Finance is increasingly commoditized. It’s a slow process, but it is happening. It happens every time someone doesn’t call his full service broker to buy his latest stock recommendation and instead transfers money from his MMACT to buy an index fund at Vanguard. Between those two choices is now nearly forty years of financial industry history, and a sea change.

Goldman, Soc Gen, et al, have been driven into derivatives and leverage at the level they have because the slack has been pulled out of the rest of investment finance. Markets will never be wholly efficient, but many of the abuses of the New York crowd are about over. The rest of the world is increasingly unimpressed, and fleecing Americans less profitable.

The web is effectively 15 years old, but younger in terms of things like the financial information from sources like Reuters, Morningstar, etc. Now, instead of enrolling at Yale to hear Shiller, I can crank up my old Dell, scan through my email morning update from Reuters, review my Asset Allocation at Vanguard (which, since I use their brokerage service, charges me nothing to trade their increasingly varied ETFs) and eventually select my economic adviser for the day over my second cup of coffee.

Is that not progress?

The simple truth is that once taxpayers were required to shoulder Wall Street’s toxic assets, the money managers were able to generate enough cash to pay off the solvency loans offered by the American government in just over a year.

The disgust and fury that many Americans harbor regarding the financial system has nothing to do with prejudice. It’s an honest, visceral reaction to the tremendous hardship and adversity that was unfairly brought on by people in power who are still maneuvering to acquire even greater wealth.

Schiller should spend at least a few moments contemplating ethics in finance.