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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong
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Erm, he also got 40,000 Galleons.
A trifling amount of money by muggle standards, even if he didn't have the arbitrage trick, or the ability to make arbitrarily large amounts of money using the time-turner on FX markets.
He doesn't have to explain where the money came from, and the tricks you named require starting capital.
It was also unclear to me that Harry could take enough gold from the wizard economy to wind up with 100,000 galleons (even in sickles) without someone noticing and perhaps interfering. And that ignores the problem of leaving Hogwarts.
I would wager that neither of those methods would actually work. We know that quirrel, snape, and other very intelligent wizards know both about the muggle world and about time turners. An idea about Arbitrage harry had within a few days of finding out about the ENTIRE wizarding world is extremely unlikely to have never been thought of. Harry is able to come up with new techniques and things no wizard would come up with but things like partial transfiguration took him days and are extremely non-obvious. Plans to make millions upon millions of dollars are something people have all the time.
Another important concern: Be careful what you call a "trifling" amount of money. You can get a LOT MORE done with a hundred thousand dollars than you can with zero dollars. You can hire bodyguards, you can rent a house, you can buy equipment, there are a vast world of things you can do that are prohibitively expensive without needing to be bill gates. We talk about vast amounts a lot when we're talking effective altruism and existential risk ending but Harry's not fighting to end hunger, he's simply fighting a relatively small-scale war.
He gets it NOW. without having to run a risky feedback scheme between gringots and the muggle economy with only 100 galleons of seed money.
But not in a particularly interesting way
He got Lucius Malfoy to give him a huge sum of money in exchange for admitting something true at no cost to himself, and gained goodwill from Lucius in the process (which set up for his subsequent conditional alliance), and probably left Lucius feeling he'd got the better side of the deal. All in a matter of minutes.
Personally, I find that somewhat more interesting than half a chapter of watching Harry mess about with economics.