Posted by Ken,

They always have, that also varies and swings like the ol' pendulum. It waxes and wanes with the economic tides but a shadow economy has always been present and almost certainly will always be...
This is true, always has been, but it is not always desirable. The system is simply too large to effectively regulate.

I think Dayuhan's point about the market determining a fair price for services and goods is the ideal state, but in many cases is no longer true. Computer based trading frequently has nothing to do with the true value of company, but rather is driven by an equation that tells the computer when to buy and sell resulting in billions of dollars moving rapidly from stock to stock driving prices up and down in an irrational manner. Statistically I don't know if this impacts long term value investors over time or not, but I think an argument can be made that the price of a stock is still driven my the market, but not by the value of the service or goods provided in many cases.

The other issue is the too big to fail issue, and that has artifically determined value in many cases, not the value of the service or goods. If the market determined the value then these companies would have gone out of business.

Additionally large companies that consolidate competiters by buying them out gain a pricing advantage that prevents effective competition, and without effective competition for some products (food being one of them) you can't rely on the market to determine fair prices.

We're in a period of transition, the voices from occupy wall street are only one voice informing what the future economic system will look like. I agree with Dayuhan, at least if you rely on the mass media to stay informed about OWS they're mostly young punks with no message, but that shouldn't distract political leaders from the fact that there is a great deal of discontent with the current system throughout America (and apparently globally).

I used to make a lot of money in stock market at one time, even when the overall market wasn't doing so well. I can't make sense of it now. Could be I just lost my magic touch, but I think there are forces influencing it now that have made the old rules obsolete.