What (Some) Wall Street People Really Think

Tuesday, 25th October 2011

Apparently this email spent much of the summer pinging from one Wall Street firm to another. I suspect the author's views are pretty widely shared. Sure, there are plenty of smart people in the financial world but it's also true that many of them ain't smart enough to know when to lie low. As a man said recently, the public rather thinks that the banks and all the rest of them have missed an excellent opportunity to shut up.

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 asses 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?”

It's one thing to fail, still another to rejoice in the cost-free nature of that failure and still yet another to gloat about the cost-free aspect of that escape. Astonishingly, people in the financial world think this email such a persuasive defence of Wall Street that they're sending it to friends who don't work in finance and expecting them to conclude that, blimey, the boy's got a point.

Plainly, there are plenty of smart people in the financial world but lord knows there are a whole lot of cretins too.

[Thanks to JT]

Filed under: Americana (479 more articles) , Banks (134 more articles) , Wall Street (6 more articles)

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ndm

October 25th, 2011 5:19pm Report this comment

-- Plainly, there are plenty of smart people in the financial world but lord knows there are a whole lot of cretins too.

There are far too many smart people squandering their talents taking rents from dollar bills instead of creating products and service to create these dollar bills.

and I'll go to bed at noon

October 25th, 2011 5:45pm Report this comment

Unbelievable. As ndm says, the genius of capitalism is in entrepeneurship, making money by actually adding value to the world. At what point did that become "trouser as much as you possibly can, consequences be damned"?

Cynthia Mcwilliams

October 25th, 2011 5:49pm Report this comment

Whoever this is talks a good game..but I betcha he can't teach third graders, & would be horrified at the manual labor of landscaping or car washing.

Andy Carpark

October 26th, 2011 11:41am Report this comment

I once saw a Tarzan film in which some unfortunate was being carried along screaming and strapped upside down to a St Andrew's cross. Then his tormentors deftly pulled the beams apart and …

Sorry, don't mind me. Just musing.

Baron

October 27th, 2011 9:44pm Report this comment

if the jobs on the Street didn't add value, they wouldn't exist, that they are remunerated as much as they are is due to first, only a few could put up with them, second, there aren't that many of them.

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