You can't keep the scum off Wall Street. After two years of agony, wrist-slashing and begging the world for understanding, Wall Street is back to its old ways. Now those traders are showing what they really are, out of touch creatures driven by greed. These financial automatons have absolutely no connection with the rest of humanity.
Unemployment in the United States is now near 10% and people are losing their homes but the New York Times reports that Wall Street's movers and shakers hired a dwarf for a bachelor party. "A Morgan Stanley trader recently tried to hire a dwarf for a bachelor party in Miami, asking the dwarf to meet him at the airport in a "Men in Black" style suit, according to e-mail exchanges. The trader, who wanted to handcuff the dwarf to the bachelor, was recently fired."
And there's excess in other areas too, reports the NYT. "Exuberance made a comeback this year at Josh Koplewicz's annual Halloween party. More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan, a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years. The open bar was sponsored by Russian Standard vodka, and Mr. Koplewicz, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, was able to snag a big headliner: the hip-hop star Lil' Kim, who performed dressed in a black cat costume. The scene was more extravagant in September, at a 50th birthday party in Hong Kong for Brian Brille, the head of Bank of America Asia Pacific. Mr. Brille, who is well known on the New York social scene, wore a gray Hugh Hefner-esque jacket. Women dressed like Playmates, with feather boas and satin ears, danced behind a pink silk screen."
Of course, all this is happening at a time when the FBI is raiding hedge funds as part of its probe into insider trading and traders are likely to walk off with $14.5 billion of bonuses this year. And it's meant to be a bad year.
Compare that with soaring unemployment and an economy in a real mess. It tells us one thing: deep down, Wall Street's denizens are really awful people. You wouldn't want them in your home.
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