Dylan Ratigan: Stock Market an ‘Obviously Corrupt’ Fraud

July 1, 2010

On his afternoon show Tuesday, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan explained why he believes the usual explanations given in the media for why the stock market went up or down on a given day are nonsense.

“Seventy percent of the volume [of trades on the stock market] is computers that are run by the banks playing ping pong with stocks for 10 seconds at at time,” Ratigan said.

“The stock market at this point, which used to be a reflection of the future value of actual businesses in this country, has been turned by our government and our banks into little more than a paper shredding facility [about which] we can make up reasons why it goes up and down,” Ratigan said. “But when the computers … at the banks are controlling the action, most everything else is kind of silly.”

Ratigan concluded that it’s time to create an “alternative investment structure” that would allow people to invest their money without putting it “into the obviously corrupt stock market in this country.”

Ratigan was referring to the relatively new phenomenon known as high-frequency trading: High-speed computer programs that are able to “peek” at stock trades less than a second before the trades are made. If the computer sees that a trade about to be made will raise the price of a particular stock, it can purchase the stock in the split-second before that trade is made.