I don’t expect the republicans to be good-faith negotiators in the debt ceiling talks. Crashes can be beneficial to those in the “have” column, who have the cash to shield and insulate themselves from the vagaries of the resulting chaos. Those folks make a killing on everyone else’s misery.
That is the angle Eric Cantor is working right now. He is heavily invested in a hedge fund that is shorting long-dated treasury bonds.
Now, I am no financial genius. Even if I had money, I wouldn’t make it go out and get a job and “work for me.” I would leave it convalescing in a nice FDIC-insured savings account. I have never believed everyone was intended to get into the stockmarket. 401Ks and the like have always just sounded like a scam to get middle-class pockets legally picked by Wall Street parasites, because if the average person were honest with themselves, they would admit that they are flying blind when it comes to managing those numbers on the page.
But I am not so ignorant of the ways of money that I don’t know good old-fashioned manipulation when I see it.
Cantor is in a position to push the United States into default, and if that were to happen, that investment would make him a very, very rich man, because the price of bonds would fall and interest rates would spike and the Minority Leader, who flounced out of talks a weekk ago would clean up.
So I have a question: HOW THE FUCK IS THIS LEGAL???