From the sums of money being extracted from the game—and the sums of money being handed by high-frequency trading firms to US stock exchanges for faster access to their data—you could see that an advantage of a few milliseconds was clearly worth billions a year to whoever possessed it. Whether the speed added anything of value to the economy was another question: Did it really matter if asset prices adjusted to new information in two milliseconds rather than a second? Probably not, but the new technology definitely made it possible for the financial sector to raise the rents that it charged
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