Wanker of the Day

Megan McArdle (Note that this is a link to Barry Ritholtz, not the McArdle article, because friends don't give friends links to Randroids).

You see, she's one of those people who read "Atlas Shrugged" in high school (I read the "Virtue of Selfishness, and hated every poorly crafted juvenile word), and never got over it. (She used to blog under the pseudonym "Jane Gault")

She says that Matt Taibbi is wrong when he fingers Goldman Sachs as a politically connected octopus (OK, "that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,"^* Goldman Sachs.) that was front and center in gaming and profiting from the regulatory arbitrage and fraud that enriched their principals, and beggared the rest of us, "for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system."

What's at the core of this is Randroid objectivist bullsh$#. The markets, you see, are brilliant, and so no one person, nor one organization, can game them.^†

It's the same thing that led Alan Greenspan to tell Brooksley Born that, "Wasn't a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him."

You see markets, and all there participants are the epitome of capitalist savvy, and as such, they would never be unaware of others engaging in unsafe activities for their own benefits, and so the only explanation of failure must be collective, so it's everyone's fault, particularly that lay-about mom working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, which makes it no one's fault.

I hope she has someone to cut her meat for her, because I think that the safe operation of a steak knife is beyond her.

^*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
^†This is despite the fact that the currently unraveling software theft case shows that Goldman Sachs has been front-running the entire stock market.