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If speculators interrupt the flow of goods to market, as they did by adding artificial demand to the housing market by contracting to buy houses that were yet to be built, they, in effect distorted or sabotaged the market.

Others noticed demand that drove up prices of yet to be built houses and they were influenced by upward price movement to follow the first speculators in for a "quick flip". Builders added capacity and the momentum created by speculators and "real" buyers, drove prices artificially high and resulted in a glut of housing supply that is either sitting empty, completing now, or in the cases of builders driven into bankruptcy, sitting unfinished in varying stages of construction.

The speculators who were caught holding their "flips" are rushing to sell, or are foreclosed on by lenders, pressuring down prices at a faster rate than if the market had been confined to "buy & hold" purchasers.

Stepping into a market to "flip" goods is a parasitic, distorting, and resource wasteful endeavor. That said, I engage in it in my business of quickly buying and selling stocks and options in the stock market. My endeavor does not send UPS trucks hither and yon on unnecesssary pickup and delivery trips, it is "just paper", represented by electronic transactions, but it does effect prices that others pay, at least at the moment of my bid or offer.

In the case of electronic consumer goods, this speculation affects perceptions of potential consumers as to scarcity (demand) and it influences them to pay more, and stores to order more units, and for every participant in the manufacturing and distribution chain to add capacity infrastructure.

At leas craigslist is a free service for sellers, ebay/paypal take a cut, further driving up prices and avoidable trips by package delivery services.

I wonder how much motor fuel is otherwise avoidably used because of all of the specculative "churning" going on today in the US. vs. the lower amount that would be consumed if only commercial wholesale and retail, and end use consumers were involved in trade?

Last I looked, petroleum products were a non-renewable resource consumed for the last few years, at rates exceeding the discovery and extraction of replacement assets.

Capitalistic activity is always acceptable, even exciting when prices are rising in a way where every buyer can make money, no matter the purchase price. It will be condemned as wasteful, unfair, and predatory in the economic conditions we have been nosing into, during all of this year.

It looks like an economic system that does not exact a heavy price, and people love it because the money they make in it is a great way (to them) of "keeping score", but in the US, when it goes bad, only World War has reduced it's decline or stagnation, and World War has been rendered obsolete by technological (war financed) advancement, since 1945.