>That isn't the case for private banks who have been getting away with the worst scams

People are straight-up rug-pulling in the crypto world for tens of millions of dollars, outright scams, and the scale of crypto is a fraction of the banking world. I bet you'd be hard pressed to name a couple equivalent scams banks have pulled in a first-world, financially regulated economy. I'm not talking about some rogue employee ripping off accounts, I mean organized fraud.

Anyone who has ever actually worked with or in the financial industry knows how crazy the regulation is. It's far from perfect, but saying it's worse than the crypto world is laughable.

"far from perfect" - well that misses the mark by a long shot. We still have unsettled shorts happening every day that are often naked and regularly stay naked for months on end - companies are destroyed from this blatant market manipulation.

Gamestop was 140% short! Is this uncommon? Many people seem to think not.

The corruption in wall-street runs so deep that tax payers have to foot the bill when no middle class person would look over the toxic loans being packaged up pre-2008 and think that wasn't a scam. This crashed the world economy, it's hard to imagine a bigger scam ever being possible without the former bank CEOs running every financial branch of the government promising bail-outs to the "too big to fail" scammers.

> 140%

We're still stuck on this[0]?

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/files/staff-report-equity-options-market... @ Page 25

Yes I'm still stuck on that, it's a story people often recognize and just because there has been no naked shorting found as of that report doesn't mean there isn't significant naked shorting involved. With the shorting moved to dark pools on top of the fact there were likely 45 million shares still shorted after that reporting data shows, it's not as clear cut as you might be implying.

Many people are confident naked shorting happens and GME hit 140%, the highest ever according to that report. So yeah, consider me skeptical that the SEC was able to find evidence of a non-scandal and used that evidence to report a non-controversial finding.

You can bury your head in the sand and pretend the market is fair if you want, but I'll stay skeptical.

I don’t know that I’d go so far the other way to infer the market is _fair_ to retail traders, but the 140% short number is not itself evidence of impropriety. All it requires a lot of longs allowing their shares to be lent (check) and a lot of shorts with appetite, conviction, and deep pockets (check).

Naked shorting doesn't destroy companies. Hypothetically even if the stock price goes to zero that doesn't prevent the company from operating as a going concern.

Incompetent managers destroy companies. Sometimes those managers try to deflect blame for their own failings by whining about short sellers.

> Gamestop was 140% short! Is this uncommon? Many people seem to think not.

This is silly. Of course it is uncommon - if it was common we would see short squeezes all the time.

this is foolish commentary. its like a trader on Wall Street complaining about javascript frameworks

> If only these "heavy" audits and "strict" rules could stop the incessant corruption we see all around the globe in federally insured banks.

Unless your claim is that corruption and its effects somehow uniquely apply only to bankers, I don't see what's the purpose of pointing this out.

The popular trend lately is to point out flaws in our regulated institutions in a feeble attempt to suggest that the solution is to abandon regulated institutions altogether in favor of some techno-libertarian hellscape. Because why fix a broken thing when you can throw it away and replace it with something even more broken.

What was actually fixed after 2018? Which banksters went to prison?

The internet (just like crypto) is a global distributed network with only local regulations (that are easily bypassed, again, just like crypto) and I would argue this "techon-libertarian hellscape" is the most valuable and important invention mankind has ever created.

I used to feel far more optimistic about the internet. Today I see the social aspects of it as a net negative; Social media in general is a cesspool, user privacy means nothing to the big internet players, ads and tracking are absolutely pervasive, and the quality of online discourse has been on a steep downward trajectory for the better part of a decade.

I'm not seeing how using the internet as analogy is at all relevant to the discussion about corruption. The internet, if it has resistance to catering to special financial interests at all, is only so because it is far removed from that sector, not because of any special attributes from being a distributed network.