But the fact is I think it's a fair question if it were being present by someone with a more open mind so on the assumption that such a fair minded person might be reading this I'll tell you.
I've been on Wall Street for nearly 20 years. I started out on the exotic swaps desk at JP Morgan, but I didn't like it so I switched to the energy desk working with commodity derivatives. From there I bounced around a little and ended up as head of quantitative analysis for a 10 billion plus hedge fund. After a decade or so at different three hedge funds, I ended up a portfolio manager running a quantitative equity strategy for another major hedge fund.
I've spent my entire career with the people involved in this crisis. There are some real jerks in the industry, but the vast majority of the people I've met were good, decent, thoughtful people just like anyone else. All any of them were trying to do was to make a good living to take care of their kids, and have enough left cover at the end to retire in comfort. The didn't want handouts.. .they worked harder than any industry I know doing work that few people know how to do. They are real humans to me, not some cartoon character from the mind of someone who see's a conspiracy behind every tree.
What's more, I know what motivated them... and I know what they were thinking at almost every point in this process. And the picture that people like you paint of what went on is so distorted and so far from reality that I think it's unfair to represent it that way.
Since it's obvious that your viewpoint comes mainly from ignorance rather than malice, I was hoping that shedding a little light on the subject might help things be depicted more accurately. But I guess there is no convincing some people.
All the same though I wanted to tear away the cartoon that people with your view have been painting and replace it with something more accurate. Just because it's the right thing to do.
Look, I went to school with a lot of these guys and I know all of that stuff.
Three things. First - that good living doing this stuff is 100 - 10,000 times what their well educated and sometimes far better educated peers in other endeavours make. Two - They are down a couple of Trillion and counting and we have enormous debts to pay off. Three: an incredible amount of this debt was accumulated paying current account sort of stuff (paying for cars and houses produced today with credit to be repaid tomorrow) and not to expand the productive capacity of the US. It is paper pushing rather than real investing.
Finally, there is the problem that a lot of us saw this day coming and have been screaming our heads off about it for two decades. We didn't have our hands of the levers of cash flow. Who is to be held accountable those that did and those that benefited, or the rest of us.
The rest of us have to pay willy-nilly.