by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, announced in June that he was going to tackle the structure of the U.S. stock market – ostensibly to make it fairer to the little guy. His plans were released last Wednesday in a mountain of paper that even Wall Street veterans are having difficulty digesting. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)
While the overall thrust of the proposed changes appears to be to provide more transparency to order execution, the proposals fail to address key structural issues that have allowed the U.S. stock market to operate as an institutionalized wealth transfer system — moving vast sums of money from the pockets of average Americans to the richest one percent.