I know nothing about finance. However I’ve read an interesting (and slightly out of date) book about the world of international finance titled:

“Traders guns & Money, Knowns and Unknowns in the dazzling World of Derivatives” by Satyajit Das.

Again, my perspective is one of near complete total ignorance. However my impression was the people in this industry were looking for any weakness or loophole in the financial system that they could exploit to make lots of money. Much of what they did was almost always cynical, often immoral and sometimes illegal. The line between immoral and illegal was very ill defined mainly because the subject was so complex. A point that Das made in his book was the people in the finance industry deliberately made the subject as complicated as possible to protect against regulation and to draw in suckers. There also was this attitude that Das revealed that was similar to that of the con artists in the movie “The Sting”. Stealing from their customer/marks through convoluted deceptions seems to have been a deliberate part of the business. Many of these big time grifters have become immensely wealthy (only the unlucky or stupid ones got caught). Sadly, I think most of these people are going to end up keeping their money.

Different topic: Looks like the UAW is setting itself up as “lead lemming” for the automobile industry. Soon the UAW’s members will have the distinction of having high wages and benefits on paper but unable to enjoy them because their industry has imploded. It’s amazing how stupid people can be.