In what's simply the latest, perhaps most beguiling, insight into what makes Wall Street, NY the envy of the greed-driven in the world, a new report issued by Congress (
see here) illustrates the wanton abandon with which Goldman-Sachs took its own clients to the cleaner and they profited off it. What could be more brilliant creating your own financial instruments designed to fail, sell them to customers of your own, and then profit by short selling the instruments? If that sounds complicated, part of the entire problem with the financial industry is that it's complicated, filled with jargon, and run by a handful of cabals that have convinced themselves that what they do is the most important thing in the world. These are the people who have brought to us our lasted round of $3.50+ / gallon of gas utilizing the trust funds of major universities and retirees, these people have run up the cost of oil again based on their speculating. These are the same people who gave out mortgages like they were candy to anyone with a pulse and then wanted a government bail out when the real estate market collapsed. How long are we going to let this go on? The primary cause of the problem is a little word that's a tenet of conservative beliefs and that is "deregulation". There philosophy is that if we deregulate industry, the free market will take over and do so much better on its own. Unfortunately, deregulation has caused these mega-financial institutions that are "too big to fail". Notice how they aren't called banks any more. They used to be banks and brokerage houses, and securities firms, and so on. Now, that they are all allowed to merge and join up and enjoy all those cost savings and benefits designed to save the consumers money....LOL!
Sorry, time to go back to some simple regulations. Time to separate the institutions back to the way they were and insulate the crooks from each other. There is a time and place for regulations, this is one of them.