2. Bankers!

Tom Wolfe once called these types “Masters of the Universe”, but this year exposed them as emperors without clothes. The weirdest thing about this financial crisis is that the idea of the unparalleled brilliance of banking and finance types, and by extension many high-up American executives, has taken a massive hit. Hard work, isn’t the key, it’s devising a way to get over and then getting out while the getting’s good. I mean, that was the plan here, right? These people are supposed to know what they were doing, and that’s what they were essentially doing.

Many of these types walk around as people who are supposed to know something the rest of us don’t. But it’s becoming more and more clear that many of these same folks don’t know as much as they think. And none of that thinking is geared in the long-term greater good, even in the life of their firms, it’s about making as much as you can as quick as you can, and achieving your star status or your level of fuck-you money. The idea of being caretakers of the American economy never occurred to them, or even caretakers of enterprises that employed millions and had been around for years. And that fundamentally is how we got into this mess. The mentality that “greed is good” was supposed to help the American economy, and for years we all bought in. Turns out greed might do well for a few in the short term, but it’s killing all of us in the long run.