Game Over? What do you think?

What do you think?

I have CNBC on wall- to-wall and there are two developments that are sub-themes there. I think both are real sleepers.

1. Retail investors are out of the markets. They took at least two beatings in the last decade and the flash-crash was the coup-de-gras. So only the pros are playing.

2. 70% of volume traded (on the equity markets) is "high-frequency" [split-second arbitrage] trading. -CNBC, October 11, 2010, 06:20:10

FWIW, the arbitrage traders don't lose, not even for a day. I think that spells the end of the markets as we know them. The ultimate wise-guys have created max entropy and game over.

What do you think?

Perverted (state) capitalism -- A disgusting example

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits arehanded out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole. --The Great Iraq Swindle, How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury, Rollingstone.com, From Issue 1034, Posted Aug 23, 2007 8:51 AM