William K. Black: An Epidemic Of Fraud And The ‘Stock Market Is Rigged’

You have probably heard by now that the popular US news magazine style program 60 Minutes carried a segment interviewing Michael Lewis about his new book last night. In it Lewis says that the ‘US Stock Market is rigged,’ referring to the legalized front running of basic price data taking place with the cooperation of ‘the exchanges, the banks, and the traders’ in order to regularly cheat large institutional and fund investors on their stock transactions.

You may rightly say that this is nothing new. You have heard about this new type of organized and systemically arranged ‘front running’ here and other places on the web many times over the past five years. And there were people who had been interviewed, occasionally but not so much of late, on some of the financial news networks complaining about it.

This morning Stephanie Ruhle and Eric Schatzker interviewed NY AG Eric Schneiderman about the investigation he is conducting. Schneiderman was quite politic, praising HFT itself as ‘providing liquidity’ and pointing to some of the trading firms grasping for milliseconds of advantage as some sort of misguided bad apples. 

Stephanie Ruhle was quite adamant that Wall Street is blameless, and that is it the fault of the regulators for allowing it to happen. She likened these Wall Street traders to her children who constantly look for ways to circumvent her own rules, and the shame is on her when they succeed. Perhaps Madoff should have been tried as a juvenile offender. It was the fault of the school, and not my little Bernie.

Well, that is the moral hazard of not stopping these jokers, of excusing their criminal thefts, of giving a slap on the wrist when they are caught lying, cheating and stealing, of believing canards like the exchanges are responsible and self-regulating, and ignoring the key role that they and the Banks play in enabling widespread fraud and financial plunder.

And ignoring of course the power of money in silencing regulators, cutting their budgets, and using political influence to kill their attempts at enforcing the law.