Matt Taibbi sums things perfectly in this Taibblog post (my emphasis and paragraph tweakage):
All of these stories suggest that Wall Street is increasingly turning into a giant favor-and-front-running factory, where the big banks and broker-dealers that channel vast streams of crucial non-public information ... are also trading for their own accounts, and sharing information with a select group of "preferred investors," who in turn help the TBTF banks move markets in this or that desired direction by jumping on or off various pigpiles at the right times.As always, you can look at the Matrix or behind it. The "markets" are not your friend.
Sooner or later, people are going to clue into the fact that one or two big banks ... can at least temporarily prop up or topple just about anything they want, from Greece to Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers. And if you can move markets and bet on them at the same time, it's impossible to not make tons of money ...
It’s like that scene in Brain Candy where the evil pharma CEO Don Roritor takes his star scientist, Chris, on a walk in the middle of a party at his house[.]
[A]fter they walk around Don’s rocking indoor pool, they open a set of doors and there’s a completely different party going on there. "What’s this?" Chris asks.
"Oh, this is the real party," says Roritor.
And in other news, Facebook is also not your friend. Who'da guessed?
GP
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