The Death of Wall Street

When one dies of natural causes, it is likely that an undertaker will prepare the body in question for burial or cremation. It's been a reliable business for millenia.

If you live in most of the civilized world and have money, it is as hard to avoid some involvement with Wall Street as it is to avoid the men in black. Financial exchanges have been around almost forever, too. The Wall St. we know today, however, is on the way to the undertakers. In recent weeks, it has been authoritatively denounced as a casino run for the very few at the expense of the many, and far worse. (See my blog Vol. 6 #123.) There is a good chance that some of it's leaders will ultimately go to jail, despite the best lawyers billions can buy.

Yesterday, a computer glitch may have caused untold disasters for many, whose "bodies will be floating to the surface," today and in the days to come, as one commentator put it. The market plunged seemingly out of control for a short period of time. Why? Because the vast majority of daily trades on the NYSE are done by computers responding to formulae created by those bright young geeks who invaded Wall Street and displaced many of those nice white haired old men from the Round Hill Club. Fortunately, the collapse didn't last and I'm certain someone will be saying soon that the system worked, but it didn't.

I bet the average American doesn't know about all those geeks and algorithims, but it doesn't really matter because the average American isn't going anywhere near Wall Street for the forseeable future. Nor should he! Wall Street is no place for the ABOVE average American either. It's for pros only. They apparently know that the books of a fine company can be easily cooked, that the AAA ratings can be purchased or influenced and all the other games that can be played. Maybe that's why the pros are abandoning the old ways and focusing on the games. At the moment, the picture is sickening. Something huge is happening, tectonic actually, that is going to lead to systemic changes in the way we in the western world think and live. It's going to take a while, but it's coming.