The best-kept secret on Wall Street is not how Jeffrey Epstein became filthy rich; it is that ordinary Americans do not actually own the assets in their investment and retirement accounts.

Yes, you read that correctly. In the early 1990s, as the Cold War was ending, the Uniform Commercial Code, “a comprehensive set of laws governing all commercial transactions in the United States,” was revised in a convoluted fashion that essentially stripped Americans of their property rights regarding direct ownership of their “securities accounts.”

Specifically, Article 8, which “provides a modern legal structure for the system of holding securities through intermediaries,” was altered so that “investment securities can be safely used as collateral” by large financial institutions.

In plain language, this obscure change twisted the legal definition of property ownership so that large financial institutions own the “securities accounts” whereas Americans own “security entitlements.”

Since this sounds too far-fetched to be even remotely true, I highly recommend you read The Next Big Crash, a new book that lays the whole story out in riveting detail.

“Wall Street’s biggest players rewrote the rules of asset ownership so that nearly all U.S. securities are legally owned by a........

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