Connel Fullenkamp

Overall impression is that this guy is worth sticking with. But he's a little too happy about the whole thing.

Lecture I: Feeling at Home in the Financial Markets
You may feel that financial markets are just a boondoggle to help make the oligarchs even more oligarchical, but they actually do serve a purpose. Here are the purposes:
1. The transfer of money in time and space. This is the essence of a respectable loan, e.g., a mortgage. You get money to buy a house now, and you get the house, but then money you earn later has to go to paying off the mortgage.
2. Pooling of resources. Well, there's a lot of ways to do this actually, but this is certainly one of them. Bonds are loans, stocks are ownership, at least in theory.
3. Discovery of value or prices. This is the most debatable, really. The idea is that the prices of the securities are the value of the securities, and that these prices stand in for the value of the things the securities are tied to.

Of course, if there are no things, think Bernie Madoff, then the securities have no value, but as in the above example, people will still buy them like crazy. And of course, we've seen stock market crashes, yeah.… (mehr)