<story><title>Penny Stocks Are Booming, Which Is Good News for Swindlers</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-trading.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tryptophan</author><text>NYT calling for more regulation as usual.&lt;p&gt;Fools will always find ways to lose their money. The way the market is regulated now, it is hard for honest people to raise money on the markets (the original purpose of stock markets), but scammers are still there.&lt;p&gt;If stock markets weren&amp;#x27;t horribly over-regulated, would the VC industry even need to exist?&lt;p&gt;Why must every part of the world be regulated into safety for the common man? Stock markets were once powerful tool. With power comes the ability to help, but also hurt one&amp;#x27;s self greatly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Penny Stocks Are Booming, Which Is Good News for Swindlers</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/penny-stocks-trading.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>This is a difficult question. Crack down on fraud, not even novel fraud, the same fraud that would have been cracked down on hard and fast in generations past, and you&amp;#x27;re cutting individual investors out of the picture. A claim which has merit--it&amp;#x27;s not obvious to me why &lt;i&gt;e.g.&lt;/i&gt; hedge or PE or VC funds shouldn&amp;#x27;t be open to individual investors.&lt;p&gt;But let the fraud run rampant, and individual investors &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; lose money. Enough money that it becomes a political problem. That threatens to destroy the market (&lt;i&gt;e.g.&lt;/i&gt; onion futures [1]), or at the very least cost the public at large.&lt;p&gt;The only solution we have is to wait for a crash. But with modern monetarism, and the political cost of unemployment, monetary easing cushions financial assets from economic declines for a long, long time. Long enough for entire generations to have no memory of losing money in the market.&lt;p&gt;We need another mechanism. We have the same problem with vaccines [2].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Onion_Futures_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Onion_Futures_Act&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] Is there a term for tearing down a levy on account of having no flooding on account of having a levy?</text></comment>