Aaaaaahaha! This is gonna be fun! I'm not going to have a shred of pitty for those no-value-producers whatsoever! :lol:
I used to think the same way, but speculators *do* provide value:
1) They assume risk for more risk-averse parties.
2) To manage that risk, they do analysis and research that other parties might not have the time or resources to do.
3) They connect buyers and sellers that might need to buy and sell at different times.
Through all of the above, they flatten out variations in prices.
So when the world is predictable, they do the research on where the economy is going and make a profit by guessing better than all the people who are too busy or too lazy to do that research. When things go haywire, they take a huge hit that would otherwise have made things even worse for the rest of us, and listen to us snicker about what horrible people they are and how they got what they deserved. I think that's a fairly good deal.
Where speculation causes problems for the rest of us is:
1) When lots of people who aren't career speculators with an actual economic education think that they can make a quick buck in boom times by buying low and selling high without putting in the effort to research actual trends. This is effectively gambling, and when it leads to a bubble that collapses and a whole bunch of people end up bankrupt at once, this can give a shock to the economy.
2) When banks perform a degree of speculation with depositors' money that isn't justified by the interest rates the bank is offering (or don't explain to customers that they're funding the high interest rates they are offering by taking significant risks), and then collapse.
2a) When banks make investments that appear safe, but don't do the research and end up depending too much on investments with speculators that they don't know are speculators, or when bank employees perform unauthorized speculation with company funds in order to inflate their performance, and aren't caught by internal checks.
2b) When governments try to cushion the blow of an economic downturn by bailing out failing banks, thus removing the consequences for over-speculation and increasing the chances of similar behavior in the future.