Hats Off To This Guy

[Hatshepsut]

The type of investment we have now works more like a Vegas Casino where the house knows no matter if some win occasionally they always long term win even if they lose. Wall Street and big banks...pump money into politics to get laws written to allow...

...commercial banks to play the investment banking game in the first place, after Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, and to trade on their own accounts as well. Banks were doing that back in 1929. But although the banks were wrapping those subprime mortgages into their poisonous packages, it was non-bank firms like Bear Stearns that got Cayned in the fallout. This is where my knowledge of the investment world comes up short. I don't have a degree in finance and really don't understand most of what happened in the meltdown of '08.

I'm under the impression that the markets have always been a casino, but more like poker than roulette. The house takes a cut, but it's really investors playing each other. And your puny 401(k) account is a guppy swimming around an ocean full of sharks like Enron, a firm noted for selling gas pipeline futures for Russia's Gazprom among other things. What's worse is the hammerheads all have cloaking devices like the Klingon battlecruisers on Star Trek  so we don't even know what's out there now that Enron and Bear Stearns are dead and Arthur Andersen lies chastised by the king. The rules have changed, new accounting dodges have been deployed, so we'll just have to wait for the next episode of Too Big to Fail. What I fear is that one day one of these implosions will bring the U.S. government down with it, especially if the Tea Party makes good on its threats to default the public debt in such a crisis.