Mr. Moderate

Oliver Stone’s masterpiece movie, Wall Street, seems an appropriate centerpiece for the meltdown in global finance we are currently working our way through. We got to this point of near-total market collapse because the real Wall Street didn’t learn a single thing from the morality play produced by Stone. In spite of being one of the classic seven deadly sins, greed is still the centerpiece of Wall Street morality. In other words, the real Wall Street still plays according to the famous quote from Michael Douglas in the movie, Wall Street, where he says:

greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

To say that the people who inhabit the real Wall Street ought to know better is to understate the obvious. But when you are playing with Other People’s Money (OPM), you are divorced from the risks, and yet you get to reap a substantial portion of the reward. The ultimate in OPM is, of course, federal bailout dollars. And as I write this short piece, our government is going through the motions of agreeing on just how many more federal bailout dollars will be made available to the rich dealmakers on Wall Street so that they will go back to making deals which seem to drive all that is left of the US economy these days.

Should the federal government be taking taxpayer dollars and putting them down on the table at the new Wall Street Casino? Given the reaction to the proposals of the Bush Administration to privatize the Social Security System, I would expect that the vast bulk of US citizens would vote “NO!” But of course, it is our alleged representatives, who get huge quantities of cash from the greedy inhabitants of the real Wall Street, who will actually vote to approve this ghastly mess. Is there much doubt that Congress will go along with this requested bail-out? Probably not, but one can hold out hope for at least a little while.