Crime is the New Smart

According to a blogger over at The Atlantic:

It makes perfect sense that Goldman Sachs alums would end up in positions of power across the world for two reasons. First, they are some of the smartest people in the world — that’s why they get hired by Goldman Sachs, the premier investment bank. Smart, ambitious people always end up in positions of power, as they should. Second, they make boatloads of money at Goldman Sachs. As everyone knows, once you’ve got enough money, the next thing you want is power. That’s why they end up pursuing such positions post-Goldman.

Bankers are smart?

Okay, so bankers have come up with complex weapons of financial destruction that nearly blew apart the world financial system and they were smart enough to get the taxpayer to bail them out but are they really smart?

Remember Enron,  one of the largest corporate frauds in history? It was filled with “smart people“:

Enron was a star system. “The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent,” Lay, Enron’s former chairman and C.E.O., told the McKinsey consultants when they came to the company’s headquarters, in Houston. Or, as another senior Enron executive put it to Richard Foster, a McKinsey partner who celebrated Enron in his 2001 book, “Creative Destruction,” “We hire very smart people and we pay them more than they think they are worth.”

What is parading as “smart” is really just criminal behavior. You make and break rules at your whim, you destroy the wealth of others at your whim, you call yourself smart? I call that criminal.