Wall Street Has Always Been Corrupt Or About To Be Corrupted | Zero Hedge

Wall Street Has Always Been Corrupt Or About To Be Corrupted | Zero Hedge

Review of  Michael Lewis' "Flash Boys"

"The smartest guys in the room are figuring out ways to steal you blind
in the financial markets, pilfer your personal information, spy on your
electronic communications, and censor your right to free speech by
taking away your ability to communicate freely on the internet."

"The technology being peddled to the masses by mega-corporations is
designed to keep people amused, apathetic, distracted and uninterested
in thinking critically."

"Those who haven’t been brainwashed by media propaganda or amused to
death by technology, are kept in check by thousands of laws, statutes,
and regulations, enforced by millions of government bureaucrats and
police state thugs. Technology is used by the state as a means of
control, surveillance, censorship, and bilking the populace of their
wealth. .. And while the government is keeping you under their thumb, Wall Street shysters are stealing you blind."

" ...Flash Boys ... revealed about the inner
workings of Wall Street, the wasting of human intelligence on
technological schemes to defraud the public, and the utter level of
corruptness in the government agencies supposed to protect the public
from the vultures in the financial industry feasting on the carcasses of
dupes who still believe the “stocks for the long run” drivel
regurgitated incessantly by the bimbos and slime balls on CNBC. The
concepts of right and wrong, moral and immoral, honesty and dishonesty,
and truth and lies are all purposefully blurred in shades of grey by
those in power, in a blatant attempt to maintain and expand their vast
wealth, immense power and complete governing control.


Michael Lewis focuses on our warped, rigged financial system, but his
insights apply across the board to our entire society. Our economic,
financial, political, regulatory, and judicial systems are all rigged.
This serves the interests of the Deep State, Invisible Government,
Oligarchs, Owners, or whatever other term you choose to describe the
obscenely wealthy minority controlling this country. The existing
establishment will never willingly change the system because it serves
their myopic gluttonous interests."

"The average person believes the stock
market is run on free market principles, with willing buyers and
sellers paying and receiving the most efficient price with regards to
their transactions. The American people have put their trust in
gargantuan bureaucratic government agencies, funded with their tax
dollars, to protect their interests and fight for their rights in the
financial marketplace. They innocently believe a private bank – The
Federal Reserve – owned and controlled by the Too Big To Trust Wall
Street Mega-Banks, is actually enforcing regulations and looking out for
the best interest
of the small investor. They evidently haven’t been paying attention for
the last fourteen years, as the Federal Reserve has purposefully
created bubble after bubble with ridiculously low interest rates, money
printing on an epic scale, encouraging complete deregulation of banks,
inciting speculation, and ignoring criminal behavior by their Wall
Street owners."

"Warren Buffett, king of oligarchs and apologist for the Wall Street
billionaire club, assures the peasants the financial markets are fairer
than ever. If Uncle Warren says it’s so to his girl Becky Quick on
CNBC, how can anyone doubt him? It’s as if the supposedly mathematical
genius billionaire forgot everything he learned in business school."

"

There is $21 trillion worth of U.S. stocks traded every year. Based
upon Katsuyama’s analysis of how much high frequency traders, Wall
Street dark pools, and the stock
exchanges selling access were skimming on virtually every transaction,
he estimated at least $160 million per day was being stolen from stock
investors. That comes to a cool $40 billion per year, at a minimum.
High frequency trading accounted for 25% of all stock trades in 2005. By
2008 high frequency traders accounted for 65% of all trades. They now
account for in excess of 80% of all trading. The Ivy League educated
Wall Street elite insist this extreme level of computer generated
trading provides liquidity and efficiency for the markets. In reality,
the actual trading results of the HFT firms, hedge funds and Wall Street
TBTF banks prove the game is rigged. JP Morgan experienced ZERO
trading loss days in 2013. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of
the mega-banks have had virtually perfect daily trading results since
2010. If they are all winning, who is losing? Guess. Lewis provides
further evidence of “investing” perfection:

“In early 2013, one of the largest
high-frequency traders, Virtu Financial, publicly boasted that in five
and a half years of trading it had experienced just one day when it
hadn’t made money, and that the loss was caused by “human error.” In
2008, Dave Cummings, the CEO of a high-frequency trading firm called
Tradebot, told university students that his firm had gone four years
without a single day of trading losses. This sort of performance is
possible only if you have a huge informational advantage.”

Buffett, the financial “journalists” on CNBC, and all of the
defenders of the Wall Street criminal cabal must have been asleep during
their Stat class in college. The statistical probability of going four
years or even four weeks without a losing trading day is as close to
zero as you can get, unless the game is rigged and you are cheating.
These results were not accomplished due to the brilliance of Wall Street
big hanging dicks and their oversized brains. They were accomplished
by front running stock market orders, bribing stock
exchanges for first access, gaming the system with more powerful
computers, ripping off clients in shadowy dark pools, and keeping the
SEC at bay with promises of jobs and riches if they look the other way.
This was all done under the veil of hyper-complexity designed to
obscure, confuse, and cover-up the truth from unsuspecting investors.


And it is all done “legally” under the auspices of Regulation NMS,
established by the SEC in 2007, to foster both competition among
individual markets and competition among individual orders, in order to
promote efficient and fair price formation across securities markets.
As with almost every government regulation, law, or diktat, the new
method of “protecting” the sheeple created fresh ways to fleece the
sheeple by those who wrote the regulation. See Dodd-Frank and the
Affordable Care Act....When obnoxiously wealthy pricks with the ability to bribe stock
exchanges to place their trading computers on the floor of the exchange
and financially induce the Wall Street banks to funnel trades through
their dark pools in order to know what is happening a nanosecond before
everyone else, and use this information to front run unknowing
investors to generate risk free profits, it’s wrong.
It really is black and white. "

"The bad guys always win and the
good guys always lose on Wall Street. And no one does anything because
they are all on the take."