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26 Locavesting<br />
<strong>of</strong> the late 1980s) have taken place not deep in some boiler room,<br />
but right under our noses at the nation’s top fi nancial institutions.<br />
As we know all too well by now, mortgage brokers pushing “no-doc”<br />
loans on unqualifi ed home buyers, investment bankers peddling<br />
highly leveraged inscrutable securities packed with toxic garbage,<br />
and rating agencies that stamped it all Triple- A, collaborated to pull<br />
<strong>of</strong>f perhaps the biggest Blue Sky scam ever perpetrated.<br />
The fact is, Wall Street today is a very different place than<br />
the one contemplated by the crafters <strong>of</strong> the 1930s regulations.<br />
Indeed, it’s hardly a place at all. It’s more a swirling vortex <strong>of</strong><br />
pr<strong>of</strong>i t- seeking electrons. With the dismantling <strong>of</strong> key regulations<br />
starting in the 1970s, the shifting <strong>of</strong> risk from investment fi rms to<br />
shareholders, and an explosion <strong>of</strong> fi nancial engineering and risk<br />
taking, the fi nancial sector morphed from a productive industry<br />
that enabled the growth <strong>of</strong> business and promoted an inclusive<br />
prosperity to one that puts its own pr<strong>of</strong>i t above all else, including<br />
clients, business, and society at large. As Philipp Meyer, a former<br />
Wall Street trader turned writer, told Time magazine: “With<br />
a trader, the goal <strong>of</strong> every minute <strong>of</strong> every day is to make money.<br />
So if running the economy <strong>of</strong>f the cliff makes you money, you will<br />
do it, and you will do it every day <strong>of</strong> every week.” 13<br />
Today, individual investors are playing in a market that, despite<br />
SEC oversight, is increasingly rigged against them. (As Bernie Mad<strong>of</strong>f<br />
told New York magazine from his jail cell: “I realized from a very early<br />
stage that the market is a whole rigged job. There’s no chance that<br />
investors have in this market.”) 14 The Dodd- Frank Wall Street Reform<br />
and Consumer Protection Act attempts to reign in some <strong>of</strong> the riskier<br />
practices. Banks will have to divest much <strong>of</strong> their proprietary trading<br />
and maintain higher capital cushions, for example. And a good portion<br />
<strong>of</strong> the $600 trillion worth <strong>of</strong> derivatives will be forced to trade<br />
on regulated exchanges. But having succeeded in watering down the<br />
fi nal bill with a blizzard <strong>of</strong> lobbying dollars, entrenched Wall Street<br />
interests are now working to make sure that the fi nal rules maintain<br />
their pr<strong>of</strong>i ts and market dominance. In a case <strong>of</strong> the fox guarding the<br />
henhouse, the biggest banks are poised to control the new derivatives<br />
exchanges, keeping them opaque and preserving their fat margins. 15<br />
The risk is still with investors and taxpayers.