There’s a popular theory about how our financial markets work that goes like this: The markets are efficient mechanisms for “price discovery”—as in, the ideal price. The true price, the real one. That’s the part of the theory said out loud. The GameStop meltdown has revealed the unspoken corollary: that the markets are right and efficient and so forth so long as they’re run by the right people.
Now the experts tell us that the true price on the market changes every day, because the fundamentals are always changing, even though they’re fundamental. It’s very confusing to normal people. That’s why we need the experts—like the ones on CNBC, devoted to interpreting the fancy graphs. And those experts, for doing us this service, deserve to be paid, they say. That’s why they trade stock options on the very predictions they make on TV. And they usually pay out.
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