a week after the company received the first $85 billion in rescue funds, it took its executives on a retreat to a luxury beach resort in Southern California, spending more than $440,000, including $23,000 on spa treatments23. That episode enhanced the sense that American capitalism had become a grifter’s paradise. Corporate overseers could engineer a cataclysm that wiped out nearly $8 trillion in wealth, while destroying jobs for tens of millions of people, and then use their rescue money to pay for massages and chocolate-dipped strawberries at a pleasure palace by the sea.
