Give Us More Prosecutions on Wall Street

This op-ed says it well:

It is sound public policy to encourage workers to save for retirement, instead of relying on the promise of a defined benefit pension from an employer that may ultimately disappear, but contributions-defined pensions simply can't work without a stock market that generates returns that follow the growth of corporate profits.
Americans expect carnivals and casinos to be stacked against them -- gambling is entertainment, and losses are expected -- but capital markets are where the nation's savings are supposed to be put to best uses, drive growth and create opportunities for the next generation.
These days, too much money and talent are directed to financial engineering -- efforts to design the next complex derivative -- and not enough is going into physics and real engineering: designing electric cars, new materials, and products and services that will define U.S. global competitive success and prosperity for the next 25 years.
The carnival culture on Wall Street is attracting too many young people to business schools to study economics and finance, instead of pursuing physics and engineering. That's why the best business schools are overwhelmed with applicants from Connecticut and California, while engineering colleges depend on students from China and Asia, who will then return home to compete with American businesses.
Increasingly, venture capital and stock investors look abroad for the best returns, and this deprives small and moderate sized U.S. companies of capital needed to expand and invest in new ideas and create jobs.
The Wall Street casino has misdirected what capital is invested in the U.S. During the boom of the last decade, America overinvested in housing and underinvested in industry by persuading investors to purchase bonds that funded "creative mortgages" to folks who could not afford the 4,000-square-foot homes purchased with them, and to otherwise prosperous Americans who foolishly purchased second and third homes as investments.
All proved poor bets. As the mortgage meltdown continues, consider how much more competitive the U.S. economy would be today -- and how many more good-paying jobs Americans would have -- had those homes never been built and that money been invested in new technologies and expanding sound enterprises.

I couldn't agree more.  Please ask yourself what actual value these traders on Wall Street provide to earn their outrageous salaries and bonuses.  I can only see that they are skimming larger and larger percentages of the economic pie by various schemes and hidden charges.  Are they doing anything which is productive, or are they looters?  I am surprised that Randian believers seem to support these guys taking so much without doing anything productive.  Her heroes were engineers and industrialists who did important things, not the leeches, or in the words of Matt Taibbi, vampire squids, who take their percentage from other people's work.  The fact that bankers have operated much in the same way as carnies, but on a grossly larger scale, only makes it worse.  Just because a guy wears a $3000 suit, it doesn't mean he's not a grifter.