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Yet another Christmas in this old house, its 173rd.

I'm waiting for the rest of the family to wake -- they're strewn around on couches, and on an air mattress next to the Christmas tree.

Last night, eating a delicious Butterball turkey (99 cents a pound) and trimmings, drinking cheap ($7.99) red wine, we talked about the economy, about those who treated people's homes like pork bellies, betting mortgages will default and winning if they do.

A world away, at the Wall Street Journal's Wealth Blog: 10 Status Symbols We Hope Disappear in the Recession. I hadn't heard about Shadow Yachts.

One commment there:

How much $$ do the rich and super-rich need in order to spend on "products and services" for it to raise all the boats? Isn't that what's supposed to have been happening all along? Why should the rest of us depend on the rich spending on their interests? Do they care about, say, inner-city firefighting that taxes pay for? Government spending -wasteful as it too often is - is spread more evenly than the rich spending on their preferred "products and services."

And that leads us to Bernie Madoff (actually pronounced made-off) -- True American Folk Hero by John Kelly:

...His victims were long established wealthy families, hedge funds, big charities, big players on Wall Street, and as the New York madam said, the rest of the list will be revealed. Some of these brilliant people invested their whole family savings with Bernie. They represent la crème de la crème of the moneyed social circuit who created this financial nightmare.

Most of that wealth was acquired by inheritance or by actions like the stark avarice of the wizards on Wall Street. The result of such inheritance is the production of whole generations of George Bushs in the halls of financial power and government. Bernie screwed those guys, the ones who were screwing the rest of us.

It is difficult to have much sympathy for these folks; they participated in the mugging of the rest of the country. If you are making great returns, especially every quarter, the less you want to know. It's easy, it's not much different then not wanting to know that item you just bought was made by slave labor in some polluted third world country.

Bernie knew how to work snobbery built on greed and one-up-manship that has no relation to how the rest of the world lives, and could care less. He appealed to their eager desire to join even more and more exclusive groups. You know the ones, where people supposedly get to make better returns because of their special god given superiority.

Later: The Bag Lady Papers: "Alexandra Penney--a New York artist and former editor of Self Magazine--lost her life savings in the Madoff debacle." Some commenters sympathize, some do not. Litmus test...)

We're getting a chance to start over. Here's hoping the changes ahead will float all our boats.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas.

 Tags  Bernie Madoff Christmas

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1 Comments

joyce said:

In amidst Madoff's uberrich victims, there are also decent people and charities which have taken it in the neck. So it's not all suitable for schadenfreude.

I do hope this mess will result in much less wasteful consumption once things get back on track, that would be so much better for the planet, but I doubt it. At least it is apparently the death knell for SUVs.

Link | December 25, 2008 10:14 AM
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