, Columnist
Trying to Buy Stuff You Want Is Not Manipulation
Also hedge fund analysts, dollar hegemony and the yield curve.
“Market manipulation” is a famously hard-to-define term. In casual usage, people often use it to mean doing stuff that tends to push the price of a thing up or down, but it can’t really mean that: Any time you buy or sell a thing, that will affect its price, and surely not all trading is manipulation. In practice, manipulation seems to have two elements:
Still that is a little underdetermined.1 Sometimes a regulator will just be wrong!