http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/wall-street-banks-are-doing-less-and-less-good-for-society-says-john-cassidy-535678.html?tickers=%5EDJI,%5EGSPC,GS,XLF,ms,skf,skf&sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=&ccode=
According to John Cassidy, Wall Street banks are supposed to act “like a power utility… except they provide money rather than power.”
But what happens when the power utility, instead of focusing on how best to manage and distribute power, decides to focus on using customer funds to make a quick buck?
The answer, as Cassidy explains in his recent New Yorker article, is a financial system pushed to the brink of collapse.
As he explains to Aaron, Wall Street - at its best – serves an important and necessary purpose: to raise capital for businesses, which in turn fuels the economy, creates jobs and improves the overall standard of living. Lloyd Blankfein famously called it "God's Work." The problem is, investment banking isn't the focus anymore.
Instead, the banks engage in a socially worthless pursuit of profits, via trading, creating huge amounts of risk for everyone – except the actual players of the game.
As Cassidy writes in the New Yorker, the banks have “turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets.”
And the problem is that, even after
