Speculation which is a beneficial, indeed vital, component of the capitalist process has come to dominate the system to an unhealthy degree. To repeat Keynes’s warning from the 1930s: “when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” Momentum trading, trend-following speculators, overleveraged hedge funds, and corporate managements obsessed with daily fluctuations in share quotations are unlikely to produce the optimal distribution of scarce resources in the global economy. We have reached Keynes’s “third degree.”

The text leads to the conclusion that speculation

Item 3 - may be either good or bad: It is a matter of degree; and it depends upon the circumstances;