David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…No, I think there is. I think it's a deeply philosophical thing, where people believe that free markets are virtuous. The only virtuous thing to do is to have everything be a completely deregulated, open, free market, lay the rules of the game out clearly, and then play the game however the rules say that you can play them. And there are two classes. I think the Skillings and the Kenneth Lays of the world fit that bill. I think a lot of the actual day to day traders are more just like red meat traders make money guys. What happened here? The state of California decided that they didn't want to go full free market. They'd put in lots of safety measures that ended up being the opposite of that, because usually when you add a new mechanism into a free market, it can be played in a variety of different ways. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to have controls in place. On the other hand, it entered a lot of new rules onto the playing field for these traders to exploit, so people would run experiments to test if they were exploitable, they would see the results, and then they would go hard, and they would be rewarded for going hard. A company is not on the right side of history when memo starts circulating on the floor with names like Death Star, Fat Boy, Get Shorty, and Ricochet.…

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