   Crybaby bankers  Bookmark and Share Tuesday, Apr 21, 2009  Be
sure to sharpen your pitchforks before reading Gabe Sherman’s
New York magazine schadenfreude-fest about pouty investment
bankers, who from behind the cloak of anonymity complain about
how unfair life has suddenly become for them. It turns out the
bankers are “angry” because they are having to pay higher taxes
and because their plutocratic bonuses seem to be a thing of the
past. As Sherman notes, “In a witch hunt, the witches have
feelings too”—but then, one could sympathize with the witches
because they were singled out unfairly by an unruly mob of
religious bigots. The fury at the bankers, in their callous
cluelessness and their reckless endangerment of the global
economy in pursuit of an extra Hamptons mansion or two, seems
altogether justified and rational. The bankers aren’t some
misunderstood group of well-meaning citizens; they are a group
that prided themselves on their sharklike mercilessness and
tenacity in extracting every last bit of