Quote from pairsarbtooo:
It should be pretty obvious to any trader that takes time to think about trends, that the government is assimilating the free market system. These are topics to research and consider: exponentially increasing regulation, zero treasury asset transparency, transfers of large amounts of money to other countries, FBI hedge fund/proprietary trading arrests, many of our leveraged firms closing their doors.
This seems to be happening at near exponential rates. When it completes it will happen so fast very few people will know what happened. Government assimilation of free enterprise is nearly logarithmic in it's acceleration and acquisition of the free market.
If we have a natural system that experiences logarithmic growth, like pond scum on the surface of a pond, if it takes 20 days to cover half of the pond, how many days does it take to cover and subdue the whole pond?
This is very similar to the rate that government has sucked up and is still sucking the life out of the free enterprise system in the United States, and pretty much globally. At the end, the scum will cover the pond so fast that most people will not be able to respond in time.
What you are feeling uneasy about and that thing are not right is the rapid acceleration of this system. There are not more business cycles: the Federal reserve is preventing it via their long interest rate policies and now that they cannot really reduce that, the exponential expansion of the money supply is sucking up free enterprise.
The bailouts basically sucked up more from the system. Companies like Oracle, who many hail to be such great examples of capitalism, are nothing more than a government company. Larry Ellison made nearly all of his money from government contracts in the beginning, and nothing has changed much. If you trace back the history of the money flow through this entity, you might find this to be true. The government has a keen interest in database systems, keeping track of citizens and data mining seem to be specialties of the government and Oracles software was one thing that they really loved in the beginning.
Gentlemen, it's the government that picks the winners and losers now, instead of the free market system. So basically unless you really innovate to make your method of earning money impervious to this (and it can probably still be done), if you are not in the government's interest you may find a road full of legislation that regulates your ability to amass capital and create jobs and venues for others to do so.
The regulations and ridiculous activities of the FBI tearing apart small firm after small firm is the perfect indicator of the what could be called a government mandate to eliminate all capital threats to their complete and total acquisition of what someday once was this capitalistic system that I believe is at the heart of each and every true trader and firm that we know.
