Michael Lewis is one of the more entertaining chroniclers of Wall Street, since his pre-black Monday days in Liars Poker. Here is part of the 60 minutes interview where he posits that there was mass delusion on Wall Street that engendered a culture of entitlement and the entire financial crisis.
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Large corporations who shall not be named have exactly the same culture of entitlement. See the post:
Neuroeditorial: The Bonus Culture As A Folie-à-Deux -Zillion March 19th, 2009
How did we arrive at a corporate culture where financial middlemen feel entitled to a hefty percent of the GDP? Everyone suspended reality and acted in a big folie-à-deux
-zillion.
In the beginning, corporations became campuses, with massages and chefs and private jets to the Loire Valley for off-sites. Working schmoo employees could live a 6+ start lifestyle as if they could pay for it. This begat in SoCal a bunch of faux-Europeanish strip malls. (I won’t name the developer). Faux pediments, faux marble, faux statuary, faux bell towers, faux bells ringing when it’s just a recording of bells; Faux retailers to make your life as if: as if you are in Italy; as if you are a world class athlete; as if you are a professional chef.
And so, the people of these faux cultures began to believe in the folly: plain vanilla finance people were rewarded as if they actually produced value, instead of off-loading risk; managers were given officer titles and responsibilities as if they actually had the job; people spent time on presentations as if the presentation were the end product. It’s a faux job, and a faux economy.
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