Courtesy of Pam Martens
U.S. Senate Holds a Critical Hearing on the Stock Market on March 3, 2016 and 73 Percent of the Senators on the Subcommittee Are a No-Show
There are 15 U.S. Senators who are members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment that has been investigating the charges that the stock market is rigged by the stock exchanges along with dark pools run by large broker-dealers that are operated as opaque, unregulated quasi stock exchanges, high frequency traders at hedge funds, conflicted payment for order flow, and tricked-up order types – to mention just a few of the ways the public investor is getting fleeced.
The Subcommittee held a critically important hearing yesterday to review what progress the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory Wall Street watchdog, were making to rein in the abuses on Wall Street.
Despite the lack of trust the public feels toward Wall Street and the abysmal 14 percent approval rating of Congress (according to the most recent Gallup poll), 73 percent of the Senators on this hearing panel couldn’t be bothered to show up for the hearing. Outside of the Republican Chair of the hearing, Senator Mike Crapo, not one other Republican out of a total of eight on the Subcommittee attended. Out of the seven Democratic Senators on the panel, three showed up: Senator Mark Warner, the Ranking Member, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Joe Donnelly.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, whom one might think would have an interest in restoring trust in Wall Street, was noticeably absent. Schumer derives substantial campaign financing sums from Wall Street and what Wall Street wants is business as usual.
Adding to the apathy that prevents any meaningful reform of Wall Street’s serial crimes against the public, major media were no-shows as well. We could not find one major newspaper that covered what transpired in the hearing yesterday. The New York Times gave it one sentence that seriously failed to capture the essence of the hearing. The Times wrote: “A Senate hearing today will examine how the pricing structure of the computer-driven U.S. stock market became so convoluted.”
…
