The recent financial meltdown and  accompanying  general handwringing by our great and all-knowing financial overlords is a bit much, isn’t it?  For years,  these  uber-mayvins at the  “great” investment banking houses, financial firms, banks and  hedge funds have been looting more and more of our  economy for themselves.  Were these titans of lucre abashed about their stay at the trough?  Were they the slightest bit embarrased by their Herculean accumulation?  Well, if they were, let me know, because I must have missed that part of the past decade.  Instead, they loudly and aggressively justified their renumeration, insisting that it was an accurate reflection of their skill, wisdom, and value to the economy, and that competitive market forces - forces that could not be checked by intervention of mere mortals without Bloomberg boxes  - required the payment of these vast sums because, without their bloated compensation “packages,”  no one  would bear the hardship, physical danger, and exposure to the elements associated with an analyst job at, say, AIG, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, or any of the other free market temples that we taxpayers are now opening our wallets for.  

Now, the flood has arrived.  Their finely tuned and intricately engineered  financial instruments have soured.  Their models have failed.  Their stewardship of our money has turned out to be a cartoonish version of a gambler in over his head.  Do we get an “I’m sorry?”  No, we get a bailout for the fallen gods.  Do we get anything like a ritual Hari-Kari?  No, we get lectures from the “investment community” about the need for autoworkers in Flint to become poorer.  Do our overlords acknowledge thier prior hubris?  No, we simply get excuses - the dog ate our homework, our grandma died, no one could have foreseen this.  On that point, check out this post by Matt Yglesias.  http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/nobody_could_have_predicted.php