What’s Wrong with Wall Street

Frank Rich’s excel­lent insight into the cul­ture of Wall Street that was at the core of the cur­rent recession:

This was not an exact replay of the pre­ced­ing dot-com bub­ble. As a vet­er­an of the tech gold rush recent­ly observed to me, in Sil­i­con Val­ley “the mon­ey comes lat­er” and “the thing you make comes first, how­ev­er whim­si­cal, sil­ly, micro­scop­ic, recon­dite it may be.” On Wall Street over the past decade, the mon­ey usu­al­ly came first, last and in between. There was no “thing” being made at all unless you count the slic­ing and dic­ing of debt into finan­cial “products,” the incom­pre­hen­si­ble deriv­a­tives that helped bring down the econ­o­my, cost­ing some five mil­lion Amer­i­cans their jobs (so far) and count­less more their 401(k)’s.

The fun­da­men­tal shift that this coun­try has to under­go is that our ulti­mate goal should all be to do noth­ing but let our mon­ey make us more mon­ey. Goods and ser­vices — and the skills that sup­port them — are the most impor­tant cor­ner­stone of our econ­o­my. Mon­ey laun­der­ing (basi­cal­ly what the mar­ket became with its shuf­fling of debt over the past decade) has nev­er been a sus­tain­able busi­ness. (via Tim O’Reil­ly)

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Categorized as Remainder

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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