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It didn't worry him. How could someone not fit in? The community was so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made.

"Honor," he said firmly. "I have great honor. So will you. But you will find that is not the same as power."

They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.

The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became

Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.

There's much more. There's all that goes beyond—all that is Elsewhere—and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.

We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.

The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets – and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.

It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.