To End This Financial Crisis, Americans Are Going to Have to Get Angry

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 11, 2009.

What happened to Jack Morgan or later Richard Whitney -- a crowd of 6,000 turned out at New York's Grand Central Station in 1938 to watch the handcuffed former president of the New York Stock Exchange be escorted onto a train for Sing Sing, having been convicted of embezzlement -- was the political and social equivalent of a great depression. It represented, that is, a catastrophic deflation of the legitimacy of the ancien régime. It was part of what made possible the advent of something entirely new.

Speculators and Con Men

Under normal circumstances, most Americans have been perfectly willing to draw a relatively sharp distinction between the misguided speculator and the confidence man's outright felonious behavior. One is a legitimate banker gone astray, the other an outlaw.

Under the extraordinary circumstances of terminal systemic breakdown, that distinction grows ever hazier. That was certainly true in the early years of the first Great Depression, when a damaging question arose: just exactly what was the difference between the behavior of Charles Mitchell, Jack Morgan, and Richard Whitney, lions of that era's Establishment, and outliers like "Sell-em" Ben Smith, Ivar Kreuger, "the match king," Jesse Livermore, "the man with the evil eye," William Crappo Durant, maestro of investment pool stock kiting, or the one-time Broadway ticket agent and stock manipulator Michael Meehan, men long barred from the walnut-paneled inner sanctums of white-shoe Wall Street?

Admittedly, their dare-devil escapades had often left them on the wrong side of the law and they would end their days in jail, as suicides, or in penury and disgrace. Nonetheless, as is true today, many Americans then came to accept that between the speculating banker and the confidence man lay a distinction without a meaningful difference. After all, by the early 1930s, the whole American financial system seemed like nothing but a confidence game deserving of the deepest ignominy.

In that sense, Bernie Madoff, a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, already seems like a synecdoche for a whole way of life. Technically speaking, he ran a Ponzi scheme out of his brokerage firm, as strictly fraudulent as the original one invented by Charles Ponzi, that Italian vegetable peddler, smuggler, and after he got out of an American jail, minor fascist official in Mussolini's Italy.

Ponzi, however, was a small-timer. He gulled ordinary folks out of their five and ten dollar bills. Madoff's $50 billion game was something else again. It was completely dependent on his ties to the most august circles of our financial establishment, to major hedge funds and funds of funds, to top-drawer consulting firms, to blue-ribbon nonprofits, and to a global aristocracy of the super-rich. True enough, people of middling means, as well as public and union pension funds, got taken too. At the end of the day, however, Madoff's scheme, unlike Ponzi's, was premised on a pervasive insiderism which had everything to do with the way our financial system has been run for the past quarter century.

Once Madoff was exposed, everybody questioned the credulousness of those who invested with him: why didn't they grow suspicious of such consistently high rates of return? But the equally reasonable question was: why should they have? Not only did you practically need an embossed invitation before you could entrust your loot to Madoff, but the whole financial sector had been enjoying extraordinary returns for a very long time (admittedly, with occasional major hiccups like the Dot-com bust of 1999-2000, which somehow seemed to fade quickly from memory).

Keep in mind as well that these lucrative dealings were based on speculative investments in securities so far removed from anything tangible or comprehensible that they seemed to be floating in thin air. The whole system was a Ponzi-like scheme which, like the Energizer Bunny, just kept on going and going and going… until, of course, it didn't.

Locked into the Bailout State

After 1929, when the old order went down in flames, when it commanded no more credibility and legitimacy than a confidence game, there was an urgent cry to regulate both the malefactors and their rogue system. Indeed, new financial regulation was at the top of, and made up a hefty part of, Roosevelt's New Deal agenda during its first year. That included the Bank Holiday, the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking (their prior cohabitation had been a prime incubator of financial hanky-panky during the Jazz Age of the previous decade), and the first Securities Act to monitor the stock exchange.

See more stories tagged with: economy, depression, recession, financial crisis

Steve Fraser is a visiting professor at New York University, co-founder of the American Empire Project, and the author, most recently, of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.

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