As demonstrated by the hundreds of billions of dollars of fines paid by the Too Big to Fail banks, where possible Wall Street’s business model is based on fraud.

As Economic Sociologist Fred Block put it succinctly,

It’s always easier to make money through predation…It’s only in those societies where the predation route is effectively closed down that you get business people to focus on making money through greater efficiency.

The only proven way to end fraud and other forms of predation like market rigging by Wall Street is transparency.

This has been well known since the 1930s when the Pecora Commission testimony revealed the extent of Wall Street’s misbehavior behind a veil of opacity.

Transparency was shown to work for five plus decades before the Reagan Administration adopted the idea government is the problem and free markets are the solution.  With this came a fundamental change in how transparency was enforced as the Reagan Administration insisted Wall Street should be the SEC’s client and not the entity the SEC should prevent from behaving badly again.

It took another three decades before there was enough opacity built up in the global financial system to make the financial system susceptible to another financial crisis.  Naturally, when the Great Financial Crisis started it spread like an earthquake down the opacity fault line as doubt was cast on the value of all opaque financial products/securities.