Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

It’s ironic that just as we entered an economic era all about eliminating inessential middlemen and corporate bloat, one bloated sector filled with inessential middlemen, finance, has flourished as never before. It’s ironic that one of the rationales for America’s 1980s makeover was to revive the heroic American tradition of risk-taking—given that so much of the story has turned out to be about reckless financiers insulating themselves from risk by shifting it to customers and, through the government, to taxpayers. It’s ironic that finance, a service industry created to help business and the rest of us, so bubbly and booming on and on these last four decades, has mainly helped itself. “There is no clear evidence,” the chief financial industry regulator of the U.K. and former vice-chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe concluded in 2010, “that the growth in the scale and complexity of the financial system in the rich developed world over the last 20 to 30 years has driven increased growth or stability.” A final disturbing effect of financialization can’t be proven with statistics or experts’ quotes. It’s the damage to the human spirit that comes from making everything everyone is or does literally and strictly reducible to dollars and cents, and how such a cynical system makes everyone in it more cynical. A finance-obsessed society makes us each a little less human, a lot more of an abstraction. An employee of an LBO’d company is only a cost that needs to be kept down or eliminat...