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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

That's a very strange way of looking at money. What about opportunity cost?

Lets say it's 2011 and you have $50,000 saved for a down payment on your dream house. I steal that money from you, but return you ~$56,000 7 years later (I've adjusted for inflation).

Technically you haven't lost any money.

But you missed the opportunity to purchase your dream house during a dip in the housing market while interest rates were low. Now, not only is your dream home 30% more expensive, interest rates are higher. You also missed out on 7 years worth of mortgage and real estate tax breaks. Your credit score isn't as robust either, since you don't have 7 years worth of mortgage history on it.

You are way behind despite getting every penny back.

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Shkreli paid investors back with interest.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/news/martin-shkreli-fraud-tr...

> After their meeting, Sarah Hassan invested $300,000 in MSMB Capital, a fund Shkreli ran. He later told her that investment had increased to $435,000, she said. [approximately 2 years later]

> Hassan eventually settled with Shkreli and she even made money off her original investment. She told the court she received $400,000 in cash, plus 58,000 shares of Retrophin that were eventually sold for an additional $900,000.

While it's true that these people would likely be richer if they had invested elsewhere, it's still hard to feel that these people were wronged. They didn't have someone break into their bank account and steal money for a house. They were wealthy investors who invested in a shady pharma company with a shady founder because they wanted to make lots of money without having to do much work themselves.

Investments lose money legitimately all the time, and the investors weren't stolen from when that happens, it's just a bad investment. Shkreli abused the system and lied with the intention of making himself personally richer, so I definitely agree with sentencing him. But I don't think the investors deserve more than their money back. They need to assume SOME risk here b/c they chose a bad investment, and it probably would have failed anyhow, even if Shkreli had followed the law.

Yeah interest is how we value the opportunity cost of money. Saying that his investors missed the dip is as pointless as saying his investors missed the opportunity to short the SPX from the top.

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