[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=briansd1]
As a society, we greatly bene
Brian: I’m as much of a money-grubbing capitalist as the next guy, but I’d also be the first to say that Wall Street has fundamentally failed in its primary mission: The proper allocation of capital to profit-making ventures.

.[/quote]

I think they may just have a morphing mission, in a sense. For example, the global economy has been growing, on average, about 2.25% per year, for the past 150 years. Which means, they need to find more and more profit-making ventures every year. Well, to put very simply, It’s been getting more difficult since the 70’s to find new ventures because of the bigger and bigger pools of capital along with some other trends. After 150 years of industrialization, how many more “needs” can they come up with for us rational utility maximizers to rationally utilize. “Security” has been one of the bigger new ventures of the past decade. Not actually a need we really want to have. It, actually, surpassed alternative energies in venture capital. Something we desperately need.

Now, personally, I think we are at a major inflection point in economic understanding. To me all the typical political discussions are very shallow. I think modern economics has some major blind spots, false assumptions and negative attributes that economists deal with through, either, flat out denial or some tautological response and this will come front and center in the coming years. I also think the institution is completely ossified, which makes things worse. But, I digress, this is another discussion all together.