Hubris is bullish - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

FuglyStick · 05-15-2010, 07:43 PM

From The National Review; it seems this anonymous e-mail was making the rounds--

Quote:

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?

A rebuttal, courtesy of Nick Kapur of The Motley Fool--

Quote:

Dear Joe Wall Street:
Allow me to be the first person to welcome you to the Proletariat! Let me bring you up to speed.

To start, what planet do you come from? A job with an $85,000 salary and pension, four months of paid time off, and all the other blue-collar perks that you claim exist sounds great, but you're so far off from the life of the average American that I have to question your sobriety.

I know $85,000 doesn't sound like much to you. After all, last year, the average employee at Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) pulled in over $235,000 a year, at JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) $380,000, and at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) more than $498,000. But the typical American family -- husband and wife combined -- actually survives on just $50,000, according to the most recent Census data. And that number hasn't changed much since 1999, even while average bonuses rose 10-fold between 1985 and 2006, according to the New York State Comptroller's Office. Lower pay is part of life in America these days -- for everyone except you, that is.

Next, do you really think we won't fight back when you try to take our jobs, as you suggest? Years of off-shoring has forced us to become quite accustomed to competition. Recent surveys suggest that between 10% and 20% of American workers maintain more than one job to pay the bills. Only two-thirds even take all of the paltry 10 work days of vacation allotted to them. Plus, down here, there's no expense account, corporate car, free meals, or slush funds to tap.

Next, you operate under the bizarre assumption that the normal world relies on your seven-figure "bonuses" to function normally. But just how many of our nation's "cushy middle-class jobs" do you think are dedicated toward popping the corks of your champagne bottles, sweeping the floors of your Hamptons estates, and holding the mirror while you gel your hair in the morning?

The reality is that no one here relies on your munificence. Our nation's stagnant per capita income and growing wealth divide should make that obvious. In fact, when this country's collective wealth was at its greatest, bankers had little more responsibility than to hold onto our money until we wanted it. Since then, you've grown like an aggressive cancer feeding off our prosperity. It's high time you realize that whether or not it hurts your feelings, you will no longer have that kind of unchecked autonomy.

Which leads me to my last point: What makes you think you could even survive in the real world? What exactly do you do well? Your own people acknowledge your uselessness. Jeremy Grantham believes that you "add nothing but costs." Paul Volcker believes that the best thing your business has produced in the last 25 years is the ATM machine. Jack Bogle ... well, you don't want to know what Jack Bogle thinks. Even in the best of times, 85% of professional money managers still can't beat a simple market index. Your business has a long and well-documented history of failing to provide value.

Honestly, I'm not sure I even want you doing something as complex as mowing my lawn. With the seemingly perverse attitude with which you view the world, I certainly don't want you within 500 yards of my kids' schools, let alone teaching at them. Your arrogance, your lack of a moral compass, and your incompetence spell out only one thing to me: You're unemployable.

Here's an idea to consider: Rather than infiltrate our lowly jobs, why don't you take that huge brain of yours and that renowned work ethic and become an engineer or a scientist or a doctor and actually create something of value? It would probably be more fun, potentially more lucrative, and you'd finally develop something that you could be proud of. We might even respect you for it.

In closing, I encourage you more than anything else to purchase some class with that swollen bank account of yours. I know you're feeling short in the wallet right now, but sheesh, this is embarrassing. Even your co-workers are pretending they don't know you.

Yours in jest,
Nick Kap--, er, Joe Fool

Attitudes like that of the anonymous e-mail author are precisely why regulation is needed. Why can't we get these clowns deported? Hop to it, Arizona!

filtherton · 05-16-2010, 05:55 AM

This reminds of when the chairman of Goldman Sachs said in an interview that he and his cronies were doing god's work. Apparently god's work involves making unjustified amounts money by gambling with other people's money and risking the health of the global economy.

The type of people who sympathize with the sentiment of the first letter are the type of people who are so out of touch that they assume that any criticism leveled at them is the result of jealousy. No animal is jealous of the pig that wanders into the farmyard and starts eating everyone else's food. They just want the pig to quit fucking up their shit. The pig, of course, doesn't understand anything but the pathological drive towards excess, is incapable of empathy with the other animals (see the first letter for a wealth of examples) so couldn't even begin to understand why the other animals don't like it. I realize that this analogy is flawed, but it's good enough for me.

We don't need these people for the economy to prosper. In fact, when these fuckers start to prosper, we should expect that the rest of the economy will soon be in the shitter. What we do need is to start encouraging investments, possibly via an exemption from a newly imposed prohibitively high tax on money manager profits, which have a potential positive effect of an investment on the overall economy. If someone is actually putting money into helping innovative entrepreneurs or loaning money to small businesses to expand then they should be held in higher esteem than someone whose job consists on betting money on whether mortgage holders will be able to pay their debts or whether their own customers will be dumb enough to do business with them.

05-16-2010, 05:55 AM	#2 (permalink)
filtherton Junkie Location: In the land of ice and snow.	This reminds of when the chairman of Goldman Sachs said in an interview that he and his cronies were doing god's work. Apparently god's work involves making unjustified amounts money by gambling with other people's money and risking the health of the global economy. The type of people who sympathize with the sentiment of the first letter are the type of people who are so out of touch that they assume that any criticism leveled at them is the result of jealousy. No animal is jealous of the pig that wanders into the farmyard and starts eating everyone else's food. They just want the pig to quit fucking up their shit. The pig, of course, doesn't understand anything but the pathological drive towards excess, is incapable of empathy with the other animals (see the first letter for a wealth of examples) so couldn't even begin to understand why the other animals don't like it. I realize that this analogy is flawed, but it's good enough for me. We don't need these people for the economy to prosper. In fact, when these fuckers start to prosper, we should expect that the rest of the economy will soon be in the shitter. What we do need is to start encouraging investments, possibly via an exemption from a newly imposed prohibitively high tax on money manager profits, which have a potential positive effect of an investment on the overall economy. If someone is actually putting money into helping innovative entrepreneurs or loaning money to small businesses to expand then they should be held in higher esteem than someone whose job consists on betting money on whether mortgage holders will be able to pay their debts or whether their own customers will be dumb enough to do business with them.