This is a little more serious than before:( . A comment about yesterday's post that a 20% discount at a thieves' bazaar should mean that thieves are having to steal more to make up for the discount got me thinking: what kind of fool worldview leads me to such preposterous conclusions.
And then it hit me - thieves don't sell the stuff they stole. "Fences" (people who sell for thieves) do. The fence works at the market, stealing money from buyers because neither thief nor fence can give legal ownership of the stolen goods! So, in the overall context, the 20% discount is truly an offer to steal less.
Relating this episode to the world (ambitious project, that), American financiers sold seemingly AAA-rated investment packages as safe and profitable ways for everyone to grow their hard-earned money. In fact, the "packages" contained "toxic assets", such as sub-prime mortgages, (Ben Benanke/Hank Paulson's words) and many people lost big time. To me, and quite a few others I'm sure, this is worse than the combination of thief and fence - there is an organized deception here, that the "instruments" are "structured products", which deceptively suggest that they have been carefully studied and approved by knowledgeable people, especially the ratings agencies.
So why isn't this phenomenon confined to the US of A? Because many other foreign banks, sovereign wealth funds, government linked corporations, etc, also invested in these packages.
So, the question is - what makes them any different from the guy who buys from the fence at Sungei Rd?
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