Wrapped Up on January 3

The votes are in, and on the third day of the year I’m ready to award the “Quote of the Year Award 2010,” yes, with 362 days to go. (360 at the time of this Post.)

It has long been my contention that, while there is surely such a thing as “towering competence,” I nonetheless believe that the overwhelming majority of the Wall Street Geniuses are worth their weight in a lot less than gold—horse manure occurs as I gaze out my office window to my Tinmouth VT barnyard.

An excellent article by an excellent author marked the cover of the first 2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine; namely “What’s a Banker Really Worth,” by Steven Brill. It is an excellent (and dense, lengthy) read, and by no means a hatchet job.

While the article is astonishingly balanced, the defendants keep failing to take the Fifth Amendment. One banker who spoke to Brill said, defending the need to continue sky-high compensation, and, additionally, not defer it:

“A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments and other obligations that require substantial current cash.”

No, with a nod to Dave Barry, I’m not making this up.

The sentence not only takes the 2010 quote of the year award, but it also goes into the dictionary as Definition #1 of “They just don’t get it.”

Any further explanation or editorialization would be gratuitous.

Repeat: “A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments and other obligations that require substantial current cash.”

Tom Peters posted this on January 5, 2010, in News.