Topic: Prof. Jeffrey Sachs reams Wall Street Banking (Read 3517 times)

Economics is the science of housekeeping of scarce resources. A non-resource based economy is an oxymoron.

Time to investigate a resource based economy!

I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I'm going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. I'm talking about the human interactions that I have. I have not seen anything like this. I have not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to counter-parties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out-of-control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They have a docile president, a docile white house, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can't find its voice. It's terrified of these companies. If you look at the campaign contributions, the financial markets are the number one contributors in US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I'm afraid to say. Both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. It doesn't have anything to do with right-wing or left-wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it's led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level now right now. It's very very unhealthy. I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I have not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won't, I have waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn't happened. And by the way, it's not going to happen anytime soon, it seems.