You really have to read this piece called the “Wail of the 1%” to believe it. My personal favorite quote is the following:
The argument that Obama has in fact done a great deal to help Wall Street—to the tune of trillions of dollars—doesn’t have much truck with these critics. “If you really take a look at what Obama is promising, it’s frightening,” says Nicholas Cacciola, a 44-year-old executive at a financial-services firm. “He’s punishing you for doing better. He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation—it’s wealth distribution. Why are you being punished for making a lot of money?” As a Republican corporate lawyer puts it: “It’s the politics of envy, and that’s very dangerous.”
After watching the 60 Minutes piece last night about how these guys got filthy rich on fees on your money, the notion that these guys are about wealth creation just tickled me. If ever there was a portrait of entitlement, it is these guys.
(via the comments)
*** Update ***
This Joe Klein piece is excellent.
MattF
The Wall Street Wizards were engaged in wealth creation in the sense that they created wealth within their own bank accounts. Otherwise, not so much.
Calouste
This will never get sorted until the myth that bankers create wealth (instead of making it easier for other people to create wealth through loans etc) is thoroughly debunked.
Numbers on a piece of paper isn’t equal to wealth. Money in itself doesn’t constitute wealth, it’s what you can buy for it.
schrodinger's cat
Good to have you back! There was some speculation on the last thread about your whereabouts.
TenguPhule
Because you made that money by being parasitic scum with no redeeming value whatsoever, perhaps?
flounder
They really fucking don’t get it do they? Most people that run “fumbling, mismanaged” anythings get paid LESS than a delivery guy.
angulimala
The efficient allocations and reallocation of money IS valuable.
I would just like to see SOME acknowledgment that the past decade featured one of the biggest and most inefficient misallocations of wealth in human history.
The way Merchants and Traders add value is by taking resources from where they are not needed and moving them to where they are needed.
These guys took massive amounts of money from all over and threw it into the housing market. They took it from where it was needed and moved it to where it wasn’t.
But they went to good Colleges ….. and surely Americans should have the right to ride on the backs of our teenage accomplishments for the rest of our pathetic lifes.
bayville
Flounder beat me to my favorite but this one is rich as well:
Joshua Norton
Charging people to move their money around doesn’t create any tangible goods. Inflating the value of existing goods doesn’t create “wealth”, it just starts another boom and bust cycle. Something we didn’t have to worry about after the enforcement of post Depression regulations. That is until the Reaganites started pulling them apart. The first thing to go bust was the Savings and Loans, then the Enron collapse, now the banking system.
So YES, less regulation for the richers, please. We just love those 20 year boom & bust cycles we used to have pre Glass-Steigle.
angulimala
@flounder,
But they went to good colleges….
bayville
Oh the horrors!
Zifnab
That’s right. I
was born richstole millions from my neighborslie to the general public for big corporate buckswon the lottery by shorting AIGraped the environment at a profitearned my money through hard work. So all you little people can just suck it. People who work 80 hours a week in a blue collar job don’t deserve nice things. College is too affordable. People are over insured. If you just believed in Jesus, invested in some better bootstraps, and decided to Go Galt like the rest of us, you wouldn’t have any problems.You’re just jealous of our success.
John Cole
@schrodinger’s cat: I was busy this morning at an appt.
bayville
Do the unwashed masses have no sense of decency?
Napoleon
Actually the guy in the Sysco truck should be paid more then the entire financial sector because in reality he/she has done more for the economy over the last decade or so then the entire financial sector.
Zifnab
@flounder: Unless they’re too big to fail!
Walker
Why don’t these people all move to Mexico? I think they will find the incentive system down there much more to their liking.
Just Some Fuckhead
Next time, we do the Great Depression again. I’ll stand in a soup line so those fuckers can be splats on the sidewalk.
Pete
That a bunch of rich, overprivileged jerks are offended and confused by the fact that suddenly not as many people are falling down to worship them is hardly surprising.
What struck me more about the article was the NYMag writer’s consistent drumbeat of “What you have to understand is…” and “From their perspective, it’s almost as though…”
Given the story he’s telling, it’s hard to see how the writer could expect his reader to have any response besides “I would like to punch every single last goddamn one of these assholes in the head.” And yet, he seems to expect me the reader to have sympathy for his subjects.
arguingwithsignposts
I personally like the one who said something about how nobody could tell the amount of “blood, sweat, and tears” that went into making those millions. Sweat? I’ll give you. Tears? Sure, why not. But Blood? Please. Sitting in an office for 60-80 hours a week is not bloody.
I cannot imagine this generates much sympathy. And besides, if we’re going to get in a rage-off between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, I think I’d bet on the 99.
Zandar
Cry more, capitalist n00bs. Your tears sustain us Socialist types.
benjoya
by “punished,” i assume he means “being given billions of dollars.” where’s my punishment?
MikeJ
Walker, I had the same thought as you, these guys should “go Galt” and move to some place with less government interference, see if they like it there. Rather than Mexico though, I’d suggest something like Côte d’Ivoire.
lawnorder
Because you are broke and now want my tax money to fund your excess
Sarcastro
Everyone on Wall Street is prepared to lose money. Bankers have expressions for disastrous losses: clusterfuck, Chernobyl, blowing up … But no one was prepared to lose their own money
this way.Little fix for clarity there.
John Cole
What they fail to realize is that a lot of us are under the impression that had they all gone Galt twenty years ago we might have been saved from this disaster.
And really, I can’t wait to see 200,000 bankers out of the American Psycho mold trying to dig a well in Galt’s Gulch. That should be some good times. Talk about blood, sweat, and tears.
Dennis-SGMM
@flounder:
…but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton…
These guys are the equivalent of the idiot princes spawned by waning medieval dynasties. It never really was a meritocracy on Wall Street – was it?
flounder
when this shit started. I said that we all needed to go to the public square, select a financial company office at random in our town, and burn it down. It would have set the terms of engagement so we wouldn’t have to put up with this nonsense.
Open you mouth, another bank go up. Simple as that.
Barry Soetoro
Options for these Guys:
Go Galt
Hold Teabagging rallies all over the nation
DIAF
Shut up (you’re not making it any easier for your “predicament”)
Napoleon
On a related matter, check out the nugget in this Joe Klein piece on what an Administration official told him about the bankers.
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/04/20/roller-coaster-down/
TenguPhule
No, that would just be me and a growing number of taxpayers who feel that you owe us so much money you’ll have to go into slavery to pay us all back.
Doctor Gonzo
Go Galt, bitches!
El Cid
When you hear stuff like this, you have to also remember that there is a very, very complicated cultural, economic, and political system in place to train people to think like this. It’s not just a spontaneous conglomeration of assholes in one spot. We’d be much better off if that were the case.
It’s like when you read how certain people in certain cultures 500 or whatever years ago had some odd belief, and you realize that this was the product of a cultural system (i.e., the belief that women or Africans had no souls whereas European males did, thus justifying all sorts of policies), rather than some individual psycho-cultural defect.
TenguPhule
And that is merely a pale shadow of my plan first announced on this blog:
1. Pick out the biggest most important #1 Banker and shoot him in front of the others.
2. Explain to Banker #2 what is needed.
3. Repeat as needed.
Slappy White
This article could have been just as easily been in the Onion and it would not have skipped a beat.
J.D. Rhoades
But…but…you don’t understand! These bankers are like the Jews in Hitler’s Germany! If you stand by while people say bad things about them, you’re Nazis! NAZIS, I say!
My Prius rolls on dubs
Fuckin’ A John, get this one up on the front page! Brilliant use of one of my favorite movies.
Brachiator
Did I miss where these clowns are giving back the bailout money? These jerks are indistinguishable from the bank robber who explains that his loot belongs to him because he stole if fair and square.
I think you underestimate how much effort it takes to push the Enter key to as you create phantom transactions. Oh, the humanity!
Svensker
This is what our Wall Street friend tells us all the time. HE got his MBA from a GOOD school, he sure as hell deserves to get a bigger paycheck than a hairdresser. Plus, the dumb hairdressers and the negroes are the ones who made the economy go bust by being irresponsible.
The guy has always been a staunch Democrat, now hates Obama, and is going to register Repub. He’s also decided that since the Dems “believe” in global warming, it’s probably a hoax, too, designed to take away his money that he EARNED!1!1!
We don’t talk to him much anymore.
Dennis-SGMM
The Golgafrincham B-Ark comes to mind.
Calouste
People who think they are owed something just because their parents had enough money or the right connections to get them into a big name university are a problem for society. It would be nice if they understood that society really starts measuring your contributions after you have finished your education, and that having an education in itself doesn’t contribute anything to society, it’s what you do with it.
erlking
See, El Cid, when I hear stuff like this I remember that the sans culottes made vulgar puppet shows with the headless bodies of freshly guillotined aristocrats. And then I feel a need to take in some theater.
DougJ
I do respect the canvassing and the fact he drives a normal car.
But can we give it a rest with the summer jobs? Brian Williams was a volunteer fireman, Tim Russert helped his dad clean up the butcher shop every day after the nuns let him out at school. Who cares what anyone did when they were teen-agers? What does that have to do with anything?
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m still trying to figure out why their kids have to go to private schools.
Walker
These guys are the equivalent of the idiot princes spawned by waning medieval dynasties. It never really was a meritocracy on Wall Street – was it?
So I went to Dartmouth for undergrad. Not the most high profile of the Ivies, but an Ivy nonetheless (and I am convinced, now that I am on the other side in academia, the only Ivy that gives a damn about undergraduate education). And even there you saw evidence of this.
Dartmouth has its number of legacies and wealth underachievers. They don’t care about classes all that much; all they want to do was to pass and get a degree. The reason they go to Dartmouth is for “the network”. That is the collection of alumni contacts that assures them a high-paying job in the business world so long as they get their degree.
This is how it has always been in our country. The primary reason why the Ivies are thought of as highly as they are is because they are the oldest schools, and they have the most extensive alumni networks.
Dennis-SGMM
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Because they might find out that they’re no better than the peasants?
Walker
Because their kids are dumb as rocks, and private school connections are the only way they are going to get into an Ivy (and thus take advantage of the alumni network I referred to in post 44).
In undergrad, I learned very quickly to never do group work with anyone from Andover, Exeter, or Choate. With rare exceptions, they were entitled morons who expected you to do all the work for them (because they could not do it themselves).
RememberNovember
Shhhhhh! Don’t give away the secrets of capitalism:
ie:
1. Jack up interest rates on the consumer while paying NOTHING back to the Fed to borrow (Chase, BoA…)
2. Over-leverage your position based on ghost assets and invisible money (AIG…et al)
3. Cry “Uncle Sam”, hat in hand when your balance sheet is redder than Mao Tse Tung’s boxers (GM )
4. Bitch about how the administration is “redsitributing” wealth when the US tries get back what it loaned. (this jackass)
Comrade Dread
Boo. Hoo.
Memo to the Wall St. crowd.
Unless you’ve been a paycheck away from being homeless,
unless you’ve had to decide between eating or paying a bill,
unless you’ve had to sit for hours on a public transit system because you couldn’t afford the gas to drive to work,
unless you’ve cut up your prescription drugs to make them last longer because you couldn’t afford more,
unless you have contemplated going on public assistance because you could no longer afford health insurance for your pregnant wife because you lost your job,
unless you’ve ever scrounged through the cushions of your couch to get enough change to buy dinner,
unless you’ve ever floated a check on groceries and spent the next day praying that it wouldn’t clear until the following day, because you couldn’t afford the penalties the bank would assess…
You can be humble and thank God (or whomever) every day for the fact that even in the worst of times for you, you still make more money than 10 average American families… or you can kindly shut up and keep your complaints to yourself before enough of the above crowd gets fed up with you and storms the palaces.
TenguPhule
Because public schools are for poor people.
I am convinced many problems in our country could be solved by eating the rich.
kay
I’m not at all envious of these people, and I’m tired of them telling me I am.
They wouldn’t have even come to my attention at all if they hadn’t destroyed their own industry.
I’m not a banker or a broker. What I’m supposed to do is my job, and they’re supposed to do theirs. That was the deal. If I have money left over from doing my job, I put it in the bank, and if there’s money left over after that, I put it in a mutual fund.
They’re supposed to not piss it all away. They’re compensated really, really well to do one thing: not piss it all away.
If I have to monitor them constantly, I can’t do my job, and if a lot of people like me can’t do our jobs, then they won’t have any money to play with.
Maybe they need to go back to basics. Where does the money they earn actually come from? Is it….people making bank deposits, taking loans and investing in the stock market? Does it come from all those “envious” people, their customers?
They should start there. With their customers.
What other industry on the face of the planet treats their customers this way?
gwangung
Yes.
That would do nicely.
Go for it, Obama.
Frodo
@TenguPhule:
Ahhh the Firefly method! :)
flounder
If only life were so fair…and tar and feathers not so expensive these days.
ricky
Only if we got them to eat each other.
ET
Envy? WTF? I am sure there are a few people out there that were envious of the inordinant amount of money they were “earning” but not me. These guys were a**hole when they were flying high and they are a**hole when everyone isn’t “envious.” To the Wall Street crowd – boo fucking hoo.
The phrase “made out of whole cloth” seems to pertain to a lot of what there were doing. They were “creating” wealth using nothing at all.
ricky
“In undergrad, I learned very quickly to never do group work with anyone from Andover, Exeter, or Choate. With rare exceptions, they were entitled morons who expected you to do all the work for them (because they could not do it themselves).”
If you learned never to do group work in school period you would have learned a better lesson.
If you refer to a university as “an Ivy” you will differ little in a few decades from the attitude you decry now.
kay
@ET:
They should have kept their mouths shut. I had no idea what jerks they are. I’m assuming most people weren’t giving them a whole lot of thought. Now we know.
Walker
You clearly aren’t an educator. Group projects are standard now for a reason. The trick, of course, is organizing so that students in the group do not take advantage of one another, but we understand how to do this pretty well now.
I am referring to a specific set of universities that are grouped together by that name. I made no statement about their relative quality to other universities.
Cris
I’m sick to death of this bullshit line. I’ve been hearing it for years. “Taxes = punishment.” Listen: you’re not being punished for anything, you’re being required to contribute. You have more than your share of the wealth, so you get to carry more than your share of the burden.
If that feels like punishment to you, it’s because you’re selfish and anti-social. Most of us learned by the time we were eight years old that we’re not the only beings in the universe. The rest of us apparently became conservatives.
D-Chance.
That article is so full of fail:
“I’m not giving to charity this year!” one hedge-fund analyst shouts into the phone, when I ask about Obama’s planned tax increases. “When people ask me for money, I tell them, ‘If you want me to give you money, send a letter to my senator asking for my taxes to be lowered.’ I feel so much less generous right now. If I have to adopt twenty poor families, I want a thank-you note and an update on their lives. At least Sally Struthers gives you an update.”
Here’s an update, asshole. You lost half of their retirements. Maybe they should deliver that thank-you note in person…
omen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
amy carter went to public school and reportedly was miserable. can you imagine how would you be treated if you were the only kid in school to have a famous parent? the rest of the school couldn’t relate. the resentment and teasing that engendered must have been intense.
thankfully the obamas put the welfare of their kids first, ahead and over winning political brownie points.
arguingwithsignposts
@Cris:
Yeah, that “punishment” idea is ludicrous. Look, I’d gladly take $5 million and you can have half in taxes. I’d still make more than 99% of the population. I benefit more from society’s capitalist system, I should pay more to support it.
The problem is it’s Limbaugh-speak. The “It’s not their money” line. It’s a very simplistic view of government and society. “It’s all about me.”
Never mind that a large percentage of these folks got where they were because of built in advantages in education, parentage, family wealth, connections, etc. Not all, but a great many of them.
Chris Johnson
This.
I have this in common with these people: my various jobs are things I want to do, or that are pretty easy for me to do if I stick with it.
That’s good, because I work LONG hours and sometimes I really wonder if I’m going to survive that or if it’s going to just plain burn me out. If I stuck with Job One it might not be like that, but I do have to keep coming up with newer, grander schemes: as a small businessman with no ‘day job’ that’s normal. Complacency is bad for you.
I have NONE of the financial cushion of these people, but I’ll only seriously want it if I get sick (at which point I’ll be fucked) or have some disastrous calamity (ditto).
I guess they feel the same way only their calamity is Billy not getting into Exeter, or not being able to have proper leisure in the Hamptons at the summer house.
I’m doing my job. I like my job, for the most part. I spend my days doing stuff I want to do, however odd that may be.
I have a friend who inherited very big wealth. I’m not envious of him either. He tipped me off that some nice luxuries are a chair-insert back massager (already have- he sez it’s 90% as good as the dedicated massage chairs, which I wouldn’t have known) and a bread-maker, which I easily got as well. So I can have a back-rub from a machine, and bread, and having those things I go back to work doing stuff.
Are we supposed to want to be wealthy and do nothing?
I’m not envious of these people, I just think they could be taxed at Reagan or Nixon levels and the world would be just fine…
wasabi gasp
When it comes to whining, rich folks are kind of impoverished, all they have is taxes, while Regular Old Joes get to sit in front of a whole smorgasbord of problems to whine about on a daily basis. Being on the outside, looking in, banging on the glass of the all-you-can-eat Buffet O’ Shit with nothing left but a few scraps of whine about the burdens of a massive paycheck is a very, very sad spectacle. Somebody please close the blinds, I’m trying to eat here.
jcricket
I 100% agree. A mildly increased tax burden on these people, barely in line to where it was 15 years ago, is no burden at all.
As importantly, what about all the laid off regular joes who are being laid off on no fault of their own, but instead because of all the bubble-inducing idiocy of these financial geniuses caused good companies to go out of business? Do those regular joes deserve $0 paychecks, losing their homes, healthcare-related bankruptcies? No, but there you have it.
So these bankers should be on their FUCKING HANDS AND KNEES THANKING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE that they even have a job. Let alone one where where they get paid enough that they might have to pay 4% more in taxes on income over $250k.
If Obama and the Democrats are smart, they will reframe this as idiotic, parasitic, selfish loser rich people being WATB. This whole notion of “progressive taxation = wealth killing” needs to be shot in the head.
Cyrus
What, are they waiting for? Do they want us to beg?
Slugger
I mentioned this on another site. I looked at a website for the Iraq war KIA’s from my state which includes a little biographical note with each fallen soldier. They were no Ivy League grads, lots of high school diploma onlies, lots of first and second generation Americans, lots of names ending in ez. Is it possible that lower economic strata Americans also bear burdens for the USA?
arguingwithsignposts
@omen:
I can understand the argument in a way, but I also think it creates further inequalities as the rich have no interest in making sure public schools work for all students, since they can just pay more to shield their kids from the other kids. Then, those kids grow up with a sense of entitlement and little connection with the larger community of the less well off.
Witness teh comment above from the idiot about not giving to charity. So much for that “rising tide lifts all boats” crap.
BethanyAnne
@Cris: Amen
Just Some Fuckhead
Get back to me when a big deal doesn’t get done because G.I. Joe won’t take a conference call on the other side of the world at 2am.
You don’t know what burdens are until you’ve been forced to carry a six hundred dollar organizer-phone and keep restaurants in business with your extravagant spending.
My Prius rolls on dubs
Bottom Line: You ran your company into the ground and therefore deserve NO bonus of any kind. For the grace of THE TAXPAYER goes your job.
So be thankful you even get that you rich, whiny fucks.
Ecks
So let me get this right. Having been given free range to explore their ingenuity unfettered for 20 years, they successfully lined the basement of the building in TNT, blew up a whole wing, and started raging fires elsewhere… and now they are saying “waaahhhh! You can’t take away our freeeedom!!! We’re so creative!!! We make stuff!
Comrade Dread
As would most Americans who, on average, make between 45 and 55 thousand dollars a year and who are very familiar with budgeting and scarcity.
I wouldn’t think it would be that hard for these Wall St. a$$holes to understand why their whining about 3% more in taxes and putting compensation limits on TARP companies is offensive to millions of Americans, but there it is.
Most of us would be grateful to have 2 or 3 million dollars a year, even if we had to pay half of it in taxes.
jcricket
@Ecks: Don’t forget, you also have to keep them employed to unwind all the ridiculously complex web of financial bullshit they built up over the last 5 years.
Fuckers.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Frodo: Ahhh the Firefly method! :)
Not exactly, if you’re thinking about the bit where Mal kicked the guy into the ship’s engine. He was nice enough to explain it the first guy and get a refusal BEFORE killing him – I’d prefer that, personally.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Comrade Dread: I wouldn’t think it would be that hard for these Wall St. a$$holes to understand why their whining about 3% more in taxes and putting compensation limits on TARP companies is offensive to millions of Americans, but there it is.
There it is, indeed – it’s because they all live in Bush Bubbles™.
jcricket
As importantly, if I had the potential to earn an extra $500k, but you told me it would be taxed at 60%, so I’d only bring in $200k, I’d still fucking do it.
Yeah, maybe if the top marginal tax rate was 99% I wouldn’t do it, but for someone else the top tax rate would be 60%, so they’d pick up my “slack”.
And moreover, a ton of this money is in capital gains, which isn’t charged this top tax rate anyway.
The whole notion of the Laffer curve, rich people not working, etc. is LUDICROUS!
geg6
@DougJ:
Wait. You mean this motherfucker is from Pittsburgh??????? Do we know if that is his real name? I know a lot of DeSantises here. I’ll hunt this fucker down and bring all my buddies who are laid off bricklayers and former steelworkers who would just love to show him all about morals here in the ‘Burgh. He apparently has forgotten. You know who’d love to re-teach him? Iron workers. Yeah, I think Jake needs to meet up with some iron workers.
PurpleGirl
Instead of saying that someone worked 60-80 hours a week, could one of them Please! explain what they did during that time. How many phone calls did they make, how many meetings did they attend, what research did they directly do themselves, how many letters did they send out (after an assistant typed them!) or were they in their offices, napping on a couch?
Church Lady
@ricky #56:
Spot on concerning “group projects”. Inevitably, there are one or two in the group doing all the work and the remainder just hitch a ride on the bus, while sharing in the grade. I don’t understand why college instructors assign such projects, unless it is to have their students learn at a tender age the folly of being the worker bee in a group.
Input on the usefulness of this practice from our blog hosts would be appreciated, given all are academics.
PaulB
There was also this quote:
Congress did not “want,” require or ask these guys to cut corners, to issue loans that even a financial near-illiterate like me wouldn’t issue, to stop asking for documentation, to fail to even do the minimal amount of review necessary to verify that the money had a chance in hell of being paid back — that was all their own devising.
As for the “rational challenge” bullshit, here’s the thing: a guy can certainly lie on his mortgage application and, if he does, the mortgage broker should call him on it and refuse to issue the loan, possibly even submit the fraudulent application to law enforcement for prosecution, if appropriate.
But who has the real power in this relationship? Who is supposed to demand the documentation so that he can discover whether the guy is lying on his mortgage application? Who is being paid to know whether the loan is a good risk? Who is being paid to know what type of loan, and how much money, an individual should get and to advise them accordingly?
Was anyone *forcing* this moron to give money to the guys who were lying? Or forcing this moron to make bad loans that should never have been made? So hell, yes, “the money guys were the perpetrators.”
tripletee (formerly tBone)
Don’t be such an ignorant peasant. It’s the role of the lower class to bear burdens while their betters enjoy a lavish lifestyle free of tiresome social or moral constraints. Don’t you understand the natural order of things?
Church Lady
@arguingwithsignposts:
“…since they can just pay more to shield their kids from the other kids.”
Parents with children in private schools choose to pay for their children’s educations for an infinite variety of reasons. Our oldest graduated from our neighborhood public high school in 2006. We pulled our youngest out of there at the semester break the following year, and it wasn’t because we were anxious to take on the tutition payment. It was because growing gang activity, fights and drug dealing reached a level we couldn’t tolerate. In our case, it was a concern for our child’s safety.
TenguPhule
We already covered that when Obama talked to them.
They didn’t listen to him.
Now it’s time for phase 2.
Jrod
@Church Lady: Let me guess, CL. Some of the rich friends, of which you have so many, (who are all angry with Obama but have totally legit reasons for it and therefore shouldn’t be put through such a wringer by us low-class types) told you there was a really scary gang problem going on, and you believed them because you’ll believe any bullshit that comes from someone who’s richer than you. And your putting the little one into private school was solely because of those scary uncouth negroes, and not to curry favor with all those rich, snobby friends of yours.
Am I warm?
kay
I’m still trying to figure out how they lost all that money.
They have had one idea since the 17th century: interest. They borrow at 2% (or less) and lend at 7% (or more).
How do you screw that up so bad?
I look at a grocery store, with a razor-thin profit margin, and I think “now that’s a difficult way to turn a profit!”
I look at these guys, and I don’t know how they lose. Did they actually take all the profit on interest as bonuses? Is that what happened? Were they somehow permitted to just take that entire 5%?
What if they ran grocery stores? I’d starve to death.
Ash Can
Christ on a pogo stick, but these guys are assholes. And I’m saying this as someone who’s gone to the schools they’ve gone to and worked in the same business as them.
::headdesk::
OK, oh Brilliant Hedge-Funder, let’s take it from the top. And I’ll go slowly so you can follow along. “JP Morgan and all these guys” are still in business because the government bailed their asses out. If the government hadn’t done this, “all these guys” would in effect BE on strike, because they’d be OUT OF BUSINESS. Yes, a large chunk of the economy here and abroad would be pulled down without Wall Street; that’s why your sorry asses were bailed out. You’re lucky you still have a job. And I’m paying your salary, by the way, so yeah, you’re welcome.
But if you and your buddies want to stomp your feet and Go Galt, be my guest. There are an awful lot of sharp financial people out there who would be able to step into your job with a very short learning curve. In short, YOU CAN BE REPLACED. It’s all part of the beauty of capitalism. Deal with it.
Here’s the news: the name of your school doesn’t give you a free pass into a good job. You still have to convince a potential employer that you can contribute to the firm. Here’s more news: once you’ve got a job, your future in it isn’t guaranteed. Management can change, the industry can change, your circumstances can change. Your old boss can retire and be replaced by someone who decides he hates your face. Your company could sell out to a bigger firm that decides your department doesn’t fit into its business plan. Or, in this case, your business could collapse and blow your whole damned company sky high, in which case you’re UNBELIEVABLY LUCKY to still have a job because the fucking Feds are keeping your sorry ass afloat. So take your paycheck and SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE HOLE, before the people standing between you and a cardboard box in the fucking alley change their minds.
PS: The issue of public vs. private school really shouldn’t enter into the debate. Church Lady is right; parents (of widely varying means) send their kids to private school for any number of reasons. It’s a different debate altogether.
TenguPhule
You loan the money to someone who can’t pay it back and then sell that same loan to 10,000 other people who promptly chop it up into little pieces and sell it to 10,000 more people.
Banks used to hold their own loans for the interest until they discovered that steady payments don’t result in flashy quarterly results and accompanying bonuses to bankers.
TenguPhule
I’m guessing we’d be humanitarians.
someguy
You all talk shit about the bankers, but what about all the greedheads with 401(k)’s (and investment-reliant defined contribution plans) and gambling on Our Lady of Perpetual Home Appreciation? State and local governments use these investment tools to multiply budget bucks too, and to fund their big spending ways.
So yeah, it’s easy to scapegoat the bankers (and if anybody deserves pitchforking other than Dick Cheney it’s them) but they’re just the dealers. Seems to me you’re raving about them but ignoring the junkies who create the demand.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
TenguPhule
greedheads with 401ks? Dumbass, we’re in 401ks because the fucking companies don’t want to offer pensions and schnookered an entire generation into believing it could replace a pension.
arguingwithsignposts
@Church Lady:
Parents with children in private schools choose to pay for their children’s educations for an infinite variety of reasons.
Sadly, no. There aren’t an “infinite” variety of reasons. There are a few reasons. 1. Christian fundamentalism, 2) elitism; 3) “crime/gangs”; 4) scary black/minorities; 5) concern over the “other” of being rich/well-known; 6) ???
The point isn’t that there are not some valid reasons for parents to move their children out of a public school, but to point out that every time someone moves out of the public schools, there is less incentive to make those public schools better, which might actually lower the crime level. BTW, I should note that before the public school, there is the suburban “white flight” school, which also has better educational opportunities than the ones in which the “scary black people” inhabit.
And don’t think I don’t know from whence I speak. My parents took my sister out of public school because they didn’t want her mingling with the forced-busing black folk in the 1970s. Instead, she married a white trash spouse-abuser/drug addict. My other sisters went through public school and were reasonably well-adjusted.
And, FWIW, all parents “pay” for their children’s educations – even through those nasty property taxes.
You don’t think there’s drug dealing going on in private schools? that’s incredibly naive.
Jrod
When those other greedheads make a point of popping up every couple days to whine long and loud about the way they’re being punished by being expected to pay slightly higher taxes after they lost all that money and received billions in taxpayer money, and this was being covered by serious newspapers as serious news appearing two pages away from the latest loss of half a million jobs, then we’ll be here to rage against them too.
Church Lady
@Jrod:
No, not even warm. It might have been the repeated gang fights in school, on an almost weekly basis, that had something to do with our decision. It might have been seeing our child’s school featured on our local evening news on an almost weekly basis, with reporters outlining that week’s weapon collections and drug busts. The resulting metal detector our child had to walk through every morning should have bought us a little more comfort that it did, but since it was only there in the morning and kids with weapons continued to come into the school later in the day, that just didn’t allay our fears too much. I suppose it could have had just a little to do with the day our son got caught up in a fight as it rolled down the hallway while he stood at his locker. Yeah, I think that one was the final straw, especially since his friend at the locker next to him got shoved into a locker door and required stitches to close the resulting head wound.
But I know that if it were your child, you would have left him or her there, no matter what the consequences, because you wouldn’t want to be seen as currying favor from the rich.
arguingwithsignposts
@Ash Can:
PS: The issue of public vs. private school really shouldn’t enter into the debate. Church Lady is right; parents (of widely varying means) send their kids to private school for any number of reasons. It’s a different debate altogether
See comment above. It’s a diff. debate, but not without an angle on the current issue. These people think they are entitled to private school education. I know middle-class people who scaped and scrimped to get their kids into middling private schools because they thought it would get them ahead. But these are NOT those people.
Here’s a social experiment for you: increase middle-class wages to a livable income in an area, participate in the public school system, and fully fund the schools and see if that fixes your problems.
Just Some Fuckhead
I had a private school education too and we were all there for pretty much the same reason: to get away from Teh Black. Of course, our parents expressed the same concerns as Church Lady. It’s more polite, donchaknow.
Jrod
No, if it was my child I’d leave him there because I’m fucking broke. And you’d be glad to just leave the school in shambles because heck, those other kids left there were poor too, and if they were worth half a shit they’d be in private school like your little angel.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck you, you pampered fuck.
(Not that I believe any of the shit you’re saying about that school. I mean, you’re the person who’s convinced that the tea parties were just pleasant get-togethers because heck, you stopped by one of them and didn’t see any lynching going on, so why are we BJ uncouths being so mean to those patriots? You make me physically ill.)
Church Lady
@arguingsignposts:
I also sat on the joint parent/teacher/administration board at the school for a year, volunteering my time to try to help find solutions to some of never ending problems with student discipline. Saying it was a head to desk banging exercise in futility is a massive understatement. Any suggestions made by parents or faculty was met with the same response from the administrators: That won’t work because their parents don’t care. Next idea?
After a year, I gave up and quit the board. Three months later, we quit the school.
Brachiator
@Frodo:
Rufus T. Firefly?
arguingwithsignposts
@Church Lady:
But I know that if it were your child, you would have left him or her there, no matter what the consequences, because you wouldn’t want to be seen as currying favor from the rich.
I empathize with your point, I really do. But did you or anyone else stop to think that the problem is deeper than the stupid a**hole kids who were in the gangs? What’s the socio-economic situation in your neighborhood? What’s the underlying *cause* of all that screwed up s**t going on?
I’m glad you have an out. But what about those who don’t? Are we all supposed to get “vouchers” and take the state money and give it to private schools?
It’s this sort of abandonment of public schools that is a major part of the problem. I’m not saying I’ve got an easy solution, but it’s always about my child and never about the school. I don’t know that I wouldn’t do the same thing you did, but I can say that I’d think long and hard before doing so, if only because I’d feel like I was abandoning the community for an enclave of privilege.
BTW, many private school teachers get dumped on in terms of pay in relation to public school teachers (many, not all, and certainly probably not the private school teachers these Wall Street folks are utilizing). Isn’t that the irony: you pay more for “superior” safety and education when you end up screwing the teachers. Again, speaking from experience here.
kay
@TenguPhule:
I’ve been paying interest my entire adult life. Student loans, a home mortgage, a business loan.
I understood that. The bank had the money, I wanted to borrow it, they get a cut.
I’m trying to figure out how you lose money on that. They lent it years ago, and it’s been delivering a healthy return year after year, and they didn’t have to do jack.
Well, they paid someone 10 dollars an hour to process three loan applications, but after that initial investment, it was the closest thing to effort-free profit I can imagine.
Church Lady
@Jrod:
That’s the difference between you and I. I would work a second or third job if that’s what it took to insure the safety of my child. Broke wouldn’t enter into it as an excuse for keeping my child someplace I considered to be unsafe. The same would go if I thought my child was receiving an inferior education, although that was not the situation we faced. As a last resort, I would try homeschooling.
Of course, in your view, even poor children enrolled in private schools with the help of financial aid (of which there are quite a few at my son’s parochial school), must be snobs intent on currying favor with the rich.
You forget that when a parent pays tuition for a private school, they are still paying the property taxes that support public schools.
bellatrys
Yeah, back when they first started whinging about how treating the poor widdle bwokers and CEOs of failed outfits harshly would discourage people from wanting to follow in their footsteps in the future, oodles of people (self included) responded, “And this is a feature, not a bug, right?”
I want to note the tremendously anti-democratic (small-d) and anti-egalitarian underpinnings of this whole “Going Galt” * mindset, too: it relies on the complete and unquestioning faith that these our plutocratic aristos simply are innately so superior to the rest of us vulgar plebs that nobody couold do as good or equal a job to them.
Compare/contrast with Napoleon’s legendary “marshal’s baton in every backpack” – the claim that anybody no matter how humble had the potential to rise to the highest levels, and would be given the opportunity…
* In fact, when ordinary workers in America have tried to “Go Galt” the good capitalists of the past shot them – the whole belief that the Genius In His Tower is solely responsible for creating the goods of society without any help from all those “parasites” he was paying, isn’t something that even Andrew Carnegie ever bought into, not when push came to shove.
gwangung
This assumes that there’s enough time on the part of the parent to take that second job.
Not quite so applicable if they’re already working that second job or have logistical roadblocks (e.g., travel time) connected with that first job.
Xecky Gilchrist
@TenguPhule: We already covered that when Obama talked to them. They didn’t listen to him. Now it’s time for phase 2.
Aha, I see. I was just a step behind.
Carry on, then, only for shooting sub “tax really heavily”. They’re more afraid of that. :)
J. Michael Neal
I am envious of them, but that’s largely because I was one of them for a while. I loved it. I wasn’t even making that much money, relative to most of them. I was the oddball in the room who went into finance for a reason other than making a lot of money. I actually got into the game because I loved the math of options. A partial differential equation with six variables, one of which is stochastic? Sign me up!
I miss it every day. Of course, the parts of it that I loved were also the parts that caused me to have a nervous breakdown and end up in the psych ward for a week. When you find yourself, at 2am, seriously asking whether taking the entire bottle of Xanax washed down by the whole bottle of vodka would mean that you don’t have to go to work in the morning, it’s time to quit.
I still miss it every day. I trade my own money, which I actually find much less stressful than trading someone else’s money, but it’s not the same. I just don’t have enough of it to justify sitting in front of the computer during market hours every day and crunching the numbers. Being a market maker just added the extra spice of having to be ready for something to go wrong at any time.
Even when I was doing it professionally, I told people that I wasn’t really adding any value to the economy by doing what I did. I just had a blast doing it. I created social value outside of work instead of at it, in order to feel good about that. Work was just fun.
Sorry to run this off on a tangent. Your comment just brought it all back up. In the end, you’re absolutely right. We need to find a way to kill the industry I was in by making it boring. It’ll just be a sad day for me personally. However, I would appreciate it if you would wait to kill it until after I have a job in my new field, because my trading profits are my only income right now.
TenguPhule
@kay
Easy, they stopped holding loans.
arguingwithsignposts
@Church Lady:
Broke wouldn’t enter into it as an excuse for keeping my child someplace I considered to be unsafe.
OMG, are you really that blind to reality. Seriously. Think about it. What do you do when you’re not home? Who’s there? What are those children doing while you are spending your entire life burning the candle at both ends while trying to meet those private school tuitions?
Seriously, I’d rather you home taught than work yourself to the bone to provide some kind of “security” for your children.
Do you think that parents who can’t afford private school don’t struggle with those issues? God, get a clue.
priscianus jr
“Klein writes;
“I suspect the next stage of this is going to be either a tug-of-war, or a flame war, between the Administration and the bankers.”
I hope so. I have this funny idea I know who’s going to win it.
vacuumslayer
Articles like this leave me feeling impotent. I mean…I have absolutely no idea how to respond to them. Some sort of snarky, smartass mockery is what I’d normally turn to…but honestly some people seem so clueless, so tone-deaf, so…asshole-ish, that it leaves me devoid of breath and voice. It’s clear to me that these folks really do feel they are the “Achievers” and “Producers” of the world. I reckon they think the rest of us are just barely human…not-too-bright, not-too-monied people who are here to serve them…and keep our fucking mouths shut. I really have no idea what to say about that. It just stuns and disappoints me. The idea of morons like this looking down me is just…mind-boggling. They just don’t get it. They just don’t.
kay
@J. Michael Neal:
Great post, Mr. Neal. Your story is interesting.
I’m trashing the whole profession, and that’s not fair.
I just resent the idea that the whole country are sitting around just yearning to work on Wall Street, or that we feel like “losers” when we observe what looks (to me) like insane excess in compensation.
It’s hard for me to believe a trader has more stress than an emergency room nurse, or a high school teacher with a really fractious class.
A lot of us do other stuff, and it doesn’t suck, and we’re good at it, and we do it for a lot less pay.
J. Michael Neal
On that, I have no idea, because I’ve never worked any of those jobs. All I know is that trading for Citigroup produced more stress, or at least a type of stress, that I couldn’t handle. Others could.
Sure, but what traders make really is a meritocracy. A good trader actually does make that much money for his (almost always his) company. In most instances, I’d bet that the traders aren’t the ones that caused the crisis. They don’t decide which products to trade; that is the responsibility of someone up the corporate hierarchy. Even if you are trading products that eventually sink the company, a good trader loses you a lot less money than a bad one.
I was a mediocre trader. I lost money on my deals, but a large part of that is because the new guy gets stuck with a book of really shitty, illiquid stocks where you routinely get your face ripped off because you can’t get your hedges on before the stock moves. It’s an odd situation, where the inexperienced traders get the most difficult stocks because, while you’re more likely to lose money, you can’t lose nearly as much money as you could if you were making markets in Microsoft markets. The most I ever lost in one move was about $30,000, and that was because I did something stupid. (I will never, ever trade Maytag again, for myself or anyone else, because that was consistently where I had my biggest problems. Of course, it’s pretty easy to never trade them again, because my second biggest loss to one event was when it was taken private.) The guy who traded the NASDAQ index once lost $7 million in a half second, and never even raised his voice.
Comrade grumpy realist
1. On behalf of all MITers, I apologize for our nit-wit colleague mentioned up above. Most of us aren’t that interested in making $$ on Wall Street. What we want to do is run off, develop some cool technology that will save the world, form a company, and THEN make a lot of $$$. (I know–I’m still working on it. Anyone got a good nanotech startup to invest in that also needs some patent advice?)
2. Quite a few of my friends have decided to homeschool their kids because of the dire straits of the local schools. It’s not a given that “private schools are snobbish, public schools are Good.” If the local schools can be turned around with just a few more involved parents, then yeah, probably better to stick with the public schools. But when your kid is dealing with the equivalent of Beirut every day and no one else is interested, forget it. Save your own family first–private school, homeschool, whatever.
Church Lady
@arguingwithsignposts:
You must have missed the part where I said that as a last resort I’d try homeschooling.
See Comrade grumpy realist – when it turns into a war torn country, it’s every man for himself. Your duty is to save your kid.
Funny, you don’t seem to have a problem with Obama or anyone else in the Administration sending their kids to private school. Granted, the D.C. schools suck, but they don’t suck any worse than the ones here.
kay
@J. Michael Neal:
I think what surprises me is this: bankers and others in finance are not worried about credibility. I would think credibility would be a valuable commodity to people who aim to convince me to give them money to invest.
Their compensation does not seem to be justified by their performance. I can’t rely on what they’re paid as a measure of merit. It’s not indicative of anything.
What is the measure of merit in your industry? I’m expecting mea culpas after this massive fail. Instead, the response is to get angry, and defensive.
They’re relying on customers, I’m assuming, like every other US industry. I would think the whole focus would be restoring faith in their ability to manage money. That’s what I would do. I’d be up nights if I ran one of these places. I’d be thinking ” Dear God, we lost all the money, and we’re a BANK!”
They’re not at all concerned.
They’re fighting regulation, and having hissy fits on the trading floor, and leading tea bag protests.
When do they come to their customers and explain how they got it so wrong? How did we manage to end up with such an important sector of the economy who worry not at all about their customer’s perception of their industry? Are they so plugged in politically and so powerful that they simply are not concerned about people like me abandoning them?
kay
Just mind-boggling, the arrogance in finance:
“That’s an appalling record,” Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said of the 20 criminal investigations. “In the midst of this crisis from which they are being bailed out, the same people who created this mess are apparently still breaking the law. What is it with these people?”
This is not the way to restore credibility. I’m assuming leaders in finance do not care whether people trust them with money. They’re going to blatantly steal until they’re led away in handcuffs.
Which is AMAZING, all by itself, considering the fact that the entire industry rests on the premise that someone will hand them their life savings.
Not me. Find some other sucker.
Comrade Darkness
@priscianus jr: “I suspect the next stage of this is going to be either a tug-of-war, or a flame war, between the Administration and the bankers.”
Obama already told them he was “the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks”
Nice opening salvo.