Gekkoian Heroics

He writes about one of the main themes of this blog since 2009, which is the embarrassing and desperate need on the part of Wall Street players to not just be rich, but universally adored. He brings up something else, however, which I haven’t been aware of:

[L]et me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

The chutzpah of these people never fails to amaze me. But this does explain their shock at being held responsible for this meltdown and the pain and suffering that followed. They really believe they are big heroes and the rest of us are a bunch of ungrateful wretches for failing to acknowledge it.

These people may not be the geniuses they think they are, but they aren’t stupid and they do have to live somewhat in touch with reality in order to do their jobs. So they know they have reaped all the rewards of their heroic Gekkoian deeds. They just think this is a fair distribution of the nation’s wealth and we should all be grateful for the crumbs that are left over. In other words, they believe they are heroes for making each other rich.

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