Linda McQuaig - Billionaires Ball - Gluttony and Hubris in an Age in an Age of Epic Inequality

For my precious Amy:
daughter, editor, best friend

L. M.

To Marlane, with love

N. B.

The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich
and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of
poor and mean condition is the great and most universal
cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second.

At that rate, after one minute, you would have sixty dollars. And after twelve days, you would be a millionairesomething beyond most peoples wildest dreams.

But how long would it take to become a billionaire?

Well, at that rate, it would take almost thirty-two years.

Being a billionaire isnt just beyond most peoples wildest dreams; its likely beyond their comprehension.

Another way to grasp the sheer size of billionaires fortunes is to imagine how long it would take Bill Gates, generally considered the worlds richest man, to count his $53 billion. If he counted it at the same rateone dollar every secondand he counted nonstop day and night, hed have it all tallied up in 1,680 years. Still another way to look at it is this: if Bill Gates had started counting his fortune at that rate back in 330 AD the year that the Roman emperor Constantine had his wife boiled alive and chose Byzantium as the empires new capitalhed just be finishing up now.

After years of basking in the glow of a flattering limelight, by the fall of 2011 the very rich were experiencing something new and altogether jarring: the glare of a harsh spotlight trained directly on them. The temptation to bark orders like: Dim that light, or else! was natural enough, but perhaps unwise. After all, those shining the spotlight were not their employees and were swarming in large numbers through the streets of lower Manhattan, behaving like the sort of unruly mob one finds in faraway places where the ways of the free world are insufficiently appreciated.

All of a sudden, right here in America, being wondrously, fulsomely, voluptuously rich was no longer a badge of honor, something to announce gleefully to the world by squealing the tires of ones Lamborghini at pedestrians who were in the way. Wall Streetthe nexus of ambition, brains, greed, glamour, the very g-spot of the American Dreamwas no longer something to be glorified, but rather occupied.

Where would it end? Could the trappings of wealth become a source of embarrassment? Could the day come when a yacht became like a fur coatone of lifes small pleasures ruined by the prospect that wearing it (or docking it) might attract a crowd of protestors? Imagine a protestor so mean-spirited that she would object to the sight of a banker lounging on a pleasure craft massively larger than the house she had once owned but that now belonged to... a bank.

Of course, it could be worse. Luckily for the bankers, the occupiers were a little fuzzy in their targeting, going broadly after the top 1 percent, apparently unaware that the real red meat was much higher up the food chainthe top .01 percent, the top .001 percent, or all the way up to the dizzying heights occupied (in this case appropriately so) by billionaires.

Anyway, help was on the way. Already, the lobbying industry was swinging into action. By late November 2011, one of the leading Washington lobby firmsClark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranfordhad prepared a memo for the American Bankers Association (leaked to the press by some mean-spirited soul), which laid out a media strategy for countering the Occupy Wall Street juggernaut.

The lobbyists insisted that the answer lay in a carefully prepared counter-campaign aimed at slinging mud at the motives of the occupiers: If we can show they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent, it will undermine their credibility in a profound way. (Its tough to imagine what cynical motivation might lead people to live in water-soaked tents for weeks on end.)

The danger was that the antiWall Street message, if unchallenged, could turn the big Wall Street banks into fodder for the Democratic political machineand worse. As the memo noted: The bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companiesand might start running against them too.

The lobbyists even raised the prospect of the Tea Party crowd joining in some kind of a Right-Left populist free-for-all of bank-bashing: The combination has the potential to be explosive later in the year when media reports cover the next round of bonuses and contrast it with stories of millions of Americans making do with less this holiday season. (Its gratifying to see that, even when theyre plotting the destruction of a democratic movement, lobbyists now use inclusive language about the holiday season.)

All this looming victimization was no doubt baffling to members of the financial elite, who still had trouble grasping the notion that they were somehow supposed to feel culpable for the 2008 financial crash.

That bewilderment had been evident as early as January 2009, only months after the crash, at the elite gathering in the Swiss town of Davos, where bankers, business leaders, political shakers, and other big thinkers come together every year to celebrate the globalized world of liberated financial markets, shrunken government, and reinvigorated capitalism. Of course, some bewilderment was inevitable in Davos that year, with even questions popping up about why markets had done such a poor job of policing themselves. The headline on a dispatch that appeared on the website Slate captured the mood: Davos Man, Confused. Written by journalist Daniel Gross, the piece explained that, despite the confusion, there was a broad consensus at Davos that [s]uccess is the work of Great Men and Women, while failure can be pinned on the system. Or, as another journalist, Julian Glover noted in the UKs Guardian: The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think [this] means they should be less important or less rich.

That would have involved a change of mindset, which was not what these economic overlords seemed inclined toward. After all, a key concept behind the economic order of the past few decades has been the central importance of individual talentand the need to nurture it with abundant financial rewards. That way, so the idea goes, the brilliant in our midst would be lured to the top jobs that run the world. Ensuring the active participation of these giants among us was clearly understood to be worth a lot, and pay scales were adjusted accordingly, going through the roof at the upper end. Just because the global economy was now in a free fall hardly seemed like grounds to beat up the very people whod played key roles in designing it.

So, in Manhattan, then-CEO of Merrill Lynch John Thain apparently saw no irony as he explained why hed felt it necessary to pay $4 billion in executive bonuses to keep the best people on staffright after those same overachievers had steered the company to a staggering net loss of $27 billion and, in the process, helped trigger the global economic meltdown. The decision of the Wall Street crowd to collectively pay themselves a record $140 billion in 2009outstripping even their 2007 recordmay have seemed odd under the circumstances, but then no one ever accused Wall Street bankers of being unduly modest, unassuming, or prone to self-doubt.