Wall Street Rubs Our Noses In It—Again

The stock market in the first quarter of this year has gone up a whopping 23 percent. In this same period, however, the actual economy hasn’t improved at all. In fact it’s getting worse by almost any meaningful, real life measure, though the worsening may have slowed a bit.

An economy that’s not improving. An economy just getting worse a bit slower. Yet we nonetheless have this huge stock market surge, the biggest jump since 1933. A surge not generated by small investors queuing up for shares, but the product of a buying frenzy by exactly the same institutional stock traders who stand to make the most in bonuses from a surging stock market.

So it comes as no surprise that today’s New York Times reports that such bonuses seem to be in tap for these traders. Thanks to their self-generated and self-serving buying frenzy, Wall Street firms are now on track to garner the same level of huge bonuses in deep recession year 2009 as were garnered in pre-deep recession year 2007.

Which brings me now to the subject of some scary emails I’ve been getting of late from angry, frightened, and increasingly impoverished Americans who rightly or wrongly blame the Masters Of The Markets for their growing list of woes. People who are certain to see these new bonuses as a deep affront to their own strained circumstances. To feel like their noses are being rubbed into the dirt by a small group of people who haven’t gotten the message that market profiteering in a time of financial crisis is as massively inappropriate, and yes, as inherently wrong, as blatant war profiteering in a time when one’s country’s is in the midst of a battle for survival.

Let us hope that Wall Street’s best-and-brightest wake up very, very soon to the damage they are doing to the social fabric of this country with their gaming. A fabric into which they, like it or not, are also woven.