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“No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?” e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.And
“I’m not giving to charity this year!” one hedge-fund analyst shouts into the phone, when I ask about Obama’s planned tax increases. “When people ask me for money, I tell them, ‘If you want me to give you money, send a letter to my senator asking for my taxes to be lowered.’ I feel so much less generous right now. If I have to adopt twenty poor families, I want a thank-you note and an update on their lives. At least Sally Struthers gives you an update.”
And
“We’re in a hypercapitalistic society. No one complains when Julia Roberts pulls down $25 million per movie or A-Rod has a $300 million guarantee. We have ex-presidents who cash in on their presidencies. Our whole moral compass has shifted about what’s acceptable or not acceptable. Honestly, you can pick on Wall Street all you want, I don’t think it’s fair. It’s fair to say you ran your companies into the ground, your risk management is flawed—that is perfectly legitimate. You can lay criticism on GM or others. But I don’t think it’s fair to say Wall Street is paid too much.”
And
"You can’t live in New York and have kids and send them to school on $75,000,” he continues. “And you have the Obama administration suggesting that. That was a very populist thing that Obama said. He’s being disingenuous. He knows that you can’t live in New York on $75,000.”Not much comment is necessary. These quotes - from unidentified sources, of course - speak for themselves. But the laid-off JPMorgan vice-president responsible for the third quote has clearly never listened to sports talk radio before.
And to address that last point, hilzoy astutely notes that the median family income in New York was $52,871 in 2007. That suggests that an awful lot of people in New York are living - or dying - in squalor. Like more than half of them. Or they're zombies. Either way, it's probably true on some level.
Meh. I can't wait for some of these people to disappear into Galt's Gulch.
2 comments:
"No one complains when Julia Roberts pulls down $25 million per movie or A-Rod has a $300 million guarantee."
The obvious (and ironic) flaw in the logic here is that while no one complains when Julia Roberts gets $25mil or when A-Rod makes enough money to buy Iceland and rename it Madonnaland, everyone complains when the Julia Roberts movie sucks or A-Rod's batting average dips because he's too busy diddling the cast of The Real Houswives of New York. People get pissed, and not because Universal Studios lost that $25mil or the Yankees blew the GDP of Germany on pitchers with "funny" names and funnier work ethic, they get pissed because they coughed up the money for a ticket, or bought a jersey.
To the wall street complainers I would make two quick points: 1) we aren't jealous of how much money you were making, we're angry that you got paid top dollar to fuck up and 2) we're angry that all that fucking up is costing us money. You jerks heard the "Greed is good" part of the speech, but forgot the next phrase, the part that sold it: "Greed works."
Sorry for the rant, BI. I'm gonna need some help getting off this high horse though.
Lol. Preach, Jack. You're in church right now.
Not to mention, when Julia Roberts and A-Rod stink at their respective endeavors, it doesn't blow up the entire U.S. economy and cause everyone else to have to pitch in to save them.
That's the problem, J. There was no logic to be applied to those complainers and their silly little whines.
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