A market is defined as a physical or virtual place where products and services are exchanged between buyers and sellers. Markets have been with human society since its dawn even before the establishment of capitalism as a global economic system. The primary function of a market is for buyers to access products and services they need and for sellers to exchange their products and services (an abstraction of their physical and intellectual labour) for a store of value so they may participate in the market as buyers and access what they need. The ultimate purpose of the market is the betterment of human life. The market allows the bread maker to sell his bread so he may buy milk, the seamstress to sell the clothes she makes so she may buy beef and the farmer to sell his produce so he may buy clothes. In the center of all this there needs a common medium of exchange or a store of value, this is what we call currency/money now value of money only exits because humans believe it does so ultimately it all boils down to belief. Think about it Gold is one of the most oldest forms of currency and a robust store of value but it is not a vital element that is needed to sustain human life but people believe it is valuable that is what gives it value. As long as markets serve the participants i.e. the buyers and the sellers and solely operate for the betterment of the society involved it remains healthy but when they start benefitting the third participant markets start eroding all qualities of human life and sucks the soul out of the society and turns its inhabitants into mindless soulless miserable slaves. The third participants are the speculators. Speculators are a kind of leech that participate in the market with the sole purpose of making a profit, now one might say that what is wrong with making a profit? sellers operate to make a profit, But sellers make a profit by providing something of equal value to the buyer at the same time with the profit they make they get to expand their business and offer better products and services. Whereas Speculators make money by betting on price outcomes, when speculators make money it only benefits them only.

A speculator does not engage in the market in a traditional way like a buyer or seller, he participates in an abstraction of the market, for example rather than buying a car he might buy a share of the car manufacturing company rather than buying 1 ton of copper he buys a commodities future. He engages in abstracted financial instruments that give him leverage and allows him to skim of value from the real participants. The more money he makes the more money and value he has skimmed off/stolen from the real market/economy. An example will make this clear. In America Cattle ranchers raise cattle and then sell it in an auction to meat packers now the baseline price of cattle is defined by the price of the Live Cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. During covid Hedge funds built massive long positions on Live Cattle Futures which drove the baseline price of beef really high a farmer from Nebraska was expecting around 120-140 Grand from his cattle sale in the auction but the hedge funds realized they overbuilt their positions so they started shorting the contracts where the price crashed from 145$ - 110$ a 25%~30% decline, after the crash he could only got 30 grand from the sale and he went bankrupt while on the other side the hedge funds profited millions from this crash which they themselves caused. A standard CME contract represents 50,000 pounds of cattle so by shorting one contract speculators made 17,500$ per contract and an average hedge fund probably shorted a few thousand contracts which in turn made them millions. This is what I meant when I previously said when a speculators make money its harmful for the market and its participants. If instead of the hedge fund the farmer made the money he could have reinvested in his business buy more cattle which would in turn keep the prices low for the consumer but whereas when the speculator made money the farmer went bankrupt that means one less producer and low supply which means high prices for the consumer both the buyer and seller is losing when the speculator makes money. This was an oversimplification of the faults in overly abstracted hyperreal markets but this explains most of what is wrong with the modern economy when this sort of speculation is done on a small scale it is okay and sometimes healthy but when billions of dollars are used to do this you have to understand that money is being mobilized just for the sake of making more money and as I explained before it has to comes from skimming value from the markets and the economy which in turn degrades it.