It is a near certainty that you are underestimating how corrupt the system is.
In the movie "The Big Short" they follow three hedge funds that bet against the sub prime mortgage market and won big. In one spot this guy refers to one of these funds as "America's most cynical hedge fund". But even with these people who assumed they were crooks, even they did not appreciate how corrupt they really were.
Here is why I say this. I have learned how incredibly leveraged these companies are shorting the gold and silver market. I was a broker and you had to have your shorts "covered". That means we were always looking to sell people out in the event they were about to go belly up. A naked short was a scary thing. Generally you could sell short twice the amount of stock you had. Suppose some stock hit $100 a share and you had 100 shares. You could sell two hundred shares, meaning you are now short 100 shares. You get 20k for that sale but if that stock you sold goes to $150 we will demand you cover that short. You can lose money on your bet, but the brokerage firm is not going to lose money.
Now consider gold and silver, the ratio is ridiculous, like 100:1 to as much as 250:1. That means they are selling an ounce of gold on paper to 250 people and yet they only own 1 ounce of gold. Why would they do that? They will go bankrupt. Yes, but "they" is a corporation, not the individuals. Suppose the CEO owns $100 million worth of stock in the company, if the go bankrupt he loses it all. Now suppose the company he is CEO of is short $10 billion worth of gold. That is 100x what he could do with his $100 million. Yes, he'll lose that but he is helping all his friends to buy gold cheaply because he is short $10 billion. Those people in turn will reimburse him for his $100 million when his company goes bankrupt. I used to wonder why do CEO's who drove their company into bankruptcy get hired immediately to be CEO of another company. Because driving that company into bankruptcy made the board of directors on the other companies rich and they are repaying the favor. Why do you think some big fat loser of a CEO gets a fat bonus to go work for this other company after bankrupting the first? Because it is legal to reimburse him for the inside info he gave them. The point is all the people who think they own gold and silver on paper are the ones who lose, the CEO and other chief executives have golden parachutes and bankrupting their company might be their plan on how they themselves can get rich.
Consider the Big Short. I thought, surely the chief officials at these investment banks understood that what they were doing was not sustainable and would result in bankruptcy. Why would they do it? The answer was they knew the US government would bail them out, they had a trump card they could play in Washington DC that would force the US government to bail them out without anyone going to jail.
