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You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.

Demos released a new report showing how the rise of high frequency trading (HFT) comes at a massive cost to the real economy, despite Wall Street’s claims to the contrary.

During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Charlie Munger, deputy to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, had some harsh words for high-frequency trading, the practice used by huge financial firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. “Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms,” said Munger. “Those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary.”

Already, the biggest banks in the U.S. are huge. The largest 0.2 percent of institutions — just 12 mega-banks — control 69 percent of total bank assets. The 20 biggest banks hold assets equal to 84.5 percent of the nation’s entire economic output.

Heather McGhee discusses the racist strategy behind austerity economics.