Will We Ever Trust Wall Street Again?

Trust is a very tenuous thing. Whether in friendship, marriage or business, once broken, it is incredibly difficult to rebuild. The financial institutions and investors of the U.S. have not only broken their trust with the American people, but they continue to seem to operate with blinders on, assuming they have done nothing wrong. Will we ever trust them again?

Let’s face facts; we can’t blame Wall Street completely for their totally unacceptable financial actions. As Americans, we always knew that these people operated in a world that we didn’t completely understand. However, as long as they were making money for us, everyone just let the behavior go on. In the real world, this is called ‘enabling’. It wasn’t until the walls came crashing down and it directly affected the average person’s portfolio, that the angry fingers began to be pointed.

In many communities and towns, we can look around and view the devastation that has been wreaked by the irresponsible actions of Wall Street. In the two towns that are closest to me, we have so many businesses that have closed, that the county is now negotiating with the banks to agree to allow the buildings to be torn down, so that the taxes will be made on land as opposed to land and a building structure. Huge quantities of homes have simply been abandoned; causing a reconfiguration of not only own ownership, but of the morale of the town itself.

A friend of mine has a service business for the residential community. He has been taking care of some of these retirees for many years. A few months ago, he told me that many of these people, who worked their whole lives towards their retirement, now have to get jobs. It seems that all of their retirement money has been leaked away due to the Wall Street fiasco. These aren’t wealthy people. They typically have smaller more subdued homes. You will now see these retirees as baggers in grocery stores and check out cash registers.

With the slash and burn tactics of the Wall Street and financial community, you would have thought the public outcry was enough to open their eyes and simply make them ashamed. However, you have to remember that these people have lived and survived in an environment that we, the people, simply don’t have the limit to understand. They don’t think they have done anything wrong. And so, as the American people are rocked to the core of their existence and lives are changed; the Wall Street community continues to feel that they deserve the fat commissions that they have always received.

The question now takes on a broader scope of understanding. We, the people, have enabled Wall Street to behave this way and now we are angered at that behavior. It has been a slow process of awakening for those that are so piggish in the investment world to actually understand what their actions have done and the ripple effect not only in this country, but around the world.
Will we ever trust Wall Street again? The answer is in the mirror. We need to take part of the responsibility within ourselves and remove the blind trust that we had for people that don’t understand anything but greed. Maybe one day, in the future we may regain that trust, but it will be a long time coming.

The information supplied in this article is not to be considered as medical advice and is for educational purposes only.