> What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?

Great Strawman. A surgeon is more morally good than a trader or hedge fund waiting to short companies to profit from their demise, or it's cousin the private equity industry buying up shares to take over companies and laying people off to make a profit.

You seem to have already forgotten it was these people that caused the 2008 crash with scandals (Look up the LIBOR scandal to remind you) not surgeons or farmers.

> Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.

I don't think that SPACs, GameStop and other hundreds of unprofitable companies IPOing in the 2010s to 2022s were efficient markets and lots of traders made billions out of them.

A doctor or farmer as you describe have far more morals than these people, as traders and the finance industry make obscene amounts of money while doing this from their desks doing virtually nothing and contributing nothing to the industries and especially society.

Wall Street has invaded tech and the reverse is happening already because the FAANG boom is now over.

You're still missing the point, by a long shot.

You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.

The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.

Lots of other confusion here, but I don't really care to go point by point, since you seem pretty determined to believe that markets "contribut[e] nothing to the industries and especially society". Maybe someday you'll come back to this topic with more curiosity, but in the meantime if you don't like this sector, you don't have to work in it.

> You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.

That is not the same thing for traders and you know it.

> The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb it.

And in the process the trader "absorbs" and enrich themselves with more profits?

The whole point of my argument is about morals, a trader doesn't have to do what you just said, and why should they? It's all about money in the end without caring for the millions of people in society, traders can bet against the markets and win big, at the expense of the economy without helping anything or giving back to society.

In almost all cases, the traders win in the end, employees of other industries that are affected by the economy always lose, (jobs, income, taxes, etc.)

There is a reason why bankers, traders in Wall St in New York or 'The City' in London are disliked.