High Finance Is Perverse

I made it to the Finance Department of a mid-level Corporate Office. Elsewhere, I was responsible for payroll checks getting out, through the distribution of W2's, etc...

The trick, when you want something, is to hide it in a big pile of $. It doesn't matter who, what, where, or when.

So these guys doing mergers, or IPOs, or going private, or whatever, and the derivatives guys, and the 1980s junk bond guys, all of them all of the time, just want to move large sums of $ around, taking a minuscule percentage, which accumulates to a lot of real $.

Nobody's ever seen $50 Billion in one place at one time. But, it's just an entry on some ledger, with a little slice trimmed off here or there.

So the real waste is not just what gets stolen via the vigorish, the total waste is all those deployed $ that had no more added value (and since the taxpayers bailed their sorry asses out, a great big negative value) than moving a pile of dirt back & forth with a dozer.