Darkscribes Blog for Tom

Welcome to Wall Street, how can you fuck America over again?

May 17, 2009 | 2 Comments

Quite simply the reason why we are in the economic reason is greed and Wall Street.

Think about it for a moment, we have tons of people who are called "Day Traders".  They trade stock just about every hour of the day, even when they are sleeping.  Sites like ScottTrade have a system in which you can create "trigger events" in which any number of events could fire off either a sell or a buy.  For instance, if a company achieves a gain in their stock price of say... 35% that stock can be sold automatically thus making the person that much richer.

Ok, that's great.  The person made money.  But what about the company?  Does that person really care about the financial history and wellbeing of that company?  More often than not, they don't.  All they really care about is making more money and to hell with the company.  Why should they?  They don't have a personal stake in the company.

So the company goes bankrupt because several hundred thousand people do the same thing.  Do they care?  Nope.  Oh well, onto the next company to rape... I mean invest in.

The whole Wall Street style of investing in a company is a fundamentally broken system.  It always will be as long as you mix in the human variable, in this case... greed.

How do we fix it?  That is a question I can't answer.  Obviously the good idea would be that the workers would have a stake in the company so that people who are ultimately making the decisions would be directly impacted by those decisions thus the future health of the company would be thought of more.