The intrigue: As detailed by investment banker and pseudonymous blogger The Epicurean Dealmaker in the wake of the financial crisis, most if not all senior investment bankers exhibit "a very substantial number of the commonly accepted markers for psychopathy."

These include superficial charm, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, poor judgment and the inability to distinguish right from wrong.

"Sexually deviant lifestyle" and "promiscuous sexual behavior" are also on the list.

A picture tells a thousand words: In one photograph that has been doing the rounds in recent weeks, Epstein smiles genuinely at Larry Summers, who is wearing his trademark rictus. The photo shows how good Epstein was at putting people at ease — very, very few people can appear so loose and relaxed around Summers in particular.

• "Jeffrey was brilliant in understanding how people felt,” one of his ex-girlfriends told Vanessa Grigoriadis of Vanity Fair. “He could feel energy very clearly. But I think because he’s a sociopath, he would manipulate that for his own needs."
• Epstein would help people in ways large and small. He would offer them access to top-flight physicians for their medical problems, make valuable introductions, donate money to their favorite charities or find the staff they were looking for. Such actions resulted in those people liking him, trusting him and feeling indebted to him.
• Epstein's monstrous treatment of the women and girls he sexually assaulted proves that his shows of empathy were deeply fake. But those displays felt real to the targets of his attention.

By the time he was arrested on sex trafficking charges earlier this year, Epstein had amassed a fortune of more than $500 million — even after decades of lavish spending and despite the fact that he never even got a college degree.

• While the exact source of his wealth remains a mystery, it ultimately must have come from his skill at manipulating individuals.

The bottom line: Capitalism often looks as though it has been designed to reward its most malign actors.

• In the stock market, public order books on "lit" markets — where all the buy and sell orders for any given stock are theoretically visible to all traders — have been functionally useless for years. High-frequency traders place and withdraw millions of orders every second, and there's a mini "flash crash" in some stock or other every day, with the price plunging and then recovering within the blink of an eye.
• In precious metals futures, criminal racketeering and market manipulation went on for some 8 years, according to a complaint this week against JPMorgan traders, including the former head of the bank's precious metals desk.
• In fixed-income markets, banks have been fined billions of dollars — and 5 bankers have gone to jail — for manipulating the key Libor interest rate.

Where it stands: This week's chaos was largely due to a series of technical factors, including the fact that the Treasury issued some $54 billion of new bonds at exactly the same time that companies started withdrawing cash in order to make their Sept. 15 quarterly tax payments.

• That created a liquidity crunch, forcing the Fed to step in with $203 billion of short-term cash.

Context: Until the financial crisis in 2008, the Fed conducted open market operations every day to keep interest rates at their target level. Those operations ended when quantitative easing massively expanded the central bank's balance sheet.

• Now that its balance sheet is shrinking and banks need abundant reserves for regulatory reasons, the Fed is going to have to step in more frequently to ensure that rates are where they should be.

My thought bubble: The Fed's traders could probably have told Treasury's liability-management team that the timing of their bond issues would be problematic for the money markets.

• But we no longer live in a world where Tim Geithner could move effortlessly from Treasury to the New York Fed and back again. President Trump is waging war against the Fed, which makes things very awkward at Treasury.

What they're saying: "There are some advantages to just asking banks to make up the interest rate," writes the indispensable Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine. "To the extent that reality is messy and idiosyncratic there is something nice about abstracting away from it."

The bottom line: Multitrillion-dollar financial markets often look reasonably stable from afar. But they're always slapdash and human, and prone to deliberate or accidental breakage.

• When that happens, governments and technocrats need to be able to step in to fix what's broken. Governments aren't perfect, but taking them out of the system entirely, as some Bitcoin true believers would like to do, seems like a terrible idea.

Between the lines: Kickstarter is a company dedicated to having a "radically positive impact on society." As a chartered Benefit Corporation, it attests that it's more interested in its community than in its profits.

• Kickstarter is also fighting a unionization drive. It has fired 3 of the 8 members of its union organizing committee, and refuses to voluntarily recognize the union.
• Kickstarter is risking its much-vaunted status by doing so. "Specific actions taken against a unionization drive may jeopardize a company’s B Corp status," a representative of B Lab, the company that certifies companies as B Corps, tells Axios.

Etsy used to be a B Corp, but then it fired its CEO and more than 200 other employees, gave up its B Corp status and started becoming much more profitable.

The bottom line: Companies love to talk about their grand ideals. But those ideals can get thrown under the bus very quickly if profits lie elsewhere.