The headline in today’s New York Times reads “Crisis Reshaping Wall St. As Stars Begin to Scatter”. Had I been the headline writer, I would have used “Financial Tumor Metastisizes.” The best and brightest of the financial industry, those who helped bring down huge institutions in their personal pursuit of the easy buck, are leaving because low pay, public scrutiny and actual hard work await those who have to clean up after them. Retiring would have been less damaging to our collective futures; instead they are spreading out throughout the global financial system, laying low until the surgery, chemo therapy and radiation treatments on major financial tumors are finished and they can once again practice their catastrophic, unregulated expertise on the global stage.
Now, I really don’t blame these stars for taking the easy way out; it is consistent with their operating philosophy and is what most of us would do under the same circumstances. However, what I’m expecting to hear over the next weeks and months is a bunch of moaning and hand wringing from the usual cast of sell-side enablers implying that we can’t survive without these people. That thoughtless propaganda is truly sick.
