“My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that boom is fueled by illusion.”Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, American Entrepreneurship, Dead or Alive?
Evidence Grows Showing Wall Street as a Negative Economic ForceBy Pam Martens and Russ MartensJanuary 27, 2015Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress. As the PBS program Frontline reported in 2013, if your work career spans 50 years and you receive the historic return of 7 percent on stocks in your 401(k) plan, the 2 percent typical fee charged by Wall Street mutual funds will gobble up almost two-thirds of your account.The Frontline program was called The Retirement Gamble. Wall Street On Parade checked the math and found this was not a gamble but a certainty: 'under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.'"This is a very short excerpt from a larger and more data packed article you may read for free here.