Ben Stein: Wall Street corruption is undermining America

Conservatives have steadfastly blocked any attempt to hold accountable Wall Street's major investment banks and blue-chip brokerage houses for corrupt market practices. They ignore the evidence that these firms have repeatedly abused the trust of investors by deceiving them about the value of investments and placing their own profits above the interests of investors (think Drexel- Milliken junk bond scam; Savings-and-Loan debacle; tech-stock bubble of the 1990s; today’s subprime disaster). Ben Stein says Wall Street corruption threatens free-market capitalism itself:

Without trust, there can be no free-market capitalism. [Fiduciary duty] standards of care required that those handling someone else's money behave with extreme rigor and honesty. Trustees always had to behave with the interests of the trustor [investor] uppermost. In the United States, the trustee had to disclose every fact or belief that might influence an intelligent, reasonable investor. But by the 1980s, the laws of fiduciary duty started to break down in a major way. Basically, a crossroads was passed in the Drexel-Millikan scandals. Although hundreds and perhaps thousands of men and women were profiting from misconduct, only a few went to prison. Today, in the midst of the mortgage mess, we see people breaching their fiduciary duty and getting away with it, while the ordinary stockholders are pauperized because of the losses. We surely cannot remain a republic under law if there is no law except the axiom from Richard II that "they well deserve to have, that know the strong'st and surest way to get."