How Wall Street Is Like a “Cancer”: Whole Foods Market, Inc. (WFM)

So he created this revolution that upset the status quo so much — the biotech industry for example was making inroads, the pharmaceutical industry, was so threatening to the status quo that they just really wanted to get that guy, they wanted to get him in jail and shut him up and whatnot.

Wall Street serves its useful purpose of financing the revolutionary companies that are going to change the world, and as well as most other businesses, but they’ve just forgotten that because it’s become, because of the Friedman doctrine it’s just all about making money and that’s all that really matters. And if you think like that, then you’ve begun to drift away from the deeper meaning of what you’re doing and in a sense I just think you’ve gone astray and I say it’s a cancer infecting the rest of business because so many business people have come to think that that’s how they’re supposed to act, too. We cannot create a good society if everybody is strictly based on their own short term self-interest.

It’s sobering to realize that almost every institution in America with no exceptions — in fact I challenge you to think of one that still has a high degree of trust. Is there, are there any? We don’t trust business; it has a 19% approval rating. We don’t trust Congress; it has a 17% approval rating. We don’t trust the educational system. We don’t trust the health-care system. We don’t trust, uh, the judicial system. I mean, trust is at an all-time low in the history of America. I would argue that almost every — we don’t trust journalists — so it’s almost like, some of these people think, really think, say well, we still trust the military, but even the military trust rating is plummeting now because we’ve been in Afghanistan now for over a decade and the Iraq war, still got problems there, so even the trust of the military’s declined. Every part of the system has got to rediscover its higher purpose, and our book’s mostly dedicated to business doing that but it doesn’t stop there.

The article How Wall Street Is Like a “Cancer” originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Brian Richards.

Fool.com managing editor Brian Richards owns shares of Whole Foods Market, as does The Motley Fool. The Fool also recommends Whole Foods Market. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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