Sometimes, you find a rant that is such a thing of beauty that it needs to stand alone.
This is one of them.
Everybody knows about the public pity party that Jake DeSantis fo AIGFP invited everyone to via his public resignation letter.
For those who are unfamiliar, here is a link with an excerpted favorite part.
Text of Letter
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I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
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Blah, blah, poor me.
Matt Taibbi (writer of the outstanding piece on the financial services takeover) took him apart.
AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right
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Are we supposed to believe that Jake DeSantis knew nothing about Joe Cassano's CDS deals? If your boss and the top guys in your firm were all making a killing selling anything at all -- whether it was rubber kayaks, generic Levitra or credit default swaps -- you really wouldn't bother to find out what that thing they were selling was? You'd really just mind your own business, sit at your cubicle and put your faith in the guys up top to fill you in if there was something you needed to know?
This would be a believable claim for an employee of some other wing of AIG, a company with well over 100,000 employees. But DeSantis works for tiny, 377-person AIGFP, a unit that had only two offices -- one in London and one in Greenwich, Conn.
And we're talking about financial professionals, the most shameless group of tirelessly envious gossips ever to walk the face of the earth. The likelihood that Cassano would pull in $280 million for himself, and his equally greedy, hopelessly jealous employees wouldn't know not only exactly how he made that money but every last ugly detail about his life -- from what skank he's sleeping with to what side of his trousers he hangs on -- is almost zero.
I know plenty of people who work in this world, and I've met very few who didn't hate with every cell in their bodies anyone in their own companies who made more money than they did or got bigger bonuses at Christmastime. Gossiping about each others' bonuses, and bitching about each others' compensation, is the national pastime for these people.
So forgive me if I don't buy this story that poor Jake and his buddies didn't know about Cassano's CDS business.
Also, there's this: let's just say, Jake, that you're telling the truth, that you don't know anything about this toxic portfolio. If that's the case, then why the fuck does anyone need to retain you at an exorbitant salary to help unwind that very portfolio? If these transactions aren't and never were your expertise, then where the hell is your value here?
When I spoke to Christine Pretto, the AIG spokeswoman, and asked about those bonuses, she said that AIG needed to retain people like you in order to take advantage of your "knowledge of these transactions." So if you don't have knowledge of these transactions, what are you being paid for? Your winning attitude?
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Read it, enjoy it. To me, it is about as satisfying as Mark Twain's critique of James Fenimore Cooper.
In any event, this critique inspires the question of the day - does the sense of entitlement ever end for a Master of the Universe?
ETA - Over 40% of all US profits over the past several years have been in the financial sector.
The Quiet Coup
Not only have the bankers been acquiring massive political clout, they've also been strangling our future in enterprises that actually provide goods and services, as they've been raking off vitality with grotesque fees and underwriting requirements. If banking is about facilitating production and service, how does a 40% profit proportion reflect that?