The second and most important thing is that while all these Wall Street shenanigans are currently legal, they most certainly are dead damn wrong, morally wrong, and should be illegal. If something is legal only because of legal and accounting loopholes stemming from power-insider corruption, I have no problem calling it illegal or criminal. To go along with it, to use the examples of alocholics, would be enabling.

It may be legal to naked short sell a stock even when there are more shares shorted than are actually in existence, which, as a practical matter, is just plain counterfeiting. It may be legal for Goldman Sachs to make a profit touting something as a good investment on one side of the building and on the other side of the building making a profit by selling it short, but it's still like Kroger selling you spoiled food so it can make money selling you Pepto Bismol to settle your stomach.

All I know about the current financial reform proposals pending in Congress is that they will not work, that the loophole writers and finaglers always come out ahead of the regulators.

There's only one way to keep Wall Streeters from doing something, and that's to take the money out of it. So tax it out of existence. We've heard all our lives about the minimum wage. Time for the flipside.

A maximum wage.

***

In 2009 the top 25 hedge fund managers in America averaged $1 billion in profits. Let that sink in for a minute. Making a billion in a single year. That's the eqivalent of a half million jobs paying $50,000 a year. Imagine the impact on the unemployment rate of a half million people finding jobs.

Imagine all the solar panels that could be built, all the schools that could be repaired, all the new teachers that could have been hired.

And instead it went to 25 people.

Now the economists (and the Ayn Rand-types) will tell you these are the people who create jobs, the titans of industry. And my answer to that is once again it's utter nonsense, a theory unsupported by facts. These people don't create jobs -- they destroy them.

Look at how Wall Street makes it money. A lot of it comes just from shuffling paper, buying and selling a tick here and a basis point there, what used to be known as arbitrage back in the Greedy 80s. A lot of money comes from trading for their own accounts, or from taking money from the Fed (at essentially zero percent interest) and loaning it to people for more than zero percent. A sure-fire money maker there. Continue > >