Wall Street Homies
by digby
One of my major frustrations with the economic crises is the unwillingness of anyone to confront the fact that these Masters of the Universe are immature and unreliable and cannot be trusted with such a huge social responsibility. Their behavior since the crisis hit has been embarrassing. And stupid.
Wall Street CEOs like to think they are the adults, the big men in the room, the ones who know how the world works. Well, you know what? They screwed up their own banks, the financial system, and the economy like a bunch of two-year-olds. Every single major bank would have failed in late 2008 without massive government intervention — because of wounds that were entirely self-inflicted. (Citigroup: holding onto hundreds of billions of dollars of its own toxic waste. Bank of America: paying $50 billion for an investment bank that would have failed within three days. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: levering up without a stable source of funding. Etc.) The financial crisis should have put to rest for a generation the idea that the big boys on Wall Street know what they’re doing and the politicians in Washington are a bunch of amateurs. Yet somehow the bankers came out of it with the same unshakable belief in their own perfection that they had in 2005. The only plausible explanation is some kind of powerful personality disorder.
This is exactly right. I think the frat house, riverboat gambling atmosphere has attracted a certain kind of person — an emotionally stunted, irresponsible, immature sort of fellow who simply refuses to accept that there are any limits to his behavior and who insists on blaming everyone else for his failures. A spoiled, reckless, bully.And all the people supposedly in charge are worried that if we don’t allow these adolescent monsters to have free rein they will destroy us all.
In other words they are simply, rich teenage gang members in pin stripes. And they are way more dangerous to the fate of this nation than the crips and the bloods.
Update: Kevin Drum has more.
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