William D Cohan

Late last week, I went to the southern tip of Manhattan to see what all the fuss is about, but discovered that the only people occupying Wall Street these days are a bunch of tourists and the few remaining bankers who actually work there.

One of the dirty little secrets of the current social-networking mania is that users of services such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr give away their content while the shareholders of the companies are busy getting obscenely rich.

Since the financial crisis hit, investment banks have been rightly criticized for their tendency to be more concerned with their own trading profits than the well-being of their customers. Sometimes, however, an investment bank can take the whole client service thing a bit too far.

If Wall Street’s not-so-subtle efforts to regain the upper hand against regulators soon begin to lose steam, it will be easy to pinpoint the reason: Kweku Adoboli, the 31-year-old purported rogue trader at UBS AG in London who allegedly cost the firm $2 billion on a horribly wrong bet.

In January, just after the lame-duck session of Congress had extended the costly George W. Bush tax cuts, I spoke with Lawrence Summers, the former chairman of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council.

Thanks to Darcy Flynn, a longtime attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, we now have all the ammunition we need to do what should have been done years ago: terminate the SEC, with extreme prejudice, and in its place construct a new regulatory watchdog for Wall Street free of obvious conflicts of interest.

Americans rightly take great pride in the freedoms afforded to us by the First Amendment. Which is what makes the ongoing self-censorship among a group of highly regarded art scholars, who work at some of our most prestigious and respected museums and universities, so deeply and profoundly disturbing.

Can it be true that the trillions of dollars we spent bailing out Wall Street only restored the deeply flawed status quo, instead of bringing about the fundamental system overhaul we needed?

What will it take for Americans to finally get the message that much of Wall Street, in its current form, is a corrupt enterprise in need of a top-to-bottom overhaul, a task that the year-old Dodd-Frank law, for all its verbosity, barely attempts?

Anyone on Wall Street who has spent time restructuring the debt of bankrupt companies knows exactly why the politicians in Washington have proved so inept in their attempts to get a comprehensive deal to cut government spending, raise taxes and increase the debt ceiling.