Planetary Misalignment

clipped from www.thedailybeast.com Fabrice “Fab” Tourre (Executive Director, Structured Products Group Trading): “I believe we have a duty to serve our clients…to show prices to our clients, to offer them liquidity.” Sen. Collins (sounding exasperated): “Should Congress impose a clear fiduciary obligation to act in your clients’ interests on broker-dealers?” Joshua Birnbaum (Former Managing Director, Structured Products Group Trading): “Conceptually, that seems like an interesting idea.” So it was no surprise when Blankfein said, at the tail end of a very long day, that “as I heard it, everything [Goldman did] sounds correct.” As the American people heard it, by contrast, everything Goldman did will have sounded most disconcerting. The gulf between ordinary Americans and those who work on Wall Street will have seemed vast, and not merely in terms of the amounts of money that the latter make. On questions of morality, the hearings prove that the two sides inhabit entirely different planets.

Maybe a few more years of this moronic grandstanding crap and our moronic "representatives" might figure out that they should have let Wall Street go bust. But if they ever figure it out they'll look at their list of campaign contributors and kill that idea pronto.