Frank Rich’s excellent insight into the culture of Wall Street that was at the core of the current recession:
This was not an exact replay of the preceding dot-com bubble. As a veteran of the tech gold rush recently observed to me, in Silicon Valley “the money comes later†and “the thing you make comes first, however whimsical, silly, microscopic, recondite it may be.†On Wall Street over the past decade, the money usually came first, last and in between. There was no “thing†being made at all unless you count the slicing and dicing of debt into financial “products,†the incomprehensible derivatives that helped bring down the economy, costing some five million Americans their jobs (so far) and countless more their 401(k)’s.
The fundamental shift that this country has to undergo is that our ultimate goal should all be to do nothing but let our money make us more money. Goods and services — and the skills that support them — are the most important cornerstone of our economy. Money laundering (basically what the market became with its shuffling of debt over the past decade) has never been a sustainable business. (via Tim O’Reilly)