Should Speculative Bankers Be Put to Death?
The latest spectacle of disgusting posthuman monsters in expensive suits squandering other people’s billions—while displaying nothing but studied contempt for hoi polloi whose blood is their sustenance—is sickening and infuriating. Déjà vu all over again. Never mind the regulators and government officials with whom they are in existential cahoots; the bastards will continue doing their thing as surely as the Muslims will go on murdering Christians, and lung cancer cells will go on multiplying. It is their vocation.
So should they be killed? The thought is tempting and rather appealing, the imagination runs pleasingly wild. On reflection it has to be rejected. Provided we accept the morally necessary assumption that for all their sulphurically scented traits, the Bankers are “humans,” we cannot escape the Raskolnikov dilemma.
The Russians are the last civilized nation to take literature as seriously as life, and they will be the last to subject that heritage to the deconstructivist butchery of effeminate idiots with minor-college PhDs. This is to their credit because Raskolnikov should be seen as a living person living a real life in New York, or London, or the Midwest today. This real-life person—a teacher, a corporate bureaucrat, a construction engineer, a retired policeman, or a housewife…—should be forgiven for wishing Bankers dead. But their all too understandable sentiment is essentially the same as that of the Red Commissars of 1917 and their heirs everywhere As Dostoyevsky understood decades before Lenin, it is dangerous; understandable; but not justified.
The Bankers should be discredited, tarred, and feathered, stripped of every last cent of their ill-gotten gains, and put to work on a Californian orange farm—absolutely!—but they should not be killed.
A bit of history. I was 15 when I visited St. Petersburg—then still “Leningrad”—with a Belgrade high school tour. My purpose was to go in quest of Dostoevsky, my favorite writer, whom I had just started discovering at that time. He wrote Crime and Punishment on the banks of the Neva—one of the best structured, intricately multi-layered novels of all time. (I even named my son Theodore in Fyodor Mikhailovich's honor.)
It was early July and the White Nights of the North were at their whitest, and the days were sunny. Yet the essential gloomy essence of the place—thickly felt in the courtyard of the building the author inhabited when writing his masterpiece, and in which his tortured hero Raskolnikov lived—could not be concealed. Behind the layers of Soviet decrepitude, one could sense the splendor of Peter the Great’s design. Such splendor makes up not for joyful livability. The city was essentially unchanged since the 1860s (minus some 1941-44 German-inflicted damage, not too visible) and its misty distances looked flat and indistinct against the pale backdrop of the Northern sky behind and the rising mist of its many waterways and canals in front. St. Petersburg is the most European city in Russia and the most inherently perverted for being so. Dostoevsky's novel embodies the worst aspects of both cultures that offer two poles of one civilization.
That essential gloom of the place (which I have not visited since but I don't believe has changed) provided a perfect setting for the novel which is the essential key to understanding the dilemma of our postmodern times. Raskolnikov rails against the social injustice without being a Marxist (not even knowing that the author of Das Kapital exists), adores Napoleon as the 19th century model of superhuman greatness but does not seek l'Empereur's glory for himself. His obsessive quest for "justice" becomes tangibly personified in the old usurer whom he finally kills—premeditatedly murders her—as an act of ontological retribution.
“I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own sake," Dostoevsky has him say reflecting obviously his own passions, "it was not money I needed but something else…I wanted to know, and to know quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else, or a man. Shall I be able to transgress or shall I not? Shall I dare to stoop down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?”
But Raskolnikov soon discovers he is not a superman capable of enacting his own moral laws, and the lesson has been re-learnt at a great cost by Dostoyevsky’s heirs in the horrible century that followed his death. On the other hand, Raskolnikov is not satisfied with the lower-category claim that because the victim was a horrible, laecherous hag (the usurer was ugly, unlike many of her well-groomed Wall Street heirs), her death was for the good of all. The key issue is that Raskolnikov is utterly unable to live with what he has done; he is going neurotic verging on insane; and in the fullness of time, he willingly makes a full confession to a police inspector who knows his soul. Porfiry Petrovich is not playing games—but merely leading him along the way to inner release that comes with confession.
This dilemma—can we be Gods?—is at the novel’s heart, and at the heart of the crisis of our civilization. And that is why we should let the bankers live, which is not to say we should try to destroy them and all they stand for.
Unlike the Communist mass murderers of the past century, Raskolnikov sees clearly his tragic predicament through the prism of a distinctly Christian hate of cunning commerce and ruthless profitmaking. Being prepared to use violence against those who destroy the meek and the pure of spirit for Mammon's sake, but NOT being a secular revolutionary—he IS what the Rulers of the World fear the most.
But in the end, with a Russian twist that is essentially pan-Christian, he repents and realizes that "Thou shalt not kill!" takes precedence. And the end of the story is the new beginning, as he serves his sentence in Siberia, accompanied by his long-suffering Sonia: “Here begins a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto quite unknown reality.”
This is a blueprint for our own rebirth and renewal in the dark times ahead. And screw the bankers.
Entries(RSS)
Srdja,
Wow, in my opinion, (which should carry no weight with anyone other than "effeminate idiots with minor-college PhDs" ) this is some of your best stuff. Thank you.
Bless you Srdja, I love you. I read your first paragraph and it just blew my mind, just a sec while i catch my breath and read the rest. Wow. I have to wonder if your Chinese minder hasn't written this article for you? I know the Chinese write all my material. Well, they would if i had something to say. But seriously, so many big words and Dostoevsky too? Jeepers, has somebody has been hiding his light under a bushel? Dude, you can write like a dream. Thank you.
P.S. it will take time for me to formulate anything approaching a good reply to this piece of excellent writing. For what it's worth, I always thought it was a mistake to ignore Russian feelings about our Eastern European anti-missile defense plans. Russians are nothing if not....... fill in the mystery.
T; i would bet " my last Golden Eagle " that even hapless mr. holloway would love that word-smithy phrase"sulphurically scented traits". good column.
While Mr. Dimond lost $2 billion in one hedge, JP Morgan still showed a $21 profit for the year, so what does it mean then? In any case, to blame bankers over anyone else is a favorite leftist ploy for decades, predictable and uninteresting. But there is a quite deserving target, mentioned above. Effeminate idiots with minor and not-so-minor-college Phds, for there is no other group at work that does more for obfuscation of right and wrong.
come on jack. it might be predicable and semi-interesting, but it sure as hell trumps beating up on faculty lounge milksops.
Yep, what you said.
RAS, i know it is more fun ridiculing Dimond than ridiculing pompous academic entities like Krugman, but you won't get me to sign on for Occupy wallstreet any time soon. I got to know SDS form the vantage point of SLS.
" And that is why we should let the bankers live, which is not to say we should try to destroy them and all they stand for." Surely a partial misprint. I believe this world would survive just fine, more justly, more sanely, and less frenetically without usury. Even more interesting, from my point of view, in JPM making these bets to make money (although they lost some this time), they expected to relieve someone else of their money; the expected to "outclever" someone else, hardly a community building activity unless, of course, you're out on the athletic playing field.
Whether one likes or dislikes banking organizations, the depositor and the borrower are ultimately always the ones at fault. It was the depositor's fault for keeping his funds with a potentially untrustworthy organization, and it was the borrower's fault to take money from those who may fraudulently foreclose on them. People hate to think of it this way, but ultimately, business exists only because of the patronage of those who use them. Let's not pretend there is no choice; there are credit unions after all.
In this day and age, we seem to want to have everything work out perfectly, without us making our own efforts. If we spill hot coffee, we sue and demand Hot written on coffee cups. If a college student fails to get a job, she sues her alma mater for tuition repayment. If a mother fails to keep her medicine capsules out of reach of her children, it's the drug company's fault for her children dying. It's always THEM, and it is NEVER US.
Criticising or singling out one group at fault implies we forget the corporate nature of man, or that many of the less virtuous elements of our society exist due to the support or condoning of everyone else in society. All the good things are because of us, and all the bad things because of society, the other, those people, or THEM.
I'll be honest, I wish there was an "opt out" option. My fantasy world is one where one could work, earn money, save up money, and then use money when needed. If one is able to save up enough to have a modest retirement at the end of life, that would be great.
The problem is we're all locked inside one big lousy casino, and we are forced to play the game. The strong pressure is on to make a gamble on stocks of some sort - you can buy mutual funds, IRAs, paper commodities . . .etc. You're making the "safe bet" but it's by no means a "guarantee" (I recently read Harpo Marx's account of him & Groucho going into the Great Depression - after he had scraped together $45,000 in 3 days he was only saved from complete financial ruin by convincing a casino boat owner to lend him another $10,000 through a game of Pinchie Winchie, and that's 1920s dollars).
You can play the "safer" bet by investing in bonds, but that's assuming you think the government will actually care about paying you back in 40 or 50 years, and at a rate that probably won't hit inflation (i.e. net loss for you). You can play it even "safer" by keeping the money in a bank in a CD or some such, but once again you're betting on beating the inflation rate and that the bank won't go belly-up or that if it does the FDIC, which has been in the red for some time, will still be able to cover your losses. There are already runs on banks in Europe - and I believe Federal Law was recently changed so that if a bank run starts in America they can actually freeze your assets in any Money Market type accounts.
You can make the long bet and invest in gold or oil or other commodities, and this is the bet you make if you think inflation will go hog wild soon, but you risk having your assets confiscated (ala the Roosevelt confiscation of privately owned gold - please nobody tell me "it could never happen again") and those assets are not easy to store/secure/trade, unless you invest in the paper that claims it's a "share" of gold or oil . . .etc., but has anyone ever tried to collect on a "share" of gold bullion?
You can take your money and put it in a mayo jar and bury it, but then the Fed steals your money anyway by what is quaintly called "Quantitative Easing" so that the 100 bucks you earn today will be worth about 5 bucks when you retire.
It's tempting to want to take it out on the bankers (I know I go through those moments), but most of them are only playing the system they've been born into. This monster, from whence it came I know not, is far bigger than any one JP Morgan goofball. As the picture to this article shows, Capra saw it long ago, as did John Ford (the banker in Stagecoach - "What's good for the banks is good for the people") and before that Chesterton & Belloc & before that . . . etc.
So place your bet and pray for the best. If you have ambition you can go gamble with the high stakes folks, or just buy a bunch of Lotto tickets like me. Seems about as sane an investment as any.
Still, I dream of being able to just earn money, save money, and spend money as necessary without having to deal with the pressures of whether I made the right bet or not. I've got enough stress in my life over important things to have to futz with such nonsense.
My friend, there are plenty of effeminate idiotic PhDs from MAJOR colleges
Great comments for a skillfully written post. It's a tough call, but I like Mr. Cornell's the best. This whole hedge fund thing has my head spinning. As it turns out, at least from my simple point of view, this J.P. Morgan fuss is much ado about not much. At least, in a way. Let me explain. Sure, the guys in JP who bet that certain trends would move in one direction more than another lost a few billion dollars. But their loss was another gambler's gain. Apparently, JP is such a big player that their large wager was noticed by others. Just as the size of the JP wager may have tilted lady luck in one direction, like heavy bets on a horse might, the avid interest of smaller betters tilted the wheel of fortune back. Maybe. This is not entirely accurate. It's not accurate because they were not placing bets on something as concrete as red or black. JP was placing bets on an index of 127 large corporate wagers called credit default swaps which is a fancy way of saying insurance contracts against borrower defaults. It gets much more complicated in real life. Corporate bonds are sold, the security of those bonds is protected with complicated insurance plans in addition to collateral and other stuff and JP placed bets on whether the index, reflecting the collective confidence or lack thereof in the security of those bonds, would move in one way or the other over time. The confidence is seen by how much insurance plans are purchased, I mean credit default swaps. The bets are not on the bonds, the bets are on how much or how little the 127 corporations invest in protection for their bonds. Which is a reflection on how confident the corporations are in their ability to pay off on the bonds when they come due. So, JP was 'protecting' it's money by gambling on how much confidence 127 other gamblers had. Jeepers. They call it hedge fund management as if they are making prudent investments. Go figure. I still remember the good old days when the Savings and Loan fiasco blew up and we found out that bankers were investing in artwork. Somehow, those investments make sense now.
Anyway, yes JP lost a few billion and they will keep bleeding for a while since time is a factor in their wagers. But, the other guys who bet against JP made money. So, it's good if you won and it's bad if you lost. I'm not sure this JP thing is a dramatic teachable moment or not. It kinda looks like business as usual in that somebody juggled their numbers wrong. Nothing new with that. I do have to wonder about the broader implications of this kind of money making. Sure, we all know that lawyers produce nothing of value and can be rightly regarded as parasitic creatures who deserve to die. What I'm beginning to think is that bankers are not really providing a public service either. Like lawyers, who leach the value from another's labor, scribble legalese on some papers, chant incantations at the robed high priest and make your money disappear. The bankers do it with calculators programmed to shuffle numbers whose meaning is tenuously linked to feelings which are prudently cross-checked against numbers linked even more remotely to hunches. Meanwhile, the underlying value of the productive entity is siphoned away like magic with nothing of value to show for it.
Let me modestly suggest that whatever passes for regulation of the banking industry is a sick joke. Is it too much to ask that banks be required to invest in direct, concrete economic activity that at least tries to improve efficiency or produce something of tangible value and deliver an honest return for a reasonable risk? I'm tempted to say that bankers making money by gambling for or against what other people have gambled will happen to bundled derivative mystery packages laced throughout with spells and incantations against the evil spirits of risk are even more depressingly mysterious than a Dostoevsky novel. So be it Mr. Trifcovic, to the Gulag with the bankers. We won't kill them, the cold will.
Now I need a cocktail. Cheers.
jack: i signed an SDS statement in 68 or 69 ; by the time SLS was founded(79) i had two children, and thanks to a local bank, a modest cape cod on 20 acres of bucks county real estate. the only thing i wanted to occupy then was a slightly larger cape. we outgrew the cape and added- it is the only thing i wish to occupy today. the SDS , like childhood allergies i also outgrew. against libertarianism i must have had immunized in childhood.
W.c. eulenspiegel : define all that constitutes "concrete economic activities" ; explain how a bankster prior to approving a loan , might come to know if the proposed concrete economic activity will in fact improve efficiency; which products have tangible value and why not demand a reasonable return for an honest risk? an "honest return" ??? now i'll have a maker's and watch the phils.
RAS kudos and three cheers! But unlike yourself, I do remain holding a grudge albeit from a desert ranch. Because in the world of my academia Krugmans won over Rothbards. The ripoff entailed theron makes a banker's misdeeds only a diversion.
Should Speculative Bankers Be Put to Death?
No, that would be anti-Semitic and a pogrom. (Tut, tut, tut - provocative titles draw provocative replies).
Mentally stimulating article as always from our Serbian gentleman-scholar and the Crime and Punishment allusions give much material for meditations on moral theology and everyday ethics.
On an altogether different matter, Dr. Fleming requested elsewhere (at that exact 'where' comments are barred) names to be invented and suggested for the new daily web-log, or blog, this fine website has instituted, my suggestions are humbly proffered for use.
"Peter they're mostly terrible". Well I'm sorry but my mother-in-law surprised us with a visit and I'm still really upset about it.
It is instructive that Dante places usurers and homosexuals in the same circle of Hell: The homosexuals for taking what is naturally fertile and making it sterile (hmm...that would include practitioners of contraception as well, would it not?), and the usurers for taking what is naturally sterile (money) and making it fertile.
So God will judge, and He will execute His righteous sentence.
Thank you, Dr. Trfkovic, for a "sentimental journey." I lived in St. Petersburg for the month of September 1999, and the exquisitely somber beauty of the place, along with all of its poignant contradictions on every level - theological, philosophical, cultural, artistic, you name it - will haunt me always.
PS For those unfamiliar with, or who want to become re-acquainted with either St. Petersburg or Dostoevsky or both, the 2003 miniseries production of *The Idiot* starring Yevgeny Mironov will effectively fascinate and draw you into that world. The English subtitles are atrocious, but the production's overall excellence more than compensates.
Vince, if you come back to your comment, I'd say we need to be more than tempted to prosecute the big Wall St banksters if we're going to survive as a society. I'd recommend reading Edward Griffin's Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, if you haven't already, for reasonably thorough background info. In any case, the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the banking cabal who set up the Fed and have been running the Treasury, Fed, and Wall St as a shadow government for a century.
Under their stooge, LBJ, and a compliant congress, they eliminated gold backing of the dollar in '68, and convertibility for foreign entities was eliminated under Nixon in '71, for the purpose of opening the flood gates for a 50-fold increase in total credit, reaching the level of about $50 trillion today. Before that, these money changers had been content to "trick a profit" off the honest labor of the rest of us through mild inflation. Today, beyond the obscene profits we see, trillions are unaccounted for. I don't think I'm being an alarmist when I say we need to look to the 60 million or so Russians slaughtered in the last century to understand what they've got in store for us. If their DHS has ordered 450 million rounds of hollow-tipped ammunition for use solely within the borders of the US, as it has, I'd say we have something to be seriously worried about.
The resulting decades of malinvestment are killing us while these banksters and their minions were growing richer than Croesus. For example, in the years just before the crash in 07/08, the financial sector (incl financial services) was siphoning off about 40% of all business profits, while their share of GDP, if we include those lawyers, accountants, and related parasites in the financial services sector, rose to about one-third. Meanwhile, manufacturing, mining, and agriculture fell to something like 15% of GDP. The idea that these banksters simply inherited the system they're exploiting when the evidence is everywhere they created it with the complicity of bought-and-paid-for administrations and congresses doesn't hold water.
By the way, isn't the face of Potter a mismatch with the title?
Potter in It's A Wonderful Life was a banker who invested in real assets - housing, businesses, and so on. The title says "speculative bankers". Except Potter was not a man trading on day to day financial assets.
More than that, Potter was considered a bad man for being too reluctant to lend money to Jimmy Stewart's character.
But today's banking organizations are criticised for being too willing to lend money to unfit borrowers. They did the complete opposite of what Potter did.
R.S.,
Concrete economic activity, maybe a poor choice of words, is anything with the potential to create more value than it begins with. Advertising to bricks, soup to nuts. Value, broadly speaking, is the market exchange rate for a produced good or service. Stuff that improves life and increases wealth. Contrarily, the speculations of JP just move cash around. OK, the traders make a nice killing. But, the overall size of the economic pie is not increased, nothing of value is produced. So, it's effect might be compared to the 'friction of war' Clausewitz writes about. 'Honest' investments, have the potential to increase the economic pie. The increased wealth means more employment, better living and more goodies. 'Honest' returns means the money earned for investors in 'honest' investments. Dishonest in this context is the unproductive transfer of cash from point A to point B. How to guarantee safe investments? Any investment carries some risk, I did not claim otherwise. Nor did I say investors should not seek a return. Hopefully, competent bankers, businessmen and investors can put together workable plans. Since they have been doing so for years, I guess it can still be done, but I've been wrong before.
Dan,
I don't think we're necessarily on opposite sides of this fence. I am familiar with the very large book "The Creature from Jekyl Island" and while I have no disagreements with the book, I found that, after reading through some of it, that I just didn't care enough to know the details of how awful it is out there. I know it's awful. I don't dispute it. But, as I said in my previous post, I'd just prefer to not monkey with any of it at all. I'd rather spend my time trying to read "Brothers Karamozov" than read about how awful the banking industry has become and who set what up when and where.
My other point is that this dope from JP Morgan is just a player in the casino, not the casino owner or builder (not to say that there aren't specific people responsible for the current state of affairs, just saying the vast majority of current speculative bankers are not primary causes). Most young, energetic speculative bankers have grown up in the system, been taught, perhaps from the cradle, that profit is the ultimtae good - it's a world of Alex P. Keatons. Had Mr. Dimond made 2 billion dollars instead of lost it, he would be a hero not a villain. Really he's just a proxy gambler - making the bets for those who want to play but who are either too timid to make the bets themselves or feel inadequate to be able to make the smart bet and want to rely on someone else. And I'm sure he's honestly doing the best that he can to make the most money that he can. Should Mr. Dimond be punished for his actions? I have no problem with that. But if its the behavior itself that we find objectionable then we have to punish the winners as well as the losers, and no one wants to do that because we have all these promises about the magic of compound interest and Roth mutual funds that will pay for dream retirement getaways that we can't live without.
And Capra & John Ford saw the problem long before we went off the gold-standard. And Chesterton & Belloc saw the problem long before the Fed was formed. From Charlie Chaplin to Solzhenitsyn, great artists have always seen a problem with Capitalism itself, not just the abuse of the Captialist system. The solutions that some of them came up with may not be any better, but give them credit for recognizing the problem. They would've thrown Rothbard out along with Soros. What's the answer? What's the true origin of this problem? What're the alternative? What to do about it? I don't even pretend to be qualified to know, and I know I'm not capable to do squat about it (me vs. 450 million hollow tip bullets loses every time).
So I place my bet like everyone else - I just make sure it's the bet that lets me sleep well at night. Maybe the banksters can steal my money through inflation, but I'm definitely not going to just directly hand it over to them any more.