These Three Men Represent Everything That's Wrong with Wall Street

By Shah Gilani, Capital Waves Strategist, Money Morning 

I've already expressed my desire to embrace the Occupy Wall Street movement.I said last week that I would join in whole-heartedly if I knew exactly what the protesters were trying to achieve.

But I don't know - and I'm not convinced they do, either.

Still, that doesn't mean we should dismiss them entirely. After all, there are millions of Americans who sense there's something terribly wrong with our capitalist system, but they can't pinpoint exactly what it is either.

But I can.

Bad actors have done bad things to good institutions and our capitalist system. Today, I'm going to let you in on who three of those bad actors are.

You see, part of the problem is that when we think of the "bad guys" on Wall Street, or in Washington for that matter, we don't often think of specific people. We talk about "them" as faceless men we might imagine sitting in luxurious high-rises chewing on cigars and laughing as they rake in millions, or even billions of dollars on the backs of hardworking Americans.

I intend to fix that. I want to shed light on the faces of the people who are gaming the system and lay out before you the tools they're using to get away with it.

So, I'm going to start today with three of the biggest perpetrators of the mess we're in.

The Three Bears

There are hundreds of bad actors on Wall Street, but three in particular tell the inside story of how appallingly corrupt our country has become. 
They are: 

• Robert Rubin, who spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS), before becoming Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration.
• Lawrence Summers, who came out of the World Bank and was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his pal Rubin before becoming Treasury Secretary himself in 1999.
• And Phil Gramm, once a practicing economist who served as a Republican Senator for Texas from 1985 to 2002.

These are the men who - with help of then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan - interfered with the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an important regulatory body, to squash any regulation of derivatives.

And now the notoriously murky derivatives market, which was hugely responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, has grown into a $600 trillion trouble spot for the economy.

This group of very influential and powerful men made sure there was no oversight of derivatives products and markets. None.

While that was an incredible gift to Wall Street's biggest banks and hedge funds, the Three Bears (I call them that because their actions drove us into the systemic economic bear market from which we're still struggling to emerge) weren't nearly done.