Greatest Trade Ever

In Gregory Zuckerman's book, "The Greatest Trade Ever," you can begin to see how the financial system has turned into a casino style betting system. There is only a loose connection to actual value. John Paulson made billions of dollars betting that there would be a collapse in real estate value. He was shorting subprime loans using CDS contracts on mortgage bonds. They were essentially insurance contracts on other bonds. If the bonds defaulted, you were paid. If not, you had to keep paying for the insurance, year after year.  

While everything he did was legal, it does make you wonder how that is possible. It seems the brightest minds have gone into creating complicated financial derivatives instead of studying ways to help our planet, or becoming medical researchers. 

Of course even medical research has a major capitalistic component. The focus is always on a drug to fix every issue. One of the reasons that bioidentical hormones didn’t get any research attention is that they cannot be patented. One of the reasons we have the industrial food complex is because the seeds that grow the corn that make everything in it, including feeding the cows, can be patented. Capitalism is not always steering us to where we need to be. On the other hand, as consumers, if we educate ourselves and see where we want things to go, we can at least do our part by spending our money ethically instead of taking the easy way out given to us by advertising.