Michael Lewis interview with 60 minutes about his new book: Every one that invests in the market or is interested in how the system really works should watch.
The stock market really was rigged. Katsuyama often wondered how enterprising politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers and state attorneys general would respond to that realization. (This March, the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, announced a new investigation of the stock exchanges and the dark pools, and their relationships with high-frequency traders. Not long after, the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, saying that Goldman wanted nothing to do with the bad things happening in the stock market.) The thought of going after those who profited didn’t give Katsuyama all that much pleasure. He just wanted to fix the problem. At some level, he still didn’t understand why some Wall Street banks needed to make his task so difficult.
Technology had collided with Wall Street in a peculiar way. It had been used to increase efficiency. But it had also been used to introduce a peculiar sort of market inefficiency. Taking advantage of loopholes in some well-meaning regulation introduced in the mid-2000s, some large amount of what Wall Street had been doing with technology was simply so someone inside the financial markets would know something that the outside world did not. The same system that once gave us subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock-market trades involving fractions of a penny that occurred at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. That is why Brad Katsuyama’s desire to explain things so that others would understand was so seditious. He attacked the newly automated financial system at its core, where the money was made from its incomprehensibility.
PROTAGONIST | DEUTERAGONIST | TRITAGONIST 