Absolution of the Titans

I admire the Titans of American Finance and you should too. In the Great American Casino, otherwise known as our Economy, they’re the winners and the rest of us are the losers. Our best and brightest leave the finest universities in the land, flock to Wall Street in search of wealth and power; these are clever, cunning, driven men and women who go after what they want with the same single-minded obsession with which Hannibal Lecter sought human flesh. The Titans buy low and sell high, own beach front homes in the Hamptons and luxurious apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, travel first class, own season tickets for the Yankees and the Giants, and pay for it all with platinum credit cards. Even low on the totem pole Titans make as much in a year as the average American wage slave makes in a decade.

Ah, the mystical world of high finance, stocks, bonds, derivatives, numbers and symbols sliding across tickers from New York to Hong Kong, unintelligible to the untrained eye, full of portent and opportunity for those with a penchant for risk and a wad of other people’s money to monkey with. These are Gordon Gecko’s heirs, knights of Capitalism, who ride alone along the great black river; they ask no quarter and of course give none, particularly to lazy welfare queens or unemployed lesbians. They see the world in black & white, good & evil, Mutt & Jeff, Ozzie & Harriet, Astaire & Rogers.

Like Gecko the Titans are suave, smooth, savvy and savage. Gecko may have gone down in the end, but he went out shouting, “Greed is still good.” We loved Gordon Gecko and everything he stood for much more than we ever loved Horatio Alger and his tedious tale of hard work, honesty and right living.

Right. Hell, yes. We’re Americans and we want what we want when we want it. Delayed gratification is for suckers and tight-assed kill joys. Life is short and death will not be denied, so grab the gusto and let the bulldog roll.

The Titans are master alchemists who turn coal into diamonds, single family homes into ATM machines, bogus mortgages made in Cleveland into Collateralized Debt Obligations sold in Mumbai.

Can you pull off a trick like that? Of course not, which is why the Federal government isn’t rushing to your rescue. Or mine. We’re the grunts of the American Casino, the water carriers, the serfs and sharecroppers, the tenement dwellers. Our purpose is to toil for meager wages, to save none of what we earn, and to rack up as much debt as possible. Sure, we’re free to bitch about the unfairness of it all, throw stones and beer bottles at the mansion on the hill, pin our hopes on political candidates who promise to level the battle field and repair the tattered American Dream, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the Titans are still more important than we will ever be.

Thus, the sins and crimes of the Titans are absolved. Instead of punishment, they are given coins snatched from our pockets and the pockets of our children, the pockets of their children, and the pockets of children yet unborn. The great Casino is too important to fail; the slot machines must clang and jingle just as the roulette wheel must spin and the loaded dice tumble.

Too big to fail, too cool for the catwalk. It may be good to be King, but being a Titan of Finance is many times better; kings are occasionally beheaded or contract syphilis and go insane, Titans are untouchable.