I would bet on these guys over Wall Street stock traders any day
Fascinating news from the Wall Street Journal:
The world's first pirate stock exchange was established in 2009 in Harardheere, some 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu, Somalia. Open 24 hours a day, the exchange allows investors to profit from ransoms collected on the high seas, which can approach $10 million for successful attacks against Western commercial vessels.
While there are no credible statistics available, reports from various news sources suggest that over 70 entities are listed on the Harardheere exchange. When a pirate operation is successful, it pays investors a share of the profits. According to a former pirate who spoke to Reuters, "The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials. . . . We've made piracy a community activity."
Prototypes of this have existed since time immemorial — successful organized crime operation usually have a "bank" — this is a new variation. Keep in mind the sheer scale of the international black market and the role drug money played in bailing out the financial system, and it gets even more interesting.
In a suitably anarchic place, it's easy to see a larger-scale version of this taking root and even prospering, especially if it acquired enough tendrils into the "legitimate" financial system.
The column ends by calling for increased embargoes, sanctions and strikes, which will probably work as well as most of those sort of measures do. Historically, piracy ends through a combination of two factors: ordered government and harsher local scrutiny. When Somalia gets an actual government in place, with authority over most of its territory, piracy will rapidly decline.
Until then, keep those sanctions coming. For the people in Haradheere, it's the equivalent of a factory opening up and offering everyone a job: only a fool turns it down.
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