The New Yorker - What Good Is Wall Street? Much (ALL) Of What Investment Bankers Do Is Worthless

This is really nothing new on this blog.   But what is new is that it is a major article in The New Yorker.  That is really quite surprising in a good way.  The article makes some good points but really the major points that I would like to see made are omitted.   

Nothing in our financial system serves our democratic society.   And I do mean nothing.   Wall Street is a useless predator.  A relic of corruption.   Concentrated power.  There are substantially better and more democratic solutions across the entire board of finance and banking. 

We have railed on investment banking as massively destructive to our economy for years.  It is a criminal act that should be made illegal.  Of course, much of their activities are illegal, it’s just that our laws aren’t being enforced.  And we have written numerous times that Wall Street in its current form serves no purpose to society.  It is simply a tax.  And a corrupt one at that.   Frankly, we don’t need investment advisors, mutual funds, a stock market in its current form or much of anything else to have democratic capital markets.  And that doesn’t mean people currently employed in these wealth-sapping positions need to be unemployed or dumped on the street corner as their actions have done to others in society.  There is a very easy way to absorb them into a new economy.   

It’s not a prediction but we wrote that Wall Street could be putting in a major top …. forever.  And that the technology exists to completely do away with Wall Street without any intermediary between capital  markets and We The People.  To go a level further, with public banking, the entire cabal could go away.   If our financial system collapses or needs another bailout, what will rise in its place will most likely be nothing similar to today.  It will most likely be a much more democratic financial system because the status quo could be forced completely out of our political process as happened in Iceland.  (How wonderful would that be?  To rid ourselves of the Washington weasels from both parties.  Obviously without the crisis part of it.) 

That our President and politicians bow before Wall Street as the all-knowing market is completely ridiculous.  This industry is filled with systemic incompetence.  But mostly this bowing is a sign of the corruption of our public offices by Wall Street’s dirty money.  OUR MONEY.