"There is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector. The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry. As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation.
As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality. The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth. "
Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, 2013
"Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great, and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Crimes against Nature, Rolling Stone, December 11, 2003
"Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."
Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933
“It could be argued that we are now in the midst of a coup d’état in slow motion. Democracy is weakening. Corporatism is strengthening; you only have to look around you. Yet none of us has chosen this route for our society, in spite of which our elites quite happily continue down it. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society. It is a modern form of feudalism.”
John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 2005
The markets are pretty much running in place ahead of the Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.
Unless there is some exogenous event, all we might see until then is high frequency pushing and shoving.
Have a pleasant evening.
