Liberal Talk Radio

This essay by Andrew Lahde is so good, I just had to link to it again.

Lahde — a former hedge fund manager — announces his intention to retire from the business of managing other people’s money.  He rips into the supposedly “smart” MBAs from top schools who rode American capitalism into the ground like Slim Pickens*:

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

Having dealt with enough “stuffed shirt” MBA types myself, I can personally attest to the fact that — good as their PowerPoint skills might be — most of these people would die, starving, of exposure within a few weeks of losing their cush bourgeoisie lifestyles.  And yet these are the people we’ve entrusted to make our decisions for us!

Makes me want to retreat to a basement squat and pirate cable TV and electricity, and wait for the rest of it to blow up.

* In case you don’t get the Dr. Strangelove reference: