Michael Lewis's new book Flash Boys, about the inherent unfairness of high speed trading, is the talk of Wall Street and the financial media. The backlash to the book is a familiar refrain: "Everyone already knows that." Well, that's the point, isn't it?

"This is a never-ending race," says the CEO of a high-speed trading firm that's built a network of lasers to trade stocks several nanoseconds faster. This is the single stupidest use of human ingenuity happening in the world today.

High frequency trading, in which superfast computer algorithims buy and sell stocks in fractions of a second, is little more than a tax on financial markets that goes directly into private pockets. There's more news today about how ridiculous the practice has become.

Here's a good explanation of how high frequency trading screws everyone except for high frequency traders.

There is currently a minor uproar over the revelation that various non-governmental groups sell early access— two seconds early—to their market-moving news releases to paying customers, who can then trade on that information before everyone else. This points to a larger problem: the entire institution of "high frequency trading" has no public benefit, and tons of risk.