The new super-rich have no allegiance, obligation or connection to wider society. They live in a mirror-lined bubble – and a legally entitled one. Can anything beyond another crash change things?
Perhaps it was ever thus: the rich have always been different. But that’s not true. Some - thing big, something moral, has changed. Driving through Knightsbridge (occasionally one must) I noticed a huge, absurd, orange and, in London, practically undriveable Lamborghini illegally parked. Once, I would have been amused, but now I feel angry because I know – we all know – it was probably bought with stolen money.
“Shocking” is too soft a word to describe the crimes of the financial sector. They are almost thrilling in their creative abundance – laundering money for drugs cartels; defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders; rigging markets; sugarcoating dud loans to look like good ones; loading the world economy with ever greater levels of risk and throwing millions of people out of work. And so on. All the time, they were enriching nobody but themselves. The banks and their buddies have been on a crime spree that would have glazed over the eyes of Al Capone.
Yet here they still are, with their undriveable orange cars, their buggies, their dark fort - resses and their rancid sense of entitlement because, in short, they don’t get it. Apparently the bonus boys see “casino banking” as a flattering term rather than the insult intended. Furthermore, the use of vast sums taxpayers’ money to save the banks is seen as no more than their God-given right.
“I live near Wall Street,” the economist Jeffrey Sachs said at an event. “The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification. They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30bn a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards . . . I don’t think they were kidding anyone except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”
But we get it and we don’t like the rich any more because they all seem tainted. Lanchester points out that real business people – those who do useful things – are as angry as we are, accusing the bankers of wrecking and discrediting capitalism. (I sympathise. I have always regarded myself as a conservative and still do, but these shenanigans have tainted even that gentle world. Like most true conservatives I know, I regard the failure forcibly to end these abuses as a disgrace and a grave threat to the social peace we crave.)
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/02/age-entitlement
Perhaps it was ever thus: the rich have always been different. But that’s not true. Some - thing big, something moral, has changed. Driving through Knightsbridge (occasionally one must) I noticed a huge, absurd, orange and, in London, practically undriveable Lamborghini illegally parked. Once, I would have been amused, but now I feel angry because I know – we all know – it was probably bought with stolen money.
“Shocking” is too soft a word to describe the crimes of the financial sector. They are almost thrilling in their creative abundance – laundering money for drugs cartels; defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders; rigging markets; sugarcoating dud loans to look like good ones; loading the world economy with ever greater levels of risk and throwing millions of people out of work. And so on. All the time, they were enriching nobody but themselves. The banks and their buddies have been on a crime spree that would have glazed over the eyes of Al Capone.
Yet here they still are, with their undriveable orange cars, their buggies, their dark fort - resses and their rancid sense of entitlement because, in short, they don’t get it. Apparently the bonus boys see “casino banking” as a flattering term rather than the insult intended. Furthermore, the use of vast sums taxpayers’ money to save the banks is seen as no more than their God-given right.
“I live near Wall Street,” the economist Jeffrey Sachs said at an event. “The sense of entitlement is beyond quantification. They could not figure out why anyone might be mad at them for having nearly destroyed the world economy, taken home $30bn a year of bonuses, gotten bailed out to the tune of another trillion dollars and then lobbied for no regulation afterwards . . . I don’t think they were kidding anyone except themselves. I think they don’t get it.”
But we get it and we don’t like the rich any more because they all seem tainted. Lanchester points out that real business people – those who do useful things – are as angry as we are, accusing the bankers of wrecking and discrediting capitalism. (I sympathise. I have always regarded myself as a conservative and still do, but these shenanigans have tainted even that gentle world. Like most true conservatives I know, I regard the failure forcibly to end these abuses as a disgrace and a grave threat to the social peace we crave.)
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/02/age-entitlement
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