You know the 1% are ripping us off to an astonishing extent, right?

[mick063]

35. If people only understood what derivatives do.

Imagine that you owned sizeable stock in a professional football team and you were allowed to bet billions, much of it the money of others, on any given game, for any given team, to win or lose. Further, there would be little or no oversight. You could make the bet with an e-mail.

Traders are betting on corporations to go broke. Really. Ponder that for a moment. Failure is richly rewarded.

So if you stand to make great profit from failure, what type of actions might you take to "help it along"?

It is so counterproductive. It should be illegal to bet on failure. Poorly run companies will indeed fail. There should be no additional encouragement for it to happen.

Imagine Bain Capital betting on a company to fail, then perform a leveraged buyout of that company, strip it of assets and wealth to line personal pockets, declare bankruptcy for that company, use the judicial system to declare the employee pensions insolvent, abandon the remains of the shattered company, then go collect "winnings" from the hedge fund manager because it was "gambled" that the company might fail.