@gjohnsit
Now that's entertainment! Wall Street is a perpetual motion frictionless top that defies the law of entropy.

link

Paving the way for the rollback is a slate of Trump-installed appointees now running the regulatory agencies. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in January directed agency staff to exercise “humility and prudence” and not assume the companies that the agency investigates are “the bad guys.” Most of the officials watching over banks in the Trump administration have extensive ties to the financial industry. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and later organized a group of investors to buy the lender that became OneWest Bank. Mnuchin brought Joseph Otting, former OneWest chief executive officer, to Washington to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent bureau of the Treasury Department that supervises national banks. Jelena McWilliams, whose nomination to run the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is pending in the Senate, is chief legal officer of Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati. By comparison, most of the financial industry regulators named by President Obama were government veterans or academics.
The most important watchdog for the biggest lenders is Randal Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman in charge of bank supervision. A banking attorney and ex-Carlyle Group partner, Quarles gave a revelatory speech to industry lawyers at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington on Jan. 19, surprising many by saying that the entire regulatory scheme is now up for reevaluation. He spoke of “tailoring” requirements to a bank’s size and “reducing complexity”—buzzwords lobbyists often equate with easing regulation. “Now is an eminently natural and expected time to step back and assess,” he said.

@Meteor Man

Until they reform the market from top to bottom by empowering the small investor, reintroducing regulations with bite and regulators with both the power and the inclination to use it, this market has no place for the likes of you or me.

As I stated before, the only stake we 99%ers have in the stock market is the one we're impaled on!

Good advice for the small investor from Counterpunch. The conclusion:

The market is therefore fully invested in stagnant wages, minimal inflation, increased corporate profits and low interest rates. It is a corporate market and its enemy is the working class. If you work for a living, why would you invest in a machine that consumes you like a lump of coal in a hot furnace?

Don’t be a fool. This is a rich man’s market. It steals your money and transfers it to the top. It consolidates wealth and secures power in the hands of the one percent. The only place reserved for the small investor is labeled: Sucker. Stay out of it.

Until they reform the market from top to bottom by empowering the small investor, reintroducing regulations with bite and regulators with both the power and the inclination to use it, this market has no place for the likes of you or me.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/09/a-vampire-market-the-next-coming...