Sympathy for outlaws thanks to greedy bankers
The credit crunch is spawning a new generation of ‘Bonnie and Clydes’, feeding off public anger towards greedy Wall Street bankers
Is America witnessing the return of the bank robber as local hero? Seventy-five years after Bonnie and Clyde were dispatched in a hail of Tommy-gun bullets, the FBI is reporting a spike in bank robberies. And as long as the only victim is the bank's cash, there are indications that there is some sympathy for the robbers.
Which is hardly surprising when Americans get a report in the New York Times saying that Wall Street 'financial workers' - bankers, brokers, Masters of the Universe - awarded themselves $18.4bn in bonuses last year. It is a breathtaking figure - and most of it was paid after the financial crisis had become apparent.
Think of it as a chunk of a $700bn bail-out package from the taxpayers. Think of it as a proportion of the $35bn flushed down the khazi last year by the brokerage departments alone of the big banks playing roulette on Wall Street. And add this detail from the survey behind yesterday's Times story: 45 per cent of Wall Streeters declared themselves 'dissatisfied' with their
2008 bonus.
It was back in the days following the Crash of 1929 that America coined the term 'banksters', derived from 'gangster' and 'banker'. It became quasi-official when it was used in Congress’s 1933 Pecora Committee inquest into the causes of the Depression, according to Michael Woodiwiss, author of Gangster Capitalism, a prescient tome on the economy of the last 20 years.
"People became aware of widespread white-collar looting," he says. "Dismantling New Deal checks and balances has given business criminals many more opportunities today than their 1920s predecessors."
Americans have woken up once more to the idea that they have been taken on a glorious ride to ruin. There were cheers for Andrew Cuomo, New York's Attorney General, when he 
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