Gall Street

[FOTD]

This is a great read. 8 years of manipulating the economy for the purpose of Bushevik control and here we are!


Wall Street's Naked Swindle
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits

MATT TAIBBI
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

" That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of the two firms was supremely ironic. After all, the boom that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer had. By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like Bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs. Instead, Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as "Lucy to America's Charlie Brown," endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we'll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class."


And then there's this: Wall Street firms should not be called banks, US official says
Head of government insurer says legal constraints on using the word 'bank' needed to dispel confusion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/26/wall-street-firms-not-banks

This is the season of "what now?" Predictions for the next 18 months?

[cannon_fodder]

a +1 to the Devil.

A well researched and well written article.  Some of the contentions are dubious and others may be exaggerated, but it pretty well nails the main problems in high finance.   I subscribed to the Chicago School - which vehemently advocates for regulation of market imperfections.  The examples described above, are significant market imperfections in need of correcting. The trick is doing so while still allowing the markets to operate.