We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?
I wish it was easier to undo legislation.
[Update a late afternoon]
Nicole Gelinas has some useful thoughts.
I doubt they are going to get much sympathy. They would get little from me. Perhaps these Wall Street people should be getting a job which actually produces wealth instead of shifting around someone else’s into toxic assets.
Perhaps people need to learn that a nation cannot produce wealth by destroying its productive capacity, moving it abroad, while the working population is composed of lawyers, bean counters, and government workers. Such a nation is living on borrowed money. Eventually the bill is going to show up and it is time to pay.
The UK is next.
The scapegoating is a bad thing, but Wall Street is far from innocent. They were some of the biggest beneficiaries of having a fiat currency. They’d probably still make a lot more than the average person with free banking and a sound currency, but not nearly as much as they did or as they do now. Legions of ordinary people are also culpable of course.
I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
I have heard of people going to Gamblers Anonymous after they busted out in Vegas and had to get somebody else to wire them money so they could buy a ticket home.
I have heard of people going to Gamblers Anonymous after they busted out in Vegas and had to get somebody else to wire them money so they could buy a ticket home.
Okay, and your point is…?
John B. – Didn’t we just write Wall Street a bunch of ginormous checks about a year ago? Something about TARP, and bailouts, and funding AIG?
If your gambling hobby leaves you so busted you need a bailout, maybe you should go to Gamblers Anonymous.
there appear to be 22 thousand employees at Goldman Sachs, if they
all become school teachers, that will about match the number of school teachers who are getting pink slips in California.
if everyone on wall street gets a job in the main street economy, it won’t even blip unemployment, and it may well actually do some good for the economy.
Caviet emptor and stop assigning blame. Except for the government handing out taxpayer money, who is forced to invest in any firm?
If it’s too big to fail, break it in two so we don’t have a system wide failure.
People are greedy. You can’t legislate that out of existence. You can force them to make an audit public. Transparency is the disinfectant.
The more I think about this letter the more pissed-off I get. If this is legit, Wall Street just doesn’t get it.
In the first place, Wall Street did lose! Not only that, they gambled away their plane ticket and woke us up at 2 AM to wire them money so they could get home. (Remember the bailouts of September 2008?) I may be old-fashioned, but literally losing your shirt at the craps table certainly seems like a good reason to, maybe, consider Gamblers Anonymous.
Second place, look at where the letter is posted. If we’d followed the advice of this blog, there wouldn’t have been a bailout. Right now, instead of threatening to get a real job, Mister Wall Street Wizard ™ be actually getting that job – because his company would be bankrupt and busily auctioning off the office furniture.
I hope this isn’t legit – because if it is, they really don’t get it on Wall Street.
I hope this isn’t legit – because if it is, they really don’t get it on Wall Street.
I’m kind of amused that you think that this letter represents Wall Street.
Consider the possibility that a) the letter writer didn’t think that the bailouts should have occurred (either he didn’t work for a company that needed one, or he figured that if he had, he’d get work with someone else) and b) he thinks that the current bill working its way through the congressional digestive system is just more of the same as TARP, and just as corrupt, while Pokculus mostly stimulated public workers, while private workers have been wiped out, and the administration was too busy taking over health care and making plans to destroy even more jobs with Cap’n’Trade to care.
Also, in general, anything that pisses off Chris Gerrib is probably a good thing.
Wall st. is getting what they deserve. They couldn’t even out contribute the unions in forking over money to the Democrats.
Pikers. Serves em right.
Finance is a major American industry. It produces products that benefit most of us. Without modern finance, “Main Street” has fewer and more-risky investment opportunities for its retirement funds, pays higher interest on mortgages and business loans, can’t get funding for promising startup businesses, has difficulty hedging risk and has fewer job opportunities. The current financial crises results mostly from government interference with free markets, principally decades of politically driven subsidies for residential mortgages. To scapegoat the finance industry while ignoring the tremendously destructive effects of ill-conceived government policies will serve mainly to drive the financial industry overseas, which (in case it’s not obvious to all the geniuses out there who think the industry is a “casino”) will be bad for the country. So even if Derbyshire’s letter is wrong in its particulars it makes a valid general point. We pay a high price for widespread public ignorance about economics and about the important role of finance in a modern economy, much as we pay a price for public ignorance about science.
I hope this isn’t actually the world view of Wall St investment bankers. For one thing, it undercuts the entire premise of the capitalist system — that the enormous financial rewards of occupations like investment banking are required to incentivize the enormous effort, risk, and stress that the bankers assume. If the letter-writer is correct, these guys would still work 80 hour weeks for a mere $85K instead of $500K+bonuses. If the letter-writer is correct, these guys are way overpaid, beyond the equilibrium of supply and demand.
And I have to say the hubris is annoying. There are a lot of people who work an 80 hour week and don’t expect to get million-dollar bonuses. (And who happen to be a lot smarter than the average investment banker, to boot.)
I guess I am supposed to say this, as a business school student (for another week, anyway), but 1. Jonathan is right, Finance does create real value, it’s not just moving wealth around, and 2. while capitalism (if you mean, Smith-descended free trade) does not have a particular problem with compensation rewarding effort, the point of competition is that compensation does not have to go up if higher value enters a competitive market. It is absolutely “capitalistic” for high-value people (if they are high-value; the letter writer may be over-optimistic about how easy it is to teach 8 year-olds multiplication) to be paid low wages.
John B. – Didn’t we just write Wall Street a bunch of ginormous checks about a year ago? Something about TARP, and bailouts, and funding AIG?
And we found out that the price for gratitude is somewhere beyond two trillion dollars (TARP for $850 billion plus Fed for $1.25 trillion). I call that very expensive stupidity on the part of the public and government not a bailout.
In the first place, Wall Street did lose! Not only that, they gambled away their plane ticket and woke us up at 2 AM to wire them money so they could get home. (Remember the bailouts of September 2008?) I may be old-fashioned, but literally losing your shirt at the craps table certainly seems like a good reason to, maybe, consider Gamblers Anonymous.
OPM. Even some of the worst and most fraudulent gamblers in that mess didn’t lose their own shirts. For example, Bernie Madoff might be doing a century of jail time, but he and his family remain well compensated for their trouble. Statements like the above makes it hard for me to believe that you have any connection whatsoever with the financial or real estate industry.
As to the letter writer, I think they’ll go after the jobs that have good monetary return for the effort. That certain is not teaching which at the K-12 level remains one of the worst jobs a professional can get. As well, I imagine at some point, finance will be back where it was as well. Government won’t always strangle these golden geese.
The teachers and other people in union jobs won’t have to worry about them. They have rules to keep those sorts of people out (for example, teacher certification, union work rules that disengage income from effort). Instead, the union people need to worry about government spending versus revenue. With the financial industry neutered, that’s going to reduce revenue significantly at a time when unions are more reliant on government spending than ever before.
Smart people go where the money is, even in academia. These people, for the most part would land on their feet in a crisis. The decisions that led to bailouts were at a higher level. Blaming traders would be like blaming assembly workers for the decision to bail out GM and Chrysler.
The whole point of blame is to pacify people so they don’t see the blamers involvement.
The problem is that the people responsible for this mess didn’t and couldn’t lose their own shirts. Even if the majority of the gamblers in Wall Street (and the City) had lost their jobs, so what? They would still be sitting on wads of cash that would choke an elephant, and even if they never worked again would be able to be comfortable for the rest of their lives.
It might just be enough, to prevent this sort of thing happening again, for losing finance-industry gamblers who bankrupt their employers to be bankrupted themselves. Really bankrupted – as in no money, no car, no access to credit and thrown out on the street.
up until the early 80’s Invesment banks weren’t corporations, they were partnerships. Consequently the partners were personally liable for all risk
in the firm. Now they are all corporations, the managing directors bear no risk and even managed to shove the major risk over on the federal reserve.
a simple change would be to require hedge funds and proprietary trading
houses to be partnerships or require the senior managers to personally insure
the firm for professional errors or omission to the net value of their total wealth.
to prevent this sort of thing happening again
This is a fantasy. You can not prevent it from happening again. You shouldn’t even want to prevent it. What you should want is government not to make it worse with bailouts. Let bad investments die.
Do not let government force the taxpayers to make bad investments.
Up at 5 AM? Work until 10 PM? I would not give anything to a Stakhanovite lunatic like that. Unless, of course, it could prove it was not human.
I have a standing challenge to all such lunatics. Come running with me. We will continue until you collapse or die. Then I will take over your job and clean up the mess you made, lunatic.