Michael Thomas
Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America.
Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.
A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants’ joy.
Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.
Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement—I hesitate to call it “a career”—in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah.
EXTRACT:
As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.
PhiBetaIota: Both Congress and Wall Street are oblivious to the perfect storm. The article is strongly recommended for a full reading.
See Also:
Review (Guest): Liar’s Poker–Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Review: Gods of Money – Wall Street and the Death of the American Century
Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Review: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown–Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
George Soros: Eleven Economic Insights + RECAP
John Steiner: Declaration of Occupation of NYC + Revolution USA RECAP
Journal: Five Myths Debunked–Treasury Run by Crooks
Matt Taibbi: GRIFTOPIA – RECAP
