In your second rate finance companies like Merril Lynch your stock broker is pushing crap that the "banking" division tells them to push so that the bankers get a cut from their corporate relationships, while your broker gets a cut from you. You get to buy the crap.
In your top tier finance companies, your broker is pushing more sophisticated crap that the "bankers" are actually shorting and they all share the money you're suckered out of.
Your insurance agent is selling you on you giving them lots of money now, and they'll pay you back some time far in the future with dollars that are worth a tiny fraction of what they're worth now. Meanwhile they take the money you give them now and gamble it in the risks markets, knowing that if they win they get huge bonuses, and if they lose, well, either the Fed pays them back, or they just don't pay you back in the future. So what? It's free money either way.
Your real estate agent swears up and down the NOW is the time to buy real estate "at the bottom." Just like before was the time to buy when the market could never sell off. As far as they're concerned you're a big fat dope, ready to be fleeced, any time.
Your investment letter guru is selling you on his charts and his Commitment of Traders Data, and his "Trader's intuition" and his moving averages and his stochastics and fibonacci retracements and his elliot waves. All crap you don't understand, and is meaningless anyway, just so you'll pay him or her 200 or 500 or 1000 dollars a year to get that "trading edge." Of course, if this crap provided a trading edge, your investment letter guru would use it to trade.
Your contractor, your doctor, your lawyer, all view you as a means of padding their wallets so they can buy that extra i-pad, trip to Aspen, boat, condo, hooker, they so badly need. Especially the ones that say "God bless" in stead of "good bye." "Or God Willing," in stead of "I hope so." The ones that constantly mention God are always The the biggest crooks of all.
And the politicians that are supposed to regulate this stuff are getting paid to write laws by the corporations and industries they're supposed to regulate.
And the news services that report on all this say whatever their advertisers and corporate strategists tell them to say.
Why is everyone out to cheat you?
I don't know. But I do know this: every economy functions fundamentally on trust.
When trust breaks down, an economy is on the way to oblivion.
Do you trust the investment professionals in your life? Do you trust your colleagues, your competitors? Do you trust your politicians? Do you trust your news services? Exactly whom do you trust and how far? That's the measure of the strength of this economy.
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