Comment author:Xachariah
28 March 2012 06:04:10PM
*
35 points
[-]
Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it's 1/15th of a week's worth of effort he's got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it's a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I'll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won't mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn't available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result - Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn't sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn't explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn't add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn't worry about importing ink, if they weren't leveraging different prices between the market where they're purchasing ink and the market where they're selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don't try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I'd be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
I think it's also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven't really been around that long.
Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don't have a bunch of children. There's been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around - for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn't that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.
The noble houses - the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot - are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it's already done.
But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.
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Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it's 1/15th of a week's worth of effort he's got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it's a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I'll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won't mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn't available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result - Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn't sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn't explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn't add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn't worry about importing ink, if they weren't leveraging different prices between the market where they're purchasing ink and the market where they're selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don't try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I'd be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
I think it's also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven't really been around that long.
Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don't have a bunch of children. There's been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around - for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn't that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.
The noble houses - the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot - are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it's already done.
But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.