Tss. After seeing how weakly regulators push exchanges like CME to prevent legitimate and proven spoofing, it's pretty clear that "backed up by their bosses" goes all the way up the chain.

Side comment: The GS head of technology recently left there to go to an at-best-mediocre options brokerage recently, which I recently left. Not gonna lie, that makes my suspicio-meter go off after seeing the shenanigans they did there.

Side note again: Another thing that pushes my supsicio-meter pretty far is seeing secret service, Harry Reid and a very well known name in HFT walk into an office and talk to each other for an hour.

I don't want to come to any direct conclusions, but "People are shitty" comes close.

No balls all the way up the chain.

Sounds more like the people at the top of the chain having different incentives and thus neutering the people further down who actually wanted to get their job done.

Yup. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Doesn't matter who cut who's balls off. No balls is no balls.

Or more to the point, if you are overseen by congress, which is in the pocket of these big banks, then regulatory action can be dangerous to your career.

"Get big government out of my business!" "These regulations are killing my business!" "People are going to go overseas and do the same thing!"

It's not just congressmen too. Even the public can be turned against the regulators with a steady drip of anti-regulation rhetoric from the newsmedia.

Regulation can't be shown to actually work in many cases. The way it is made is .. terrifying.

This is a corollary of "it's twice as hard to debug something as it was to write in the first place."

Exactly. If it affects my personal livelihood, it is not logical to pursue.

Except when you are a public official it is your duty to pursue these sorts of cases for the public good.

Damn your duty, I have bills to pay. Point is, why risk my job when my boss wont have my back?

This statement makes me sad... I mean, I adhere to it, but I am not exactly a person who should be emulated.

It's their boss' (aka Congress) job to set a tone where it is not a livelihood risk to "do your duty".

If you're a peon, "doing your duty" is a great way to put a target on your back.

100% right. Before people start looking at those guys they should look at themselves. A lot of people in corporations do things they don't agree with or find ethically questionable but since the boss says so they will do it. "The fish stinks from the head". This is not isolated to government.

It's the same story everywhere. As long as there is hierarchy (which we do need in some form in most organizations) then there will be incentive for people to do things they personally disagree with due to the conflict of interest that arises.

It seems like one of the hardest problems to solve in our society because it seems to be so tied to our nature. I can recall doing things in grade school I knew was wrong but felt obligated to do because my peers and those I looked up to do too. While that isn't the same exact situation, the dynamics at play are the same. What can be done to combat this innate in-group/out-group behavior more effectively in our organizations and society?

Good or bad is not that clearly to distinguish. Going with the group is certainly the easiest path but on average it's probably also the right thing to do.

People will inevitably identify with an adversary if the relationship lasts long enough.