YEAH, THEY ARE CROOKS, LIARS AND THIEVES

You may suspect that I'm pretty down on Wall Street Masters of the Universe and you'd be correct but I hope you don't attribute that to "class envy" or ignorance. I think that way because they seem to run the financial gain primarily for their own benefit. Do you remember all the lies told by stock analysts during the Dot Com boom? Well, that's been going on for a long time, though not necessarily quite as dishonest. Merrill Lynch has now made a rule that its analysts MUST have at least 20% of their ratings as “underperform.”

It turns out that our little buddy Jim Cramer has been gaming the system for years. John Amato found that Cramer liked playing Pied Piper:

I came on this show and did something you're never supposed to do if you have a stock show. I said people should sell everything.

He may have even engaged in criminal activity when he was also running a hedge fund (h/t Julie Satow at HuffPo):

-On manipulating the market:

"A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund, and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity before hand that could drive the futures,"

-On falsely creating the impression a stock is down (what he calls "fomenting"):

"You can't foment. That's a violation... But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn't understand it." He adds, "When you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment."

-On the truth:

"What's important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view - it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction," Cramer advises. "You can't take any chances."

Why don't the MOTU understand thast we don't trust them?