Jules Crittenden apparently has a problem with the fact that some people make more money than he does. In his class warfare blog post about Jake Desantis’ resignation letter he says:
Any financial brainiacs out there willing to work for something less than two million bucks? Never mind Mom, Apple Pie and the American way, how about $1 million?
Well how about this Jules… do you imagine that there might be anyone out there willing to do your job for a little less? I’ll bet there is. So why don’t we just shove you out to the unemployment line and your new cardboard box home, and let that kid with the A in ‘basic composition’ take over. I’m sure he can handle it right? We’ll outsource your job to the local middle school English department, how about that? That’s the thing about you journalists… you all get to ‘seem’ as if you’re experts on something when the reality is that you really don’t understand it at all. And I’m sure we can find a few thousand kids out there who can overwork an analogy just as well as you for a fraction of the cash.
As to your question, I’m not willing to work for one cent less than the market will bear for my skills and knowledge. Every day that I go to work I place my entire financial future and the future of my family at risk. It can all be gone tomorrow if I’m not more right than wrong. There is no job security at all and my entire career is at stake in every decision that I make. The only way you can ever hope to achieve anything resembling job security in my industry is if you have a nice big fat profit and even then, come the first of the year everything resets to zero and you start all over again anyway.
But for journalists there are no costs to being wrong. As far as I can tell the vast majority are wrong about most things virtually all the time. I and my coworkers don’t have that luxury. We are right, or we are choosing a new career. And taking that risk every day comes with some benefits… as it damned well should in my view. That ‘different planet’ you’re complaining about where Jake Desantis lives, has some different and much more severe costs too. And the people who are willing to pay them, and are capable of doing it well without a steady dose of ulcer medication are much fewer than you realize. The graveyard is full of geniuses who never managed to turn a profit in the markets, and it takes more than being smart to be successful in this industry.
So Eff you and your sanctimony. It’s true that my half of the money that I and the people like me get to keep every year may be larger than some other peoples, but you apparently have no problem spending your share of the other half that the government takes away from us. I and the people like me are picking up the tab around here, and not only do we never get a thank you, we’re called villains for our trouble. Presidente Obama’s future ‘balanced budget’ is going to be balanced on our backs. And that’s a lot to take when you’re also getting death threats and have a mob of protesters in front of your house.
America may have been good to me, but I and those like me have more than returned the favor. But with that said, if what you really want is for us all to go find some other country ‘to pillage’ then just say so. The fact is, we can do this job from anywhere, and there are lots of places where they value smart, law abiding, industrious members of society where we won’t have to worry about a 90% ex-post tax because we work in the wrong industry.
I don’t want you to call me a hero. But if like Jake Desantis I’ve done nothing wrong, then I dammed well want to be able to live my life in peace without a mob of protesters at my door. That’s something the folks at AIG don’t have, and they should. They aren’t guilty of anything but they’re still being punished. And you journalists are either enabling the mob or giving a pass to the politicians who have engineered this whole mess.
3 comments:
I'm not any sort of executive, investment banker, or any of the current "bad guys" (nor do I play one on TV), but I've always wonder what people think folks that pull in "outrageous" salaries & bonuses do all day. I guess they think they sit in their plush offices and watch TV or play golf all day or something.
Personally, I don't wish to spend 14 hours a day at work (50 hours a week is plenty) - and I know I've sacrificed monetary wealth for that. That's my choice and other folks have made other choices and are entitled to whatever benefits or sacrifices come with those choices.
Crittenden could have gone into the finance industry - it's a free country (for now anyway). He chose a career path that doesn't pay as well - but also doesn't have the risk involved.
Instead of coveting the rewards others receive, if Jules is disatisfied with his station in life, maybe he should re-examine his own choices in life.
John,
I wholeheartedly agree.
To anyone who questions the "outrageous" salaries, I have one simple question: "Why don't YOU do the job?"
Why don't you question the salaries of big time athletes or "movie stars?" And if you do, why don't YOU do their job? Simple.
Big risk means big reward... or big loss. I guess no one taught these folks simple statistics in school, or if they did, it didn't stick!
Oh, yeah... that's another thing you have to be good at to be a wall street exec... MATH.
Me, I’m a bad guy. I believe that what I earn shouldn’t be decided by some envy driven bureaucrat, but by the fair and open market.
I didn’t go to an Ivy league school so I figured the only way I was going to get ahead while I was at JPMorgan was by working everyone around me into the dust. During much of my three year tenure there I worked 100 hours a week. If you do the math on that you quickly come to understand that if I was awake, I was at my desk. I’ve been the first person in the office virtually every day of my life, no matter where I worked.
When I was working at Moore Capital I lived right around the corner. In fact since I lived on the 30th floor of one building and worked on the 53rd floor of another, I was one of the few people in New York City whose entire commute was further vertically than horizontally. There were a number of times when I would go to work at 5:00AM and work until 11:00 at night, only to have people calling at 11:30 demanding that I answer some question for them or to address some little problem. (One very notable night, the head of trading called at 11:45 demanding that I be woken up, and my then girlfriend… now my wife… told him to Eff off and that she wasn’t going to wake me. He was a good natured guy who realized that I had been pushed to my limit, so the next day he laughed it off.)
At Caxton Associates I got up every day at 4:00 AM and got to the office at 5:30, for two years while I was building my trading strategy. I worked nights, I worked weekends, I was always trying to do something extra. And even now, I get up at 3:45 AM several days a week so that I can get to the office a little earlier and get a something extra accomplished. We joke in my house that we do more before the US Marines get out of bed, than most people do all day.
I’m not saying that I’m some special guy, in fact I think overall I’m probably quite ordinary. I work in a very competitive industry and it takes a real commitment to get ahead, especially if you come from modest means like I do. But it is possible. And many of the senior people in every firm have stories surprisingly similar to mine.
I don’t know Jake Desantis personally, but I guarantee you he didn’t get where he is without substantial sacrifice. And for that sacrifice, even before the rise of el presidente Obama, the government would take roughly half of everything he’s was paid. People like him, and to be frank like me, are the fatted calves that governmental parasites live off of. By being so industrious regardless of the obstacles they place before us, we give them a way to get by. We are the ‘other people’ in the ‘other people’s money’ that big government types so love to spend.
It’s true I bitch about my taxes, but not too much more than anyone else. No more certainly than most people would say I’m entitled. But with el presidente now in power it’s a different story. Now we’re supposed to be ashamed of having worked that hard. He says he doesn’t’ have a problem with people getting wealthy … per se…. but even his fans can tell that he doesn’t’ mean it.
The measure of our worth isn’t supposed to be the open market for our services anymore, but his view of the morality of our labor. If, like with Jake Desantis he doesn’t understand how you’ve earned the money, he rallies his populist mob to and warms up the ACORN busses so you can have protesters harassing your kids at the end of your driveway. But if in his eyes you’ve created ‘real value’ then it’s OK to make a little money… for now. But we all know that’s not going to last. We’ve seen this movie before. And we all know that his ‘reduce the deficit after the crisis’ commitment isn’t going to come from spending cuts…
He has institutionalized envy of the rich, without any consideration of how the rich got that way. And I for one am not going to lay back and let my labor be confiscated. I know that a great many of my peers feel exactly the same way.
There are entire trading desks threatening to resign en masse from the TARP recipient banks. There are dozens of small hedge funds looking to rent offices in Bermuda, Grand Bahama and Grand Cayman islands. As you read this an entire generation of highly productive people are working toward becoming “Ex-Americans” because like me they have no intention of handing a majority of their labor over to others. And if Obama and his brown shirts want us, they’ll have to come get us.
Hitler demonized the Jews and Obama is demonizing the rich investment bankers. Hitler thought the world would be better without the Jews, and Obama apparently thinks America would be better without the rich.
Life really has become just like an Ayn Rand Novel.
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