A former Wall Street insider argues the industry abandoned its responsibility to clients and markets for pure profit extraction. He says most bad actors never face consequences, contrary to films like Wolf of Wall Street that suggest otherwise.
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They weren't out there to help their clients get smarter. They were out there to make themselves some money and a lot of it. And, and it is, and that, that is really the way Wall Street worked back then. And it still works today. I mean, not everybody's partying like that, right? But, and that was sort of part of the entertainment. But that's, I was there, I was there during the tumble. I've seen it and it's still, it's still the way it works because how else can you justify how much money they make? Why should they be able to extract so much money from a capital market system whose job is to distribute capital to its highest and best use? And I believe that before I got to Wall Street, most of the people on Wall Street were made up of people who realized that they had a responsibility to be good stewards and that the future of the stock market depended on its efficiency and its integrity and their being good stewards and not just being— Mm-hmm. Pirateers, financiers, just trying to soak as much money out of the market as they could. And that all changed as the tech bubble came along and ever since. And so it's a shame. Because it is true and people should watch Wolf of Wall Street and understand this is what Wall Street is about. This is what you're up against. They're not afraid to misinform you because they can make so much money and be gone and be on their yacht before it catches up that it doesn't even matter. And Wolf of Wall Street is a little bit misleading because it makes it look like the bad guy got caught. There's a million bad guys out there and every now and then only one or two of them get caught.
