Finance and such

This week people finally calmed down a bit about AIG and their band of merry-million-dollar-bonus-having executives. I think the so-called "populist outrage" over AIG was mostly a fabrication of the media, but that doesn't mean there isn't something there. Anyway, I saw a few interesting articles written this week about American anger towards the financial industry that I thought I'd pass along.

On Wednesday, Nate Silver, the genius behind FiveThirtyEight.com, posted a brief story about his friend, and former wall street banker, Vijay. Silver uses the biography of his friend to effectively denounce "blanket assertions that Wall Street business people are 'greedy, selfish and utterly immoral.'" He also makes a great point against that the proposed (and now dead?) Bonus Tax idea is discriminatory in nature. The only critique I have of Silver's argument is that he dismisses the idea that greed, particularly the greed of the financial industry, is bad.

For more on the evolution of the financial sector from a boring and stable industry into one that balooned up and exploded, see Paul Krugman's article in this morning's New York Times.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com posted his ideas on what he called the "social contract under strain."

I don't want to summarize this article because I think it should be read as a whole. But I will post this short passage that seems to be vital to arguments that approve of the outrage over executive bonuses:

"When the companies have come to the taxpayer hat in hand, begging for money, at that point you're into the average citizen's moral space, in which it becomes her or his business whether you really deserve that much money -- something that people just don't think is their business as long as you're talking about private corporations making or not making money in whatever way they're able."

Ok. It's Friday, so enough about AIG.