QOTD: Anonymous Coward Banker

Louise Story (NYT) has had some behind-closed-doors conversations with the banking elite who continue to serve this country day-in and day-out without so much as a thank you from the mud-spattered Dickensian street urchins camped out downtown.  How dare these “fringe” losers take the banker and his foundational talents for granted?

Here’s a delicious little taste of how some denizens on Wall Street really feel, courtesy of an anonymous coward Story interviewed for the piece:

“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”

Let me help you out, sir.  Finance is one of the things we do terribly in this country, not well.  Alan Greenspan’s policies simply created the illusion that we “did finance well” when in reality, what we did well instead was wealth transference.  We used inflation as a weapon and permitted the privileged few to gorge on a bloated, overly-financialized economy that was fed with debt growth rather than actual production.

The FIRE economy is now shrinking, thank heavens, to a normal portion of the overall US economy.  One can only hope that it shrinks juuuuuussssst enough so that this guy, whoever he is, learns a lesson about hubris, bad luck and unexceptionalism.

Source:

In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated (New York Times)