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Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website.
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He is a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation. Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.

History's Already Repeating Itself on Wall St.

By Derek Thompson
Jul 31 2009, 2:20 PM ET Comment

The Wall Street herd is at it again.

Even as the cleanup crew is carting away the debris left by the last financial crisis, the investment banks, hedge funds and exchanges are busy working on the next one.

Forget collateralized-debt obligations and credit default swaps -- the new new thing is high-frequency trading. In the last three years, this practice has boosted trading on the country's stock exchanges by more than 150 percent, to the point where it now accounts for two-thirds of the daily trading volume.



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