Real competition, modern technology and lack of special government-granted privileges means that most American businesses, especially those on Main Street, have no choice but to adapt and innovate.
However, according to Dylan Ratigan the only apparent skill of many of our Wall Street billionaires is at rigging the game. He continues:
On Wall Street there have always been only two basic ways to make money. The first and most difficult: Be a great investor. To the best investors go the profits; the biggest rewards go to those who are best at being able to recognize and pick the businesses that will win for America, while the punishment of losing money is reserved for those who are not so good at this task.
The second, and now seemingly the preferred method of making money on Wall Street, is to exploit and/or trick those who are kept from knowing as much as you, about current market and company circumstances, and by this means take their money, even if you have to buy politicians, change the laws, or even break the laws to do so.
This second way of making money on Wall Street was much easier to pull off prior to the Internet and 24-hour Exchanges etc. " such technology is the enemy of any business that makes its living overcharging customers who know no better or are given no other choice. As a result, bankers, facing an onslaught of web-driven transparency and reduced profitability during this last decade, along with an increasingly educated customer-base, were eager to change the laws in 2000 and are even more eager to protect those changes now.
Owing to modern information technology, stock and bond trading had become a very low-margin, modest-profit business " until the legalization in 2000 of a secretive market for crooked insurance schemes with no transparency or accountability, which then became an absolute boon to the profitability (for some) of stock and bond trading, and especially insurance/derivatives trading.
With credit derivatives, banks and other insurers (with nowhere near enough backup money to ever pay off the claims that might someday be made) offer, for a reoccurring fee, to effectively "insure" financial assets of many kinds. Example: Credit derivatives were used to "insure much of the real estate and pension liabilities in America over the past decade.
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