Primary hatching and fraud culprits from so called top rank institutes / breeds (promoted by crony employers network) could only be monitored by 100% honest, 100% transparent but maybe poorly-funded investigative agencies constantly, just like we treat any other political terrorist or religious extremist outfit. First, they spend money for expensive or subsidized education and then go on an open cruise to gather wealth using tools of public developmental loot (so-called hard work in growth jugaad). Who can segregate name / shame these smart viruses turned financial mafia at entry / exit points? Think how without such successful cronies and its Big5 gurus we can fund noble investments into our EVM deep democracies run by closed circuits turn-key totalitarianism gangs – piggy bank of mafia donors, suckers and bonded investors?

Yes, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, crimes they commit are virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction / land grabbing contracts a cornerstone of its business. This is world’s biggest banks stealing money that would otherwise have gone toward education, health-care and housing for ordinary people, and turning the cash into SUVs, villas, brands and bonuses for the connected rich. It’s the equivalent of robbing a charity or a temple fund to pay for fame clubs or fun of some exotic comedy nights; and promote themselves as bhakt savior of religions / nations at the same time!

Recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. We may yet find out that the world’s most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate financing vehicle on earth, from property mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies and insurance. This led to Brexit, possibly?

After what happened in 2008, nothing has changed but the banks got bigger with more leverage to do the same, and more immunity from the law-mockers. Why politicians won’t touch these issues? It is not about the money, it is about the welfare of the citizens and millions of innocent looted people. God knows we have had more than enough scandals ginned up by Wall Street over the years, and the message that Neo-profiteer banking executives proclaim after each is: Don’t worry, we’ve learned that lesson, and it will never happen again.

Which is how we got to the recent spectacle of the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., testifying that although the bank’s chief investment office was taking huge proprietary risks with some $350 billion of its depositors money – and lost $3 billion (and counting) by making a bunch of risky bets on an obscure, thinly traded derivatives contract – everything is now fine and dandy because the unjustifiable gambling has been stopped dead in its tracks.

We were, of course, told pretty much the same thing after the collapse of the junk-bond market in the 1980s, the collapse of the Internet initial-public-offering market in the 1990s, the collapse of the telecom debt market in the early 2000s, not to mention the scandals over IPO spinning and laddering and the ones involving the trading of favorable corporate research for investment-banking fees, public insurance, tax loot, murky-derivatives and many more….

We are told repeatedly that when Wall Street’s deeply flawed incentive system leads to one bad outcome after another, year after year, it will never happen again. Yet it does. Wall Street is tired of making money by competing for business and weathering the vagaries of the market. What it wants instead is something more like the deal the government has – regularly collecting guaranteed taxes. What’s crazy is that in order to justify that dream of regular, monopolistic tribute, bhakts have begun to see themselves as a type of shadow government, watching out for the rest of us, surveying / hacking AADHAR & Citizen Codes for private IoT mining apps, analyzing BigData, FAANG’s Private OneWeb Drones and hallucinating minds for bucks.

Amazingly enough, this even became a defense at trial. Capitalism includes vagaries, and the means with which these banks avoid vagaries is the same means that corrupts and discredits capitalism. Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime. The notorious Abacus deal involving Goldman Sachs, for instance, involved a hedge-fund billionaire ripping off a couple of European banks – who cares? But even countries like India will be eager to spend billions to help cronies in crisis and similar disasters not knowing fully or ignorant (normal commission jugaad is ruled out!) about the origins of such frauds, who grabbed the lost public money and tax loots? Who can prove it’s not the 1% rich and popular celebrities?

Experts could say — look, economic theories seem very cut and dried on paper, but for a policy maker, like a central banker, the world is complex. There are always a million special factors that disturb the neat logic of whatever theory you’re using. The fixation on inflation, for example, meaning consumer price inflation of one sort or another, is surely part of the reason that asset bubbles have been allowed to develop, including before any financial crisis.

A perfect way of inflation targeting? But Bank of England governor now says about the current inflation that we’ve got to blame the Russians and greedy businessmen, and that sort of thing. Inflation has increased and the central bankers strangely don’t accept that it’s their fault. And they might have a case, too, at least up to a point. I think I’m probably in sympathy with what you were saying. I think, setting aside COVID or the war in Ukraine, in normal circumstances, at least, there has been an excess of caution, based on fear of rising inflation, on the basis that it will quickly get its way into expectations, and once it does that, it’ll be very hard to control it again.

But in telling them the inflation target is everything, that that’s what you ought to worry about — well, that’s actually an instruction not to worry about asset bubbles or currency bubbles or financial crisis. And of course, if you instruct the central bank not to worry about these other things, you’ll increase the danger that things will go wrong (of-course mostly affecting workers and commoners minus policy-jerks).

What the Wall and Democracy Streets learned from the Mafia? How to reach into the penny jars (or donation lockers) of dying hospitals, weak citizens and schools and transform their desperation and civic panic into fat year-end bonuses, commissions and the occasional “big lunch.” Unlike the Mafia, though, they were smart enough to do their dirt without anyone noticing for a very long time. No harm, to them, means no visible harm i.e. what taxpayers didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. This is logical thinking, to the sociopath – like saying it’s not infidelity if your spouse never finds out. But we did find out, and the scale of betrayals are epic. As there are still many unsold republics owned by the likes of Jeff Musk & Capitol, so “bhakt-type banking nationalism” must also be sold / exported.