Sociopaths in Banking

Mike the Mad Biologist recently featured a piece by Brian Basham on the subject of sociopaths in the banking industry.

You should read Mike's piece in its entirety, but here are a couple teasers from the original Basham piece:

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.

 

Mike goes on to say:

There is no way to understand the collapse of Big Shitpile [the international financial collapse] without understanding the criminal mind. This is as much a problem of fraud, as it is macroeconomics (and microeconomics). We would be better served by listening to professors from criminal justice and psychology departments, as opposed to economics departments.

We are so screwed.

 

Who are the REAL Robber Barons?

An interesting point from the folks at Corrente:

Per President Obama on 27 May 2010: “What’s also been made clear from this disaster is that for years the oil and gas industry has leveraged such power that they have effectively been allowed to regulate themselves.”

Well, the banksters have "leveraged such power that they have effectively been allowed to regulate themselves." Then they crashed the economy, squeezed the taxpayers for the largest transfer of wealth in world history, and the same people are still in charge, and the big banks are bigger than ever. That is a mighty FAIL, and just as mighty as Deepwater Horizon. So why the double standard?

Are Goldman and JP Morgan really all that different from BP? Why?

I mean, say what you like about the oil companies, but they actually deliver oil that people use, a tangible product. They didn't inflate a huge financial bubble based on phony paperwork and accounting control fraud, and then loot the wreckage when the bubble burst, either.

To answer the question posed by the title of this post, obviously both the Banksters and the Oil Companies are culpable for their respective disasters. 

Oh, and I do know what the answer is to preventing these types of rape and pillage.  Just follow this advice:

I can’t help but think that if we so-called “mature” people would ALWAYS guide our actions by the credo, “Is this good for the children?” then we’d all be much better off. Especially the children.