It’s Envy, not Greed we should fear most….
Now that Greed is Bad, to misquote the great Gordon Gecko, open season has been declared on anybody not wearing a hair shirt to atone for their sins. Most notable amongst them – Goldman Sachs, the new hate figure of Wall Street, the “…great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” (thanks to Rolling Stone for that exquisitely pejorative quote).
They repaid $10bn in government bailouts. They made $3.5bn profits in the second quarter and started dishing out bonuses to their no-doubt deliriously happy staff.
They are successful. And that makes them bad, apparently.
What should they have done? According to the chippy and increasingly swaggering Democrats in Congress, they should have done anything but make shedloads of cash and be disgustingly successful. Interesting. I would have thought success is something we should celebrate, no matter how squid-like the successful business is.