I Think You Have to Have a Cop on the Corner of Wall Street

Nobody Who Has Made His/Her Nut Loves the Free Market or Schumpeter's "Gales of Creative Destruction"

I think you need a level of regulation to keep people honest. Someone told me, concerning employee theft, that 10% of employees will never steal, 10% will always steal and that with 80%, it is situational ... and part of the situation, where there is less theft, is effective internal controls. The same guy told me that where the theft starts at the top, it is far more common.

If the Anti-trust People at the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission had done their jobs in the 1950s, the US Car Industry would still be dominant. Instead it got clubby and gentlemanly ... and vulnerable.

The Drexel Burnham Lambert fiasco of the late 1980s gives a pretty good insight. Some times there is a perverse incentive to do things to lock in your profits, even possibly a "Ponzi Scheme" involving "busting-out" solvent companies to pay initial investors, which was one accusation.

I think Ferdinand Pecora was right, "You have to put a cop at the corner of Wall Street."