I'd actually like to see gambling and speculation eliminated completely. If stupid rich people want to gamble, they can go to a casino.
The markets should be reserved for investment in the real economy, not in multiply leveraged risk-engined machineries of financial self destruction.
Projects and ideas will always have enough risk to make basic investment interesting enough for the talent which currently wastes its time trying to pull profit out of noise to be doing something useful with its time.
Finance has been a double tragedy - not only is it an epic fail financially, but it has also sucked the life out of engineering and research, which are always more likely to create stable and reality based prosperity.
Certainly not.
So what does this mean, in practice? Limits on leverage maybe? But will that then fall in the investment or utility banking sector? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The secondary market (trading existing securities) is speculation. This is so because trading stocks or bonds has no impact on the capitalization of the underlying companies/treasuries; buying securities in the primary market does expand the working capital of the issuer.
The secondary market exists to provide liquidity so investors have a way out of their investments. Without a liquid secondary market, it would be much harder to convince people to lock their money in the primary market.
There is a long quotation by Keynes in The General Theory about this, ending with his famous When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.
I diaried the long quotation here. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
