I remember not too long ago people who said that Wall Street is full of crooks were considered to be off-kilter. At the same time, it was commonly understood that they were saying the obvious, but for some reason they weren’t supposed to say it.

Things have changed.

Have a listen to a speech recorded in the video below. The speech begins at 2:08, after the intro by the off-kilter guy in a t-shirt (don’t know who he is), and the speech was given at (of all places) the Philadelphia Federal Reserve by (none other than) economist Jeffrey Sachs, named by Time magazine as one of the 100 “Most Influential” people in the world.

Sachs says that Wall Street is full of crooks.

Not just that. Sachs said that, “I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. I’m talking about the human interactions I have. I have not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably…they have  no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice….We have a corrupt politics to the core.”

Or in the DeepCapture vernacular, Washington has been “captured” by financial miscreants.

Sachs also rails against (among others) Goldman Sachs and short seller John Paulson for manufacturing synthetic CDOs (i.e mortgage derivatives deliberately designed by short sellers to self-destruct). Basically, he says what we’ve been saying for years, but what most prominent economic professors dared not say in speeches at the Federal Reserve—not, anyway, until now. And when prominent economists start talking like this (he even criticizes fractional reserve banking) in speeches at the Federal Reserve—well, that’s a revolution in the making. Wait and see.

Click here to listen to the speech.