THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”

“Private Vices, Publick Benefits” read the book’s subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm — a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are — Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”

In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.

I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “job creators,” a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is envy.

First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless.

Also, entrepreneurs and the rich are different and only partly overlapping categories. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of established corporations, institutional managers of other kinds, the wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the most successful entertainers and athletes, people who simply inherited their money or, yes, people who work on Wall Street.

MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.

Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.

Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

Published: May 12, 2012

Why is Wall Street full of psychopaths?

A surprisingly high number of financiers have an "unparalleled capacity for lying," according to a new, unsettling report that's rattling the industry

What are the symptoms of Wall Street psychopaths? 
They "generally lack empathy and interest in what other people feel or think," writes DeCovny, who bases her report on interviews with several trade psychologists. Financial psychopaths are capable of displaying "an abundance of charm, charisma, [and] intelligence," but also possess an "unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation."

How does it affect their work?
In extreme cases, financial psychopaths become compulsive gamblers, driven by "the chemical rush of serotonin and endorphins" that accompanies gambling, writes Alexander Eichler at The Huffington Post. Of course, "an appetite for risk can seem like a positive business trait on Wall Street, where big gambles sometimes lead to big rewards." But when bets go bad, psychopaths "dig themselves into a deeper hole and deny any wrongdoing or failure," DeCovny says. Financial psychopaths lie to others — and themselves — about the extent of their problem, and "commit forgery, fraud, theft, and embezzlement to support their habit."

Why are there so many psychopaths on Wall Street? 
In some cases, people with psychopathic personalities seek out jobs in the financial industry, where charisma, confidence, risk-taking, and a singular focus on self-interest are often rewarded. In fact, DeCovny finds that the best candidates for Wall Street positions often display such characteristics. But some Wall Street workers also develop these traitsbecause of the job and its attendant pressures. DeCovny says compulsive gambling, for example, is "often latent — neither they nor anyone else knows they have this propensity."

What other psychological issues do financiers face? 
Quite a few. Nearly a quarter of male Wall Street brokers are clinically depressed, compared with 7 percent for the general male population, according to a 2000 study. Research also shows that bankers are prone to "insomnia, alcoholism, heart palpitations, eating disorders, and an explosive temper," writes Leslie Kwoh at The Wall Street Journal.

I think I've identified one of these guys:

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/senior-wall-st-banker-be-tried-ethnic

Here is another one for you to read.

This guy is a douche and reminds me of those assholes at my previous employer. The double talk and jibberish is exactly what they want you to listen to; they don't want to tell you the truth because they fucked up and they don't want people to know how illegal or stupid their fuck up was.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-dimon-sunday-20120512,0,6700867.story

May 14, 2012, 5:00 a.m.

Without even waiting a decent interval for mourning, JPMorgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimonlaunched his defense campaign over the disclosure that he presided over a $2-billion trading loss in derivatives within days of the disclosure itself, choosing the comforting confines of NBC's "Meet the Press" for the campaign kick-off.

Dimon’s theme was essentially as follows: "Hey, everybody makes mistakes -- sure, we lost $2 billion, but we've still got billions more, and we'll figure out this one ourselves without the need for any further regulations, thank you."

His argument is plainly designed to distract from the right way to think about JPM's fiasco, which is that it's exactly the sort of thing that regulations should forbid banks from doing, lest they destroy the financial system -- again.

Dimon certainly showed supreme skill in choosing his venue. In "Meet the Press" host David Gregory he had a questioner who is expert in the honored television tradition of taking interviewees at their own level of self-esteem. Also someone who is so clueless about how banks and investment markets work that he hasn’t got the slightest idea of what questions to ask, much less how to follow up on an answer.

Here, for example, is how Dimon answered Gregory's question, "How did this happen?"

"First of all, there was one warning signal -- if you look back from today, there were other red flags. That particular red flag -- you know, we made a mistake, we got very defensive and people started justifying everything we did. You know, the benefit in life is to say, 'Maybe you made a mistake, let’s dig deep.' And the mistake had been brewing for a while, so it wasn't just any one thing." (The words are verbatim; punctuation is added.)

If you didn’t know anything about what happened at JPMorgan Chase before, now you know less.

For most of the interview Dimon allowed a pained smile to play on his lips, like someone who is suffering a mild case of indigestion but is confident that the Tagamet will soon take care of the discomfort. Dimon could pose as having been taken to the woodshed by the stern questioning of David Gregory. But this more resembled being taken to the woodshed for a cool, companionable drink.

Gregory didn't press Dimon to explain how the blown-up trade fits in with the ongoing debate over the Volcker Rule, a federal proposal designed to forbid banks from making risky trades for their own books. Here's the answer to that unasked question: It illustrates how Wall Street's campaign to eviscerate the rule will allow exactly this sort of trade to happen.

There's not that much mystery about the actual trade. Leaving aside the sophistication of the transactions themselves, JPMorgan's trader, a London-based derivatives expert whose portfolio was so outsized he became known in the markets as the London Whale, essentially bet that corporate debt was becoming less risky as corporations were getting stronger -- in trading parlance, he was long corporate debt. But he did so in a way that even a tiny hiccup in the index he was trading could be exploited by rival traders. And that’s what happened.

Dimon continues to explain this trade away as a "hedge." It may not have been anything of the kind. First of all, a hedge reduces risk: If one investment might lose a lot of money if markets move in one direction, you create a hedge that will make money under those circumstances so your losses are limited.

Yet JPMorgan already is massively long corporate debt as a result of its normal course of business, which is lending money to corporations. A "hedge" that replicates that same position isn't a hedge at all. There's evidence that the department where the Whale worked was, in fact, replicating Morgan's real-life business of lending to corporations, but using fancy derivatives to do so -- creating a "synthetic" bank, as traders would say, without actually lending to corporate customers as real banks do.

If that's true, the question is why? To put it another way, if JPMorgan had $350 billion sitting around idle (the sum the Whale's department appeared to have to play with), why not use it to do something that helps the economy -- such as, you know, lending it to businesses? Instead, JPMorgan used the money to buy chips to play in the derivatives casino, which doesn’t help the economy one bit.

Gregory didn't ask Dimon that, so he didn't get an answer.

If this was a hedge, it looks like a "portfolio" hedge -- that is, one not tied to any specific Morgan investment, but to a broader swath of it business. That's something that drafters of the Volcker Rule such as Sen. Carl Levin have specifically hoped to eradicate. As Levin wrote in February to the SEC and other regulators drafting the Volcker rule, "banks could easily use portfolio-based hedging to mask proprietary trading" (which the rule is supposed to outlaw).

But Dimon and his fellow bankers are determined to save portfolio hedging. As Dimon specifically said in his 2010 chairman's letter to Morgan Chase shareholders, "if there must be more rules," they need to allow portfolio hedging.

The most important question about the trading fiasco that Gregory and Dimon danced away from involves how this affair demonstrates that risk-management models can always break down. That's important to remember when bankers like Dimon portray such events as out-of-the-blue "mistakes" that will be guarded against in the future. The risk management expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book "The Black Swan," explained in 2008 that when 30 years of risk models tell you that a certain costly event is almost sure not to happen, that only means that you become so complacent that when it does happen, it destroys you utterly.

Dimon and Gregory conspired to convince Americans that this was just another "mistake." Morgan will figure it out and move on. During the broadcast, which was taped Friday, Gregory asked Dimon: "If this happened to JPMorgan Chase, which really understands how to manage risk, what about all the other banks out there?"

Say what? The Whale affair shows that JPMorgan doesn't understand how to manage risk. When you're making multibillion-dollar bets using inherently volatile and unpredictable financial devices, nobody does -- JPMorgan’s own risk models showed that its exposure had suddenly doubled in a period of weeks prior to its disclosure, which means either that the risk models were hopelessly outclassed, or that risk models can't ever be reliably accurate under all conditions. Either way, it leads to the conclusion that Dimon desperately tried to evade on "Meet the Press": that the only way to make this sort of risk-taking safe for the financial system is to make it illegal in the first place.

I mean seriously... wtf is this guy saying? What a load of bullshit

"First of all, there was one warning signal -- if you look back from today, there were other red flags. That particular red flag -- you know, we made a mistake, we got very defensive and people started justifying everything we did. You know, the benefit in life is to say, 'Maybe you made a mistake, let’s dig deep.' And the mistake had been brewing for a while, so it wasn't just any one thing." (The words are verbatim; punctuation is added.)

What a crock of bull.

Some one should just fucking kick him the fucking nads and be done with it.

Why do you care that JPMorgan Chase lost $2.3 billion? Yes, trading in the stock market means that sometimes you will lose money. *gasp* That is what "risk" is. It happens, so what? The shareholders of JPMorgan are the only ones who face losing money as shares dropped $3 overnight. The people deemed responsible for the loss will be fired or demoted, and maybe they might implement new rules. You should be happy because the rich people you hate so much just lost money. 

Apparently the shareholders decided that Dimon gets to keep his $24 million/year paycheck and his chairmanship. http://www.suntimes.com/business/12548390-420/jpmorgans-dimon-survives-votes-on-pay-chairmanship.html

Probably because the shareholders serious enough to vote know enough about the industry to recognize that $2.3 billion doesn't really matter. The bank is still very strong financially and is expected to post a quarterly profit exceeding $4 billion despite the loss. If they are wrong and JP Morgan Chase starts losing money like crazy and collapses, so what? They lose the money, as long as we don't have some asshole in Washington who decides we have to bail them out. Let them collapse, and smaller banks will buy up their assets in the resulting vacuum. Evil capitalism will destroy those who take irresponsible risks and reward those who make good decisions long term.  

I don't think it is in any danger of collapsing. I think the smart thing to do is to take advantage of the hiccup in stock price and buy some JPM, you have a good chance of making 10-12% on your money in a short time period. One thing we can expect though is that a lot of banks are going to lose a lot of money investing in bonds- an issue I laid out recently. http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/31903 There is no government regulation that would have prevented this, there are government actions that could be stopped that would prevent the market from being skewed as it is right now and lesson the size of the bubble before it does pop. 

We aren't talking about a local business losing 23 dollars. We are talking about a global company losing 2.3 billion dollars.

A global company like JPM has an effect on us in many ways. The local business doesn't.

JPMorgan Chase losing $2.3 billion affects them about as much as my business misplacing $23. They are worth over 3.1 trillion. $2.3 billion doesn't hurt them in any long term way. 

Explain exactly how them losing that money harms you, in any way. If there are "many" ways you ought to be able to name one. 

I don't know all that much about the bank, but there has to be something serious about the loss.  The FBI is investigating it.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/16/markets/jpmorgan-fbi-investigation/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

Easy to say when there is no accountability when you pay off lawmakers to be able to bet on both sides of the "risk" and set up an economy that dumps the losses on the rest of us.

You are trying a bait and switch argument by fallacy of equivocation by pretending that a laymen individual investor is the same as the ATMOSPHERE. That is like accusing a cloud of being the entire atmosphere.

We do need risk in a healthy economy. WE DO NOT need the "risk" we have now which basically amounts to privatized profits and socialized losses.

I don't own a damned bit of stock and if more people bailed on the stock market the more it would be forced to accept the healthy risk it has avoided.

The climate is the problem that has created wild speculation that over conflates a healthy price. If the CEOs and Wall Street slush makers were under threat of prison and had been held to a high standard the "risk" would be healthy and the tax payers, like me wouldnt be bailing out those fucking crybabies.

Your smoke and mirrors bullshit doesn't work. Risk is not the issue, accountability is, and those who created the climate have not been held responsible. As long as we as a collective society allow golden parachutes the game will always be rigged.

There is a huge difference between healthy risk which fosters the betterment of society, and unhealthy risk which is nothing more than a gambling addict who has no business being in the casino. You are confusing the addiction for the person. CLIMATE created this, not one single individual investor.

Its unhealthy because it has been dumped on people in the form of loss of jobs and in the form of us bailing them out.  Economies don't exist in a vacuum and without owning stock myself, HAVE been affected by the bad risk of others.

Your risk affects others and our climate of putting profits before people has fucked us over.

I wish more people would boycott the stock market, then the buyer would rule and the risk the stock sellers sell would be held accountable. But as long as it is "every man for themselves" and "fuck you I got mine" we'll merely set up more bubbles with an even far worse disaster than we are slowly creeping out of.

You are out of your fucking mind dude. The risk we have is nothing more than privatized profits and socialized losses.

"risk" as it stands now, is like blaming the hammer for what the person does with it in bashing someone's scull in. Investing is a tool, but collectively it does no one any good when we end up with what we have ended up with and that risk affected even those who down own houses and dont own stock. Those people ARE not separate from the economy and do not live on an island.

You support the car salesman who blames the buyer when they know the car is a lemon and then say "hey tough luck, I didn't tell you to buy the car I knew was defective". We are not talking about one bad apple, and we are not talking about one loser. We are talking about an entire climate that threw caution to the wind.

You'd suck at being a NASCAR owner with your attitude about what "risk" is. You'd be willing to put your driver in a car with no rollbars and no breaks and blame the pit crew for getting run over and if you owned the stadium you'd allow people walk across the track during the race.

WITH RISK comes responsibility. Your idea of "risk" is fuck seatbelts and who needs speed limits?

Risk in investment is one thing, anarchy by the salesmen is not risk, it is a scam.

Doesn't mean there is anything serious, it just means government thugs want to look like they are doing something. Even the story says it is "unclear" what laws might have been violated. Probably because there probably weren't any laws broken. Maybe a few SEC regulations, but doing business without breaking SEC regulations is virtually impossible because the regulations are so numerous and complex no single person can possibly know all of them. 

 Beachbum, you're correct! Some psychopaths are natural businessmen. I remember the story how the best investors and gamblers on stock market were people with impaired sense of empathy. Their lack of empathy allowed them to invest or withdraw money completely regardless of humanitarian, environmental or moral concerns, purely with focus on profit. This is why they had the most success and became more rich than others.

Nowadays they use computers for the same task.

It scares the shit out of me. These psychopaths were given enormous amounts of money, power and control over global resources and finances. They let 10 million people starve every year and more to live and die in other terrible ways, because it suits them. This is an absolutely perverted and evil system, which will if necessary not stop before anything except the use of nuclear bomb. Although frustrated masses will doubtlessly resort to that, given more time. That is of course not just Wall Street, these people most probably form the basis of all private banks, hedge funds, investment funds, bond markets, stock markets worldwide and so on. And they already attack their own state economies to gain access into the governments:

http://www.other-news.info/2011/12/european-democracy-and-the-financial-coup-detat/

They only can't threaten democracy in my country, because we don't have any. A former deputy of my Parliament and a current regional mayor was just caught with the total of 37 million CZK of bribes for faking dotations from the EU budget. He demanded a billion CZK on a project of a freakin' LOOKOUT TOWER at the premises of a freakin' HOSPITAL, reputedly to support tourism. (there were other insanely overpriced and useless projects on the hospital take-in facilities or dotation for a school that does not really exist). Be assured, most of my deputies, ministers and president included are the same swines as this David Rath, they just weren't caught with millions in their pockets. I suppose this will become a standard policy in the indebted countries taken over by the Goldman Sachs-appointed prime ministers.

(* 1 dollar is about 20 CZK, but the actual purchasing power here is higher, 1 dollar is about 5 czk in practice)