Did you? And where did the money come from before that? Where is PG&E getting the billions for all these payments? From consumers, right? How much does that drive up the prices? Why did PG&E find that reduced maintenance and safety was more profitable despite the huge payments, what is broken about that system of regulation and incentives?
Ok, this I agree with. Consumers are paying for mismanagement, and that bothers me a lot. I told you PG&E management is more to blame, and I am also peeved about their bonuses. I think we can agree, they did not deserve them, in light of crappy maintenance and years of negligence. But that has nothing to do with the hedge funds or getting the 3 billion. Your OP, as I understood it was complaining about profits and the financial sector, not PG&E negligence. Now you are mentioning PG&E negligence, yes, absolutely, they were. And they are paying for it.
PG&E, before all this, blew up a neighborhood in a local city, San Bruno. They had neglected maintenance. And then, they lied about that. What's broken about all that?
Well aware of that. I watched upper management get some silver hat of excellence award on the news right after that disaster, and that really peeved me, to say the least.
Are you sure it lowers insurance prices? Seems to me there's something broken in that system also, if the court award leave the victims feeling they're better off selling them at a discount to the hedge fund - and that it would increase the cost of insurance, because the hedge fund will plan to get more (hence the $3 billion profit) than the victims would have settled for. So that's a dubious claim also.
I tried to explain it. You can look into subrogation claims, to understand it better. Insurance companies are trying to offload some of their risk, and the hedge funds made money by buying many of their claims at a lower cost of the value of the claims. Those hedge funds are actually helping here, and yes making money, but at a risk, not free. I don't see them as being a nefarious middleman here, as I gather from your posts.
The point is, the American economy has become far too dominated by finance extracting money from the economy. I can show you far more harmful examples. But there are countless examples all around practices that are parasitical, far in excess of the legitimate activities that make a contribution.
There is something fishy about the system being set up where the normal parts - the company that's supposed to provide safe energy, to courts awarding damages when it doesn't, the insurance industry - somehow leave a hole of an unmet need that allows a hedge to walk in and extract $3 billion dollars from somewhere in that system. From consumers, victims, insurance companies, some combination, somewhere.
Not sure if you recall the rolling blackouts in CA 2000s, with huge extra premiums. The culprit in that case was Enron and traders milking the markets, playing games with the power grids. Those guys were caught laughing at elderly ladies who couldn't afford the extra costs, they were incurring while playing their games. Now, that's something that supremely pissed me off. I just think your anger, in this particular case, is misplaced.