The Last Man Left To Defend Wall Street

The Dow's below 7,000 (as Nouriel Roubini--and Chumpchanger! --said it would be), the banks are about to be nationalized, and Chumpchanger has been ... close to AWOL for a month.

So there's some catching up to do, and I'll start with last week's story from Slate's The Big Money, Is Wall Street Evil? My editor for some reason preferred "evil" to "wicked"; I like the sound of "wicked" better, but maybe "evil" scores higher in the hit counts. One reader, Kim Elliot, took me to task for "a veiled attempt to excuse rich people while lecturing us folks who make an honest living, however delusional our choices." Obviously, I disagree. On two counts. First, I don't think I was lecturing. Second, heck, I thought it was pretty unveiled attempt to excuse rich people. I may well be one of the poorest men in history to take on the mantle of defending the prerogatives of the monied interests.

On investigating further, however, it turned out that Elliot and I agreed on more than we disagreed. Elliot's biggest issue with Wall Street was not the enormous amount of money reaped by the Street before and (in the case of Merrill, even during) the crash, but the smugness and sense of entitlement that persists despite the enormous evidence of Wall Street thorough going incompetence. On this I agree whole heartedly, except that I see this same smugness well beyond the boundaries of Wall Street. The builders and commercial bankers, the mortgage brokers and realtors, the journalists who believed the housing bubble would never burst and the builders of McMansions who to this day imagine that they made no mistakes and resent bailing out their neighbors--all of the other players who created the current mess all manage to smugly insist that the failings of character and of basic common sense all happened somewhere else. They resent bailing out their less fortunate neighbors and rant about the failings of Wall Street with the same smugness that Elliot (rightly!) criticizes Wall Street for. And that smugness drives Elliot and me equally crazy. Money does corrupt, and it corrupts in a particularly insidious way that makes those who have it believe that it is a justified reward for their own intellect and character. This is the case on Wall Street, and off it. And to this problem, I see no solution at all.