In our free-market economy, what you earn is supposed to reflect the value you produce for the economy. The more you earn, the more value you allegedly produce in the form of goods and services. So if you make a lot of money making music, like U2 or Lady Gaga, it's because lots of people really enjoy your music. So hedge funds must be producing an astounding amount of value ... or there's something really screwed up about our economy.
In 1970, for every dollar the average worker earned, the top 100 CEOs paid themselves, on average, $40. That's a $40 to $1 ratio. By 2007 the ratio jumped to a whopping $1726 to $1. Nothing in free-market literature can explain that colossal increase -- not increases in skills, experience, new technologies, or new products.
Another atrocity commited by wall street is high speed trading. If you're making a trade for your 401k for example, using something like E-Trade, there's a high-speed trader using automatic computer programs waiting out there for you. By the time you hit the "buy" button on your computer, that trader has bought the stock ahead of you and sold it back to you for a profit of a few pennies, which you will hardly notice. They picked your pocket. They do this again and again -- millions of times a minute. Overall, they are extracting from $5 to $20 billion a year from the rest of us -- from our pension funds, mutual funds and other retirement accounts. And in return they produce nothing of value at all.
In fact, from 50 to 80 percent of all trading on the stock market is the result of high-speed trading. Thanks to my sources, I think I do a pretty good job of walking the reader through this murky world. Actually, it's sickening that our regulators allow this industry to exist at all.
Tell Mayor Blooberg to pass a Robin Hood tax that would place a small fee on all financial instruments (stocks, bonds, futures, options, derivatives, CDOs etc.) and put more scrutiny on wall street so the money they make is not from high speed trading and any financial institution caught doing this will be charged a large fine and a refund of all the money siphoned. Wall street will pay for its crimes
