page-loading-spinner
Home Part 8: Financial System Fragility & Wall Street Skimming
Economy
Preparedness
Uncategorized

Part 8: Financial System Fragility & Wall Street Skimming

The financial system has evolved into a highly efficient machine…for skimming profits and using opaque complexities to hide the sheer magnitude of the operation. Sure, we get cheaper trades on a per trade basis, but with billions of trades the tiny slices add up. Importantly, the system has a number of weak points about which every investors and financial profession should be aware.

The User's Profile Chris Martenson April 5, 2024
34
placeholder image
Looking for part 2?

The financial system has evolved into a highly efficient machine…for skimming profits and using opaque complexities to hide the sheer magnitude of the operation. Sure, we get cheaper trades on a per trade basis, but with billions of trades the tiny slices add up. Importantly, the system has a number of weak points about which every investors and financial profession should be aware.

View part 2

Every system has its advantages and disadvantages, and our hyper-complicated (if not complex) financial system is no exception.

Those risks are poorly disclosed and often investors are completely unaware of them, and this includes financial professionals working within the system.

This episode begins to correct those murky deficiencies by connecting the legal issues identified during our deep-dive into The Great Taking to the actual market structures and components that arose in response.

Guess what?  Wall Street’s gonna be itself and skim and find ways of separating us from our money.  It’s what it does.

But our regulators and those charged with overseeing the market structure and that its rules are followed have largely been missing and action.

All of which boils down to this idea:

Our sense of risk now has to be adjusted with these new understandings especially including any reassessments we might individually make about whether or not the legal system will fairly and impartially adjudicate claims in a timely fashion for all parties equally.

I certainly don’t have that view anymore.

Links:

SEC Image of Market Structure – Boxes and Lines

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2015-12-31/pdf/2015-32755.pdf

Wall Street Bonuses

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2czsnmybndd1t2e20prls/corner-office/wall-street-bonuses-fell-as-profits-rose-in-2023

Citadel’s Earnings $8.1B

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/citadel-most-successful-hedge-fund-175619548.html

Bernanke Joins Citadel – 2015

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N0XD1B2

Citadel Handles  26% of All Equity flows, 99% of All Options

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Securities

Dark Pools

Slicing the Liquidity Pie

Derivatives $1 trillion or $2.3?

https://radixuk.org/opinion/the-looming-quadrillion-dollar-derivatives-tsunami/

https://goldbroker.com/news/two-quadrillion-dollars-global-timebomb-2261

MF Global

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0312/what-happened-at-mf-global.aspx

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/mf-global-customers-will-recover-all-they-lost/?_r=0

Watch the Video
Listen to the Audio

Click Here to Download

Read the Full Transcript!
Looking for part 2?

The financial system has evolved into a highly efficient machine…for skimming profits and using opaque complexities to hide the sheer magnitude of the operation. Sure, we get cheaper trades on a per trade basis, but with billions of trades the tiny slices add up. Importantly, the system has a number of weak points about which every investors and financial profession should be aware.

View part 2