Reading Griftopia's research on Wall Street's activities in the past decade or so, made me remember when I worked for a summer at Shearson in Boston. They were Shearson Loeb Rhodes when I was hired and during that summer the name of the company was changing to Shearson American Express because of a merger, or one bought the other. ...
When you read about the housing bubble and these wall street shenanigans you read over and over again that "it's all about the commissions" -- doing phony deals on people in order simply to glean the commission, not to work legitimately toward any long-term, real success.
When I worked at Shearson there was one broker with a desk in a corner near mine who disappeared.
One day he was at his desk.
The next day he was not at his desk.
Word bubbled up in hushed office-talk that he'd been asked to clear out his desk. I asked one of the brokers why -- he told me the Missing broker had been taking his clients' money and trading different stocks, making different investments -- brokers were allowed to do that but it had to be for a legitimate reason -- to help their clients earn more money. You couldn't just trade back and forth in order to generate yourself another commission.
And apparently that was what this guy had been doing: the broker who taught me this called the practice "churning."
My understanding was that this practice was unsavory and unethical. I didn't know whether it was actually illegal.
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From what I'm reading, it sounds as if, now, these investment bank crooks and others probably get asked to clean out their desks if they do not "churn" and generate wildly out-of-proportion commissions based on nothing. ...
Is America going downhill?
Or is it just a "swing" in one direction and then things evolve and it "swings" back again?
I tend to think the commentators who think we're just getting worse and worse and never coming back are wrong.
Hope I'm right.
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