We just saw the steep­est stock mar­ket decline in six and half years, and the largest one-day point decline in the his­to­ry of the Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age. Last week saw the worst week on Wall Street in two years. The pre­cip­i­tous fall fol­lows the recent so-called ​“Trump ral­ly,” where stock mar­ket val­ues inched to their high­est lev­el since World War II.

While this down­turn may not spell an imme­di­ate cri­sis for cap­i­tal­ism, it does fur­ther reveal the rot at the core of the sys­tem. The largest finan­cial firms can prof­it from sud­den fluc­tu­a­tions in the mar­ket — while ordi­nary investors such as those with pen­sion funds and 401(k)s are left hold­ing the bag. This volatil­i­ty in the mar­ket has allowed for more Wall Street ticks to suck at the hog of the rough­ly $27 tril­lion in retire­ment assets held by Americans.

There are a few prin­ci­ples that guide how traders and spec­u­la­tors on Wall Street oper­ate: Buy low and sell high. Liq­uid­i­ty in the mar­ket gen­er­ates prof­its. And use infor­ma­tion to your advan­tage. With­in this frame­work, a small group of pow­er­ful banks dom­i­nates Wall Street trad­ing, includ­ing JP Mor­gan, Gold­man Sachs and Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch.

Many of these pow­er­ful finan­cial insti­tu­tions have been bet­ting that volatil­i­ty will rise. The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed in April that ​“banks would sud­den­ly be sit­ting on huge prof­its from their volatil­i­ty insur­ance” were volatil­i­ty to increase. Low volatil­i­ty in the stock mar­ket has hurt the rev­enue of trad­ing desks such as those at Gold­man Sachs by reduc­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to exploit spreads in prices. The largest banks have dis­cre­tionary con­trol over hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in assets that, through selec­tive buy­ing and sell­ing, can cre­ate added volatil­i­ty in the market.

Gold­man, in par­tic­u­lar, has a long his­to­ry of ben­e­fit­ing hand­some­ly from ris­es in volatil­i­ty. Dur­ing the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis, Goldman’s for­mer Chair­man Hank Paul­son served as Trea­sury Sec­re­tary while anoth­er for­mer Chair­man, Stephen Fried­man, served as head of the New York Fed — Goldman’s pri­ma­ry reg­u­la­tor. Goldman’s for­mer chief lob­by­ist in Lon­don, Joshua Bolten, was White House chief of staff, and anoth­er Gold­man vet, Neel Kashkari, was a top deputy to Paulson.

At the end of 2006, Gold­man began to short the res­i­den­tial mort­gage-backed secu­ri­ties mar­ket (RMBS). The even­tu­al col­lapse of RMBS helped trig­ger the finan­cial cri­sis in 2008.

Near­ly every bank with expo­sure to the col­lapse in the RMBS mar­ket was either bailed out by the gov­ern­ment or put into an order­ly receiver­ship. The lone excep­tion was the invest­ment bank that was like­ly the most exposed to the sub­prime mar­ket, Lehman Broth­ers. Lehman’s Chap­ter 11 bank­rupt­cy fil­ing meant that there would be no aid from the gov­ern­ment, and investors hold­ing Lehman RMBS could expect to get just pen­nies on the dollar.

Every oth­er major bank was deemed by Paul­son, Fried­man, Bolten and Kashkari to be Too Big To Fail because of the mort­gage cri­sis, except for Lehman, whose col­lapse would trig­ger mas­sive prof­its for Gold­man. While the pen­sion funds that had pur­chased Lehman secu­ri­ties lost bil­lions, Gold­man made out swimmingly.

Then there’s LIBOR, or the Lon­don Inter­bank Offered Rate, which was tied to the val­ue of $800 tril­lion in secu­ri­ties world­wide. In 2012, near­ly all of the world’s major banks were found to have manip­u­lat­ed LIBOR by arti­fi­cial­ly dis­tort­ing the data they sub­mit­ted to set the rate. Andrew Lo, a pro­fes­sor of finance at MIT, said in 2012 that the scan­dal ​“dwarfs by orders of mag­ni­tude any finan­cial scam in the his­to­ry of markets.”

These gam­bits demon­strate how con­cen­trat­ed pow­er in finan­cial mar­kets allows for the largest insti­tu­tions to manip­u­late these mar­kets for their ben­e­fit. And under Pres­i­dent Trump, even the most basic lev­els of secu­ri­ties law enforce­ment have decreased dra­mat­i­cal­ly. Law360 report­ed in Novem­ber 2017 that enforce­ment activ­i­ty had ​“plunged” since the Trump admin­is­tra­tion began.

In Jan­u­ary, Trump installed Robert Khuza­mi, a for­mer Deutsche Bank gen­er­al coun­sel, as the num­ber-two U.S. Attor­ney for the South­ern Dis­trict of New York, which com­mon­ly leads secu­ri­ties pros­e­cu­tions with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion. And Gold­man alum Steven Mnuchin is cur­rent­ly serv­ing as U.S. trea­sury sec­re­tary. This reg­u­la­to­ry roll­back, over­seen by indi­vid­u­als with strong ties to the finan­cial indus­try, allows bad actors in the mar­ket to ensure that they can oper­ate unscathed.

When the mar­kets fall pre­cip­i­tous­ly, as recent­ly hap­pened, it’s gen­er­al­ly not the ​“invis­i­ble hand” at work. Every bet has a win­ner and a los­er, and in the casi­no of Wall Street, the house always wins. The up-and-down jumps of the mar­ket ben­e­fit those with inside or priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion. And on the oth­er side are the mil­lions of ordi­nary investors with lit­tle under­stand­ing of the intri­ca­cies of how the mar­ket actu­al­ly works, and with lit­tle con­trol over how their wealth is actu­al­ly invested.

In July, Simon Der­rick of BNY Mel­lon com­plained to CNBC that the ​“lack of volatil­i­ty leads to a lack of trad­ing prof­its.” And the Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed Tues­day in an arti­cle enti­tled ​“Banks Cheer Return of Wild Mar­kets” that banks ​“have blamed placid mar­kets for lack­lus­ter returns in their big trad­ing oper­a­tions” but that ​“they’re cheer­ing the big mar­ket swings, see­ing hope for a boost in fees that dropped off a cliff last year.” The paper also quot­ed a financier say­ing “[a]nything that brings back volatil­i­ty would be good.”

Besides the big banks, anoth­er promi­nent ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the rise in volatil­i­ty is bil­lion­aire Vin­cent Viola’s Vir­tu Finan­cial, a high-fre­quen­cy trad­ing firm that han­dles 20 per­cent of all equi­ty trades in the U.S. stock mar­ket every day — that saw its prof­its plum­met along­side the reduc­tion of volatil­i­ty in the mar­kets. After this past week, Vir­tu now ​“rides high” with its share price jump­ing 40 per­cent in two days. Vio­la, the founder and ​“Chair­man Emer­i­tus” of Vir­tu, has sig­nif­i­cant ties to Don­ald Trump, who briefly nom­i­nat­ed Vio­la as Sec­re­tary of the Army in 2017.

While it’s impos­si­ble to prove that the lev­el of manip­u­la­tion that occurred with LIBOR and the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis is hap­pen­ing now, there is motive and oppor­tu­ni­ty: Wall Street’s largest trad­ing desks were neg­a­tive­ly hit by low volatil­i­ty, and the same banks and hedge funds have con­trol over hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars that can influ­ence price swings in the mar­kets. And for their bets on price swings in a volatile mar­ket to pay off, Wall Street has to have some­one on the oth­er side of that bet: the dumb mon­ey of pen­sion, 401(k)s, and mutu­al funds. The rise of high-fre­quen­cy trad­ing firms like Vir­tu come at the expense of every­one else.

So what needs to hap­pen to pro­tect these ordi­nary investors from such fluc­tu­a­tions? In a Feb­ru­ary In These Times cov­er sto­ry, Liza Feath­er­stone and Doug Hen­wood lay out one smart solu­tion — a mas­sive expan­sion of Social Secu­ri­ty so that peo­ple aren’t depen­dent on deeply cor­rod­ed mar­kets for their sav­ings and retirement.

Anoth­er good idea would be to elim­i­nate the tax exemp­tion for munic­i­pal bonds, and com­pelling pen­sion funds to invest in munic­i­pal bonds instead of Wall Street. This would end a huge tax shel­ter for the rich, while return­ing pub­lic pen­sion funds to the invest­ment strate­gies that worked well for them through the end of the 1960s.

A revived Glass-Stea­gall Act to sep­a­rate com­mer­cial and invest­ment bank­ing would also help to stamp out mar­ket manip­u­la­tion by rein­ing in the pow­er of banks like Gold­man and JP Mor­gan. But for these things to hap­pen, there needs to be a more adver­sar­i­al pub­lic atti­tude towards high finance. The stock mar­ket isn’t guid­ed by an invis­i­ble hand: There are real peo­ple behind it and prof­it­ing from it — and it isn’t you.