market speculation and waste

When the central banks turn the money markets and the capital markets into carry-trade driven casinos... the result is inherently a massive, dead-weight loss to economic output and national wealth.  That's because capital and other economic resources are drastically misallocated to pointless secondary market speculation and pure economic waste....

[A]bsent the inherent checks and balances of the free market, these central bank-enabled casinos do not simply boom and bust randomly;  they do so chronically and predictably.  With the ever-increasing confidence levels developed over the bubble cycles since the early 1990s, an entrenched class of permanent, professional speculators has learned to front-run the maneuvers of our monetary politburo almost perfectly.

-- David Stockman, The Daily Reckoning (April 16, 2014)