I don't know about these guys, but according to Cathy O'Neil, D. E. Shaw profited by anticipating (c.f. index front-running) pension funds in a way that sickened her to the point of quitting.
Think about happens if indexes don't pre-announce their changes. Is their market impact larger or smaller than if people know about it and "front-run"?
Suddenly someone wants to trade 10x daily turnover in a small-cap stock right on the closing bell. It could be a dumb whale index fund, or it could be an insider trader who knows about a merger, or a sharp hedge fund who thinks the stock is undervalued.
If you're a liquidity provider or speculator, do you want to stand in front of this freight train at all? If you offset the huge liquidity imbalance, how much will you charge to cover your losses if it was an informed trader? Is it more or less than if you know it's an index fund?
Remember, even if there is some edge in this type of anticipatory trading, competition will reduce its margins significantly. Imagine I announce tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal that I'll buy 100000 off-lease Honda Accords next week from whomever will sell them to me cheapest. Everyone rushes out to buy them on Craigslist or eBay, but only those who make the least on the deal end up selling to me.
The narrowness of career paths for highly specialized attorneys combined with the possibility of entering an altogether different remuneration universe at the law firms the DOJ is theoretically adversarial to is what makes the revolving door spin, and the spinning of the door is what turns "adversarial" into "theoretically adversarial". That is the problem. I didn't say there was an easy solution.
The generalization of this principal to other government institutions (agencies, departments, offices including even the presidency) is one of the great problems of governance of our time. You can take the remuneration discrepancy as the "0=1" conclusion of a reductio ad absurdum argument against unfettered capitalism or as an argument that resistance is futile.
A small number of taxpayers has accumulated larger IRA balances, likely by investing in assets unavailable to most investors—initially valued very low and offering disproportionately high potential investment returns if successful. Individuals who invest in these assets using certain types of IRAs can escape taxation on investment gains. For example, founders of companies who use IRAs to invest in nonpublicly traded shares of their newly formed companies can realize many millions of dollars in tax-favored gains on their investment if the company is successful. With no total limit on IRA accumulations, the government forgoes millions in tax revenue. The accumulation of these large IRA balances by a small number of investors stands in contrast to Congress's aim to prevent the tax-favored accumulation of balances exceeding what is needed for retirement.
> Pre-Bitcoin, the scammer would have her call an expensive foreign premium-rate phone number or mail cash to a foreign address.
A foreign address is still an address, which if used to perpetrate crime on a large scale, would represent a point of vulnerability for the criminals even in a somewhat lawless country. Bitcoin's role in these crimes is analogous to an alternate universe, lawless by design, where criminals can retrieve ransoms anonymously and with impunity.
There is an essay (in English and French) published last month on Grothendieck's life and work by Pierre Cartier who was a member of Bourbaki and a friend and colleague of Grothendieck's.
>I just pity Holder for mismanaging this. Or maybe there are more horrific details we haven't heard of yet.
Your pity would be misplaced; there are horrific details. A large part of the problem is that there is a revolving door between the DOJ and the law firms that represent financial firms (likewise for the SEC). Holder was assistant AG in Clinton's DOJ, then he moved to the law firm Covington and Burling where he represented the bank UBS among other clients, now he's back at the DOJ, and soon he will likely move back to the private sector where he will be handsomely rewarded for his service to the finance industry while AG.
The solution in this century's financial crisis has been "handcuff none of the bastards", but it wasn't always so. I'm surprised you cite the savings and loan scandal as a case of criminals not going to jail because in that crisis there were over 1000 felony convictions of high level people (usually the CEO and CFO). Since that crisis was 1/70th the size of the recent crisis, by strict proportionality (all things being equal, etc.) there would have been 70,000 felony convictions of high level people in this crisis. All thing are not equal of course, but there weren't 70,000 or 7,000 or 700 or 7 convictions of high level people in this crisis. There were none! Things really have change dramatically for the worse.
William Black on Moyers and Company[1]: Sure. The savings and loan debacle was one-seventieth the size of the current crisis, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud. In that crisis, the savings and loan regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals, and this produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice. But even that understates the degree of prioritization, because we, the regulators, worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They involved roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals, and virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.
I don't know -- I didn't downvote you, but you might want to edit to indicate that x and y are not necessarily finite sets. (For finite sets, the result is trivial.)
https://mathbabe.org/2011/06/24/working-with-larry-summers-p...