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Another reader from the financial world writes in:
"Profane and informed" is exactly right. I spent a couple of years as a litigator investigating charges against one of the major firms in this crisis, reading their professional and personal emails. Calling them "testoterone-fueled assholes with God complexes" may be an understatement. These guys (and it's all guys) think no rules apply to them, and that they are the smartest, biggest-dick Masters of the Universe to ever breathe. Just confirming what "profane and informed" wrote, in case any of your readers think it's hyperbole--it's surgically accurate.Even so, these guys can't be permitted to drown the financial system beneath their own self-regard. Paulson and Bernanke are acting as if Wall Street should retain agency, and they can't play it that way. It will kill the plan. Congressional egos are as big as Wall Street's -- maybe the only ones that big -- and right now, Paulson and Bernanke need to be playing to the political system that will pass this bailout, not kowtowing to the financial system that has created the need for it. Wall Street has money, but at the moment, they don't have power. Not unless we pretend they do.
