Little guys are fucked

• Analysts at major investment banks promote stocks they know to be worthless, misleading the investors who rely on their advice yet helping their investment-banking colleagues generate fees and woo clients.
• Ratings agencies slap AAA ratings on debt they know to be dicey in order to appease the issuers -- who happen to pay the fees of the agencies, violating the rating agency's duty to provide the marketplace with honest evaluations.
• Executives receive outsized and grotesque compensation packages -- the result of the perverted recommendations of compensation consultants whose other business depends upon the goodwill of the very CEOs whose pay they are opining upon, thus violating the consultants' duty to the shareholders of the companies for whom they are supposedly working.
• Mutual funds charge exorbitant fees that investors have to absorb -- fees that dramatically reduce any possibility of outperforming the market and that are set by captive boards of captive management companies, not one of which has been replaced for inadequate performance, violating their duty to guard the interests of the fund investors for whom they supposedly work.
• "High-speed trading" produces not only the reality of a two-tiered market but also the probability of front-running -- that is, illegally trading on information not yet widely known -- that eats into the possible profits of the retail clients supposedly being served by these very same market players, violating the obligation of the banks to get their clients "best execution" without stepping between their customers and the best available price.

• AIG (AIG, news, msgs) is bailed out, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, even though (as we later learned) the big guys knew that AIG was going down and were able to hedge and cover their positions. Smaller investors are left holding the stock, and all of us are left picking up the tab.