JonStewart

By the way, to no particular question:

Yes, I have done it on weed.

I don’t think they should be banned from holding index funds and the like, but they shouldn’t be buying and trading individual stocks.

At the heart of our so-called free market capitalist system, is a process rife with conflict of interest, poor transparency, and lack of competition. And that it took like 20 years for anyone to figure out Bernie Madoff was fucking with them and then ultimately he’s the one who turned himself in.

Hey Reddit! This is Jon Stewart. Thank you so much for the opportunity to join you today. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances between the different Wall Street communities here and I’m certainly not an expert in the intricacies of trading but I am a firm believer in clear, fairer, more transparent markets. I imagine I’ll get more out of this today than you all will but I welcome the chance to have the discussion and hopefully whatever animosities exist in these communities that have made a group discussion here impossible, will be minimized towards this higher goal. But if not, know I’ll be watching with my very own eating popcorn GIF.

I’m a bit of a Glass-Steagall fetishist myself. Yeaaaaah baby. Separate my business practices, baby. I’ve been a baaaaaad lender and speculator. The ideas behind Dodd-Frank were well-intentioned and some of the practices of collateralization and not being so over leveraged worked well, but it wasn’t a thousand pages because poor people and the regular investors who had been so hurt in the 2008 collapse wanted more complexity. This shit has to be simplified if we’re going to get more transparent and efficient markets and have a better handle on boom and bust. Also, there was no individual accountability for those that very clearly and very purposefully defrauded investors and the economy.