I tried to imagine how it must feel to be one of those Wall Street bankers who stand to make tens of millions in bonuses from bailout money after nearly bringing the world’s economy to its knees. I know I’d feel too guilty to take the money, so I could only speculate that these guys must have an honorable reason for not refusing their ill-gotten windfalls. I came up with this.
Goldman Sachs has recovered quite nicely from the recession they helped create. They’ve paid back the bailout money already, and freed from the strings that came with it, they’re rewarding themselves for their business prowess with executive compensation above pre-crash levels. How did they do it? By being smarter than the other banks. Oh, it’s not that they didn’t play the same risky game with mortgage-backed securities and derivatives; they just saw the disaster coming before everyone else did and passed off their toxic assets to less prescient investors. To the victor the spoils. What’s especially troubling about all this is that neither they nor the government seems to have learned anything. So far the Wall Streeters in the Obama administration have shown little interest in actually fixing the system. The heart of the problem is precisely the executive compensation Sachs is lavishing upon itself. Without strict limits on how much these robber barons can help themselves to, the temptation to rig the game once more will be too great, and another economic meltdown is inevitable.
A line in Dashiell Hammett’s great detective novel, The Thin Man, keeps coming back to me. About a particularly toxic family she and Nick Charles have become involved with, Nora asks, “Are they the first of a new race of monsters?” Could there be a more apt description of the contemporary lords of finance, this collection of sociopaths who seem to think that the rest of exist to make them obscenely wealthy? The latest outrage is the AIG bonuses in the amount of $165 million, which the company claims, oh so regretfully, that it is legally obligated to pay. It goes on to argue that it really must pay them in order to keep the talent on board–the same talent that wrecked the company, not to mention the world’s economy, in the first place.
In my fantasy, this is the outrage that finally moves us working stiffs to storm the citadel and haul the creeps out to face the anger of the mob. After all, thanks to the AIG bosses and their ilk, all too many of us now have lots of time on our hands during the workday. We might as well use it to do something constructive.
