Obviously, it won’t be possible to chronicle all of the fawning media coverage the various finance world moochers and looters received back when they were still viewed as conquering heroes. But this Vanity Fair piece about Walter Noel’s family is probably representative of the worst of it:
The Noel sisters of Greenwich, Connecticut, are turning tabloid-fodder sister acts (that is, Nicky and Paris Hilton) on their heads. In lieu of dancing on tables, the five Noel women have made a name for themselves by shoring up the virtues of a nearly extinct aristocracy. They’re well educated and well married, and they’re raising a pack of well-behaved, multi-lingual children while keeping their string-bikini figures intact.
[…..]The eldest sister, Corina, graduated from Yale and, while raising four daughters, works alongside her Colombian husband, Andrés Piedrahita, at the London office of the Fairfield Greenwich Group, an international hedge fund founded by Walter Noel. Lisina, a Georgetown graduate, met Yanko Della Schiava, an Italian alumnus of Aiglon College, in Saint-Tropez. She married him, and he now works at the Lugano, Switzerland, office of the Noel-family hedge fund. Ariane followed Lisina to Georgetown and Corina to London with her husband, Marco Sodi, an Italian who works for the Veronis Suhler Stevenson media-investment firm. Alix went to Brown and later married Philip Toub, an alumnus of Deerfield Academy and Middlebury College, who now works at the family office in Rio. Marisa, an all-American in lacrosse, graduated from Harvard after serving as president of its Hasty Pudding Club. She met Matt Brown, her fiancé, through Alix and Philip, and—surprise—he works not for the Noel-family hedge fund but for his own.
The Noel sisters—with not a divorce or scandale among them—seem to have heeded the wisdom of their grandmother Trudy Haegler, who once wrote up her own 10 commandments for the family’s future brides, including: “Make your husband believe that he is your Lord and Master, no matter what the feminists say”;
I like the fact that most of these of these Lords and Masters were errand boys for their wives’ fraudster father. It’s also hard not to compare with Burke’s famous description of Marie Antoinette:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.
And the enterprise that funded all the Brazilian nannies and houses in Palm Beach and Park Avenue and Southampton? You can probably guess.
Mr. Noel’s firm, including four sons-in-law as partners, now has the distinction of being the biggest known loser in the Madoff scandal, to the tune of $7.5 billion.
[….]The Fairfield Greenwich Group charged clients an annual fee of 1 percent of assets invested for providing access to exclusive hedge funds and performing due diligence on them, in addition to a fee of 20 percent on investment gains each year, according to people close to the fund’s operations. At that rate, an investment of $7 billion would have paid Mr. Noel’s company $70 million annually, and then $140 million more in a year in which Mr. Madoff reported a 10 percent gain (he steadily reported returns of 10 to 12 percent).
If Obama’s slight tax increase causes people like this to go Galt, we’re all in a lot of trouble.
Update. Sad news:
Friends of Andrés Piedrahita and Corina Noel were exchanging e-mails last week, trying to ascertain whether their Christmas trip to Mustique was going ahead as planned. It was supposed to be the usual affair; meet on Boxing Day in Barbados, then fly to the exclusive island by private jet. There they would eat their turkey in the sunshine at Yemanja, the Noel family holiday home, and enjoy views that are reputed to be the best on the island.
calipygian
Heh indeedy.
And the worst part of it is, I’ll bet that all that ill-gotten income was taxed at the capital gains rate and not the ordinary income rate.
JL
I actually read the article earlier this week. What a waste of my time.
El Cid
It appears that the only time we in this country act as though the fact that there is a fairly coherent economic and social upper class with disproportionate influence on the nation’s political activities means that it is only permissible to discuss this when it’s time to praise the refined lifestyle our betters manage to lead as an example to us all.
Comrade Stuck
It was supposed to be the usual affair; meet on Boxing Day in Barbados, then fly to the exclusive island by private jet.
JL
Doug, How long before the assholes category grows larger than the pets category?
Comrade Stuck
After watching John Mccain this morning on FNS, rave about the economic devastation wrought by earmarks, his wish to let AIG go under, and a 400 billion light stimulus for guess what, tax cuts for rich people, I am convinced we dodged a asteroid size bullet.
D-Chance.
Has Cole quit Balloon Juice and left these two nitwits in charge?
Seriously, Cole, go solo and fire up an auto-post for open threads a couple of times a day, and you’ll do much better than you are now with your current duo of pee-ons. I’d rather see more infrequent posts from one qualified blogger than the dreck that currently serves as "website filler" from two unqualified dunces…
Comrade Stuck
@D-Chance.:
Top of the morn to you to Dchance. sounds like you fell out of the wanker tree and hit ever branch coming down.
DougJ
@D-Chance
Good to hear from you again. It’s been a while.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Well thank God for that. I hate scandales.
aimai
I thought "scandale" was something french. Plus, I love "fell out of the wanker tree and hit every branch on the way down."
aimai
ricky
I heard on some cable blabberpfest that one of the lawyers representing a group of Ponzi scheme vicitms felt his clients best shot of recovering anything was to get back capital gains taxes paid to the federal government since those gains were not real.
I believe we should pay them in recalled Chinese toys.
Napoleon
@Comrade Stuck:
What kills me is they got their ass handed to them in the election and yet they have continued on with the exact same issues/talking points they got beat on, right down to Obama uses a teleprompter and was not born in the US.
El Cid
Yeah, morons, why don’t you hire some real bloggers who sound like somebody smart and maybe quote Newt Gingrich or Glenn Reynolds or someone huh?
DougJ
Me too. I’m not sure people realize how close we came to a real second Great Depression.
stickler
_Me too. I’m not sure people realize how close we came to a real second Great Depression._
Um, yeah. The way you’re using the past tense, there: optimistic.
This thing isn’t over yet.
Dave_Violence
"I believe we should pay them in recalled Chinese toys."
Good one!
El Cid said:
"It appears that the only time we in this country act as though the fact that there is a fairly coherent economic and social upper class with disproportionate influence on the nation’s political activities means that it is only permissible to discuss this when it’s time to praise the refined lifestyle our betters manage to lead as an example to us all."
It’s pretty disgusting, I agree. American Old Money needs to be put to useful work rather than separating itself from the rest of us unwashed types. This is an inner conflict I’ve had for years and years. On the one hand, as an American, I have the right to lawfully make as much money as I can and do with it, lawfully, as I see fit. On the other hand, someone else please fill in the blank.
gwangung
They should work just as hard to keep their money as the rest of us do to get up where they do…
jcricket
Matt Yglesias recently said if the robber barons and miscreants in the financial sector are actually discouraged from working due to higher tax rates,, it would be a net positive for the economy. In fact, paying these people $50 billion to simply go the fuck away would probably result in less ultimate economic destruction that allowing these "titans of industry" to "work their magic" for top dollar.
Lupin
I bet they taste just like chicken.
bootlegger
Jefferson tried to warn us of how dangerous inherited wealth is to the Republic. Ironically, Republicans disagree with him.
The United States has the lowest taxes on the intergenerational transfer of wealth among the capitalist economies and it also has the least amount of class mobility. In places where its harder to transfer wealth, wealth is earned rather than inherited. We instead allow a monied aristocracy to pass their wealth down, unearned, to the next generation. How can this possibly be our preferred economy?
El Cid
@Dave_Violence: On the other hand, you ought pay for the very society and economy whose correct functioning keeps you wealthy in the first place.
Napoleon
And then to add insult to injury we tax the income on that inherited wealth at a lower rate the labor.
Ash Can
Disclaimer: I did not read the Vanity Fair article, so I may be missing something important. However, to be blunt, I don’t see anything wrong with what these girls are doing, other than perhaps following a laughably antiquated view of gender relationships. If they were knowingly contributing to defrauding others through their father’s/husbands’ work, or deliberately using their money and/or influence to the clear detriment of others, that’s one thing. But wealth all by itself is not intrinsically bad. It’s easy to envy others, especially from a position of want. Heck, I felt that way myself back in my poverty-stricken student days. I envied the hell out of my classmates who didn’t have to struggle to make ends meet. But my envy didn’t do my own situation any good, and it didn’t make me feel any better about anything. I understand the venting here, but I don’t feel inclined to join in.
vacuumslayer
Well, as long they’re keeping their string bikini figures in tact. ‘Cuz, ya know, that’s what really matters in the end. *sigh*
Jrod
It’s not about envy, Ash Can. It’s about piling up the evidence that these richy-rich assholes are not, in fact, super-competent Masters Of The Universe, but the same trash as the rest of us with more money.
The whole argument against raising taxes on the poor, beleaguered rich is that they are simply better, more productive, and more important to the functioning of society than the rest of us; therefore us plebs need to stop meddling in their affairs and just leave them to do their thing, tax-free. Oh, and AIG needs another $80 mil, make it snappy.
These daughters of industry made their fortunes by… being shoved out of the right womb. They made their way in the world by… working for Dad, and marrying right. Who wants to guess what unique skills those guys have, other than Olympic level ass-kissing? The only thing that separates all of these people from us is blind luck.
DougJ
I don’t begrudge the girls anything either.
I find it comical that a family so lauded and idealized by the media was in fact defrauding investors by shipping its money to Bernie Madoff. Don’t you?
Porlock Junior
Waitaminnit. The guy took 20% of the profits? You do know that the Masters of the Hedge Fund had already taken 20% of its gains off the top, right? (Speaking here of what we may call, if not with a straight face, the legitimate hedge funds as opposed to Madoff.) This guy’s clients, surely the Lackeys of the Universe, were getting taken for 36% of the profits before they got anything.
(Go back 3 spaces if you added 20 and 20 and got 40%. Noel presumably got just 20% of the remainder after the hedge fund managers took theirs. Don’t know how he managed to make ends meet.)