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The 5% Factor in Finance
Author J. Cafesin4 min read·Just now--
I had a conversation with my former financial advisor when the markets were crashing back in ’08. I asked him to give me an estimate, his best, ostensibly educated guess when the market might turn around or at least stabilize. He assured me it would be soon. The credit default scandal had already been exposed. Real estate foreclosures had been assessed and the losses factored into financial projections. The fact is, he offered with conviction, in any industry one had to account for a certain amount of corruption. Maybe 5% of the people in any given field were evil. The evil had now been weeded out and the markets would bounce back to its mean of 8 to 10% growth or better annually soon, he’d promised.
Turns out, evil abounds in the financial industry. From Michael Arougheti (Ares), $85 million in 2024, to Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), $39 million to Varun Krishna (Rocket), $25.89 million, and their corporate cronies with eight figure bonuses, these bank execs and mortgage brokers horde properties, creating our current housing shortage turning us into a renters nation, and control the markets at their whim with risky investments (which they call ‘financial products’) for personal gain. My advisor had to be grossly low on his 5% estimate of evil in finance.
According to forensic psychologist and author Robert Hare, it is possible, even likely, that the percentage of evil is…