But That's The Point!

This will undoubtedly be a surprise to any unreconstructed lefties out there. Talking about the Soc Gen mess The Times notes:

While appearing heartless, speculators and traders often pile in and out of shares in the immediate aftermath of shocking world events, hoping that they are better informed than the average.

Quite, although even that august institution couldn't bring itself to go quite far enough.

Speculators and traders often pile in and out of shares in the immediate aftermath of any piece of new information. That's actually what markets are for!

Looked at in one way markets are information processing machines: they tell us about relative values in the eyes of those participating in the market and thus what are the uses of a resource with greater value. Resources thus move to those applications of greater value and we all get wealthier: for that's what the creation of wealth is, the movement of resources from low value to higher value uses.

And the problem for those who don't like markets, traders and speculation (whether leftie or the more traditional conservatives with that disdain for trade) is that we don't in fact have any other similarly efficient method of processing the information.