Wall Street's Threat to the American Middle Class

originally posted by: mikegrouchy
Outlawing high speed trading would be akin to outlawing the Torrent file sharing protocol. As is so rightly pointed out in this very discussion it becomes a question of how close joe-street can get to the wall. My advice... buy the old school stocks that pay dividends, and hold them for decades. Day trading is asking to have your own fat trimmed.Mike Grouchy

We can't eliminate it but we can take steps to level the playing field. Most notably Wall Street shouldn't be allowed to sell prioritized stock information. Everyone should get the up to date information (+/- a few milliseconds depending on location) at the same time. The big banks will still rig the game but the individuals who do their own day trading and the smaller firms will be competing more evenly and in a free market it's best if people are competing as equally as possible.

Wall Street basically operates on a 3 tier information system right now. The large banks are in tier 1 with close physical proximity to the servers, their access to information is near instantaneous and their physical location allows them to see what others are doing and react to it before that persons action even happens. Next come the large individual investors and smaller firms that pay for priority access, they're tier 2 and they get information up to the second, it's offered as a subscription service to get say up to the second information. Last comes the tier 3 access which is say every 10 seconds (not sure on the exact rate). The tier 3 people essentially get screwed. If they give Wall Street a few thousand a month they can move up to tier 2, but even those people get screwed.

We can't eliminate the tier 1 group, but we can get rid of the gap between tier 2 and tier 3. I think that would help things a bit.

It's blackmail and has been since 2008.
It's criminal and ALL the big banks need to be taken over by the Government.

a reply to: ladyinwaiting

This older yet worthy article by an investor is worth bringing up

www2.ucsc.edu...

An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%

The higher we go up into the top 0.5% the more likely it is that their wealth is in some way tied to the investment industry and borrowed money than from personally selling goods or services or labor as do most in the bottom 99.5%. They are much more likely to have built their net worth from stock options and capital gains in stocks and real estate and private business sales, not from income which is taxed at a much higher rate. These opportunities are largely unavailable to the bottom 99.5%.

A highly complex set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

originally posted by: ladyinwaiting
Yes, it's from a blog. Bite me. : )

Presidential aspirants in both parties are talking about saving the middle class. But the middle class can't be saved unless Wall Street is tamed.

The Street's excesses pose a continuing danger to average Americans. And its ongoing use of confidential corporate information is defrauding millions of middle-class investors.

Yet most presidential aspirants don't want to talk about taming the Street because Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money.

Do we really need reminding about what happened six years ago? The financial collapse crippled the middle class and poor -- consuming the savings of millions of average Americans, and causing 23 million to lose their jobs, 9.3 million to lose their health insurance, and some 1 million to lose their homes.

A repeat performance is not unlikely. Wall Street's biggest banks are much larger now than they were then. Five of them hold about 45 percent of America's banking assets. In 2000, they held 25 percent.

"Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money" Well of course, whoever has the most money, and whoever makes the most money for MSM wins! Who didn't know that?

The American middle class needs stronger bank regulations, not weaker ones.

Last summer, bank regulators told the big banks their plans for orderly bankruptcies were "unrealistic." In other words, if the banks collapsed, they'd bring the economy down with them.

www.huffingtonpost.com...
Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; author, 'Beyond Outrage'

Actually, Wall Street is the only thing the political class (of either party) can point to and say " The economy is great".

Wall Street is inflated by Federal Reserve money creation and the collusion or direction of TPTB, or else the market would be much lower.

Facebook, a company made of blips of electricity is worth more than General Motors, a company that makes millions of cars with cutting edge industrial robots. Something is fundamentally wrong with the stock market.

Any supporter of Washington D.C. policy that is complaining about the stock market is stupid or lying.