Great piece in New York Magazine by a reporter who crashed the annual gala of the Kappa Beta Phi "secret society" of financial titans. If you had any doubt that these people are a bunch of depraved, egomaniacal sociopaths, read this.
Here is an excerpt:
As I walked through the streets of midtown in my ill-fitting tuxedo, I thought about the implications of what I’d just seen.
The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.This should be a siren call telling us that if our nation is to survive--no, if THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT is to survive--where societies are established for the benefit and "general welfare" of the people who live in them, then the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (F.I.RE) sector has to be dismantled or shrunk down to a level where it's parasitic tentacles are no longer a threat.
Wer're a long way from that.
Here is a list of the Kappa Beta Phi members.
Looks like another JP Morgan employee "jumped" from another JP Morgan tower in another accident that the company is calling "tragic." One was odd, two in a week was strange. Three is almost a pattern, employees turning up dead, jumping off buildings and committing suicide lately. With thousands of employees, weird things can happen... Enron had one executive kill himself before the media started asking questions, maybe someone should start digging in.
ReplyDeleteRyan,
ReplyDeleteGood observation, the other thing you see is that some often go "Grizzly Adams" and go off the grid this is what Neal Kashkari did after Goldman and Treasury during TARP.... went out into the woods and built a cabin... didnt shave...
Paul McCulley from PIMCO too now he literally looks like "Grizzly Adams" and is "letting his freak flag fly..."
I guess it is better than suicide....
I'd also assume there is heavy substance abuse going on in these institutions (drugs/booze) .... that is another thing you would probably see.