The basic problem with Wall Street is that, 1) the need for centralized markets to allocate capital worldwide on a gigantic scale presents clever people with vast opportunities to enrich themselves, and 2) in America today nothing is valued but money, so nobody sees anything wrong with making as much as possible, regardless of the harm this may do to anyone else. Put these things together and you get the unending stream of new market strategies, upstart billionaires, market scandals, and minor crashes that have marked the past 30 years. And now that a handful of banks have swallowed most of the others, becoming "too big to fail" because their fall would drag the rest of us down with them, we all have a stake in restraining the behavior of their ambitious traders.
The Obama administration has come out with what I think is the first really good idea for dealing with this situation: charge banks above a certain size an extra tax to cover both the cost of bailing them out last time and the additional costs we are bound to incur when we have to bail out another one in the future. I think this is only just, and it also might help to diffuse a little of the anger that so many Americans feel about the bankers who got so rich and then came banging on the White House door to demand taxpayer help when their own foolishness got them into trouble.
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