I really like Rachel Maddow, but this candy metaphor doesn't make any sense:
In the metaphor, if the kid stops eating candy (which is standing in for cash), he'll be in better shape. If Wall Street doesn't get capital, our financial sector will collapse, credit will sharply contract, and the economy will enter into a time of incredible chaos. On the other hand, the bit about supervision does make sense: Wall Street had a rather mythical aura, but in certain ways, it's actually a much more dangerous industry than most. Traders are trying to game the market for the pure sake of profit on extremely short timeframes. Forget quarterly profits. We're often talking days. And there's no pretense about the importance of making TVs or providing health care to customers or anything else. There's no tangible intermediary between the trader and the profit. Moreover, it's a realm in which the legendary players were all superhumanly aggressive and risky and bold. In other words, it's an industry where you'd expect the excesses of capitalism and the profit-motive to be much more present than in most, and thus it's an industry that requires an almost unique level of oversight and transparency. Meanwhile, in other Rachel Maddow news, she's doubling the ratings of her predecessor, Dan Abrams. That's a big deal. For Fox News, conservative broadcasting is an ideology, and they happily endured decades of losses to make it viable. Liberals don't have a Fox News. MSNBC's experimentation with a block of liberal programming has been a business strategy, and the way it will be replicated is if it is successful.
