry heterosexually ahead of procreation", than a stochastic analysis, e.g. "X percent of fatal car crashes involve blood alcohol above Y concentration."
What I'm after is that much of the ethics by which our legal system operates, e.g. a BAC limit for legal driving, is divorced from moral questions such as: "Is drinking beer a sinful act?"
I think you’re gravely misguided. BAC has nothing to do with sin, it’s connected to the morality and ethics of putting your fellow citizens at risk of your impaired driving.
My repeated point has been that morality != religious sin, rather the latter is a subset. I don’t necessarily agree with laws/taxes in this regard, but it’s important to understand where they come from.
