“Financial innovation” is just Wall Street code for “gambling in the shadowy $670 trillion global derivatives market,” says Paul Farrell, in Marketwatch. Wall Street is “spending millions on lobbyists to kill financial-regulation reforms” because it “rakes in billions of dollars annually from their ‘financial weapons of mass destruction,’ as [Warren] Buffett calls them.” Farrell cites Time magazine’s Justin Fox, who says that most so-called financial innovations are “just new ways to fleece customers or hide risk” and who notes that “all major financial crises have been associated with some financial innovation.” Farrell also cites former hedge fund manager Richard Bookstaber, who says, “Derivatives are the weapon of choice for gaming the system.” They are “vehicles for gambling . . . side bets on the market.” They “put all markets, investors and taxpayers at risk” because they actually “change the behavior of the market.” Farrell asserts that “financial innovations only serve the interests of Wall Street’s insiders, not the public interest, not Main Street investors, not American taxpayers, and not retail banking customers,” and he warns that “without transparency and regulation reform, a new meltdown is guaranteed. . . . Wall Street is back running the same con game that triggered the 2007-08 meltdown . . . . They have no conscience. . . . Morals, ethics and the public good are irrelevant in the rules of Wall Street’s new mutant American capitalism.”