Three developments in finance cropped up in the last days that must be read as a single story.

First, Blankfein, Dimon, and the rest of the Wall Street bigwigs visited the White House to meet with the president and his team. That team consisted of Denis McDonough (Chief of Staff); Valerie Jarrett (Senior Adviser); Cecilia Munoz (Domestic Policy Adviser); Gene Sperling (National Economic Council Director); and Alan Krueger, (Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers). The meeting was secret, but we can deduce much from its attendance.

Last week, Professor Charles M. Jones, a noted economist at Columbia, published an opinion piece in POLITICO claiming to enlighten readers on the realities of high-frequency trading (or “HFT”), computer driven trading at millisecond speeds driven by complex algorithms based on complex trading strategies. This has surfaced as the subject of politically charged debate in the context of of a proposed financial transaction tax that would, among other things, curb the most excessive forms of HFT.