A Profligacy of Greed
I've taken Mel Gibson off my Axis of Evil list on the right since his latest movie was good for a bad movie, even though the plot line seemed devised by a conspiracy-minded 9/11 Truther. Plus famous people like Gibson tend to go insane and it's not generous to malign the mentally ill.

In addition to my Axis of Evil list, I have my personal Rogues Gallery, particularly awful human beings I will touch on and discuss from time to time. People such that your heart sinks at the mere mention of their name. So far, I believe I've mentioned George Will, Robert Samuelson, and Mickey Kaus. Let me add that scourge of government debt Peter G. Peterson to the list. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out, the stimulus last year was too small, even though it was the largest in history. It was too small because people like Peterson have been spreading propaganda about the deficit for years. And so many more people than need be will be unemployed in the coming years, the economy will be worse off, and hence the Democrats and Obama will suffer at the voting booth.

Let me add this anecdote from Yves Smith:

The one and only time I met Steve Schwarzman was in 1986, when he and Pete Peterson had just started the Blackstone Group. I was a manager (meaning a mid level working oar) at McKinsey. We had teed up a deal and were assisting our foreign client in hiring an investment banker. This transaction was sufficiently sexy that Felix Rohatyn wound up working on it personally.

But what did we get when we presented the idea to Peterson and Schwarzman? We explained why we came to see them. We got 40 minutes (I kid you not, I checked my watch) of name-dropping by Peterson, of all the senior folks he knew in our client’s country. But that wasn’t why our client came to see him; had he bothered to listen, the matter at hand was in the US.

Then he and Schwarzman spent the next 20 minutes talking about Blackstone, and they make it abundantly clear how jealous they were of leveraged buyout king Henry Kravis (at the time, Peterson and Schwarzman were mere advisor types, their looting wealth creating opportunities were far more limited than if they had oddles of investor and bank money to play with).

So in effect, they spent an hour telling us that they really wanted to be doing LBOs, that was SO much better paid than M&A, they wanted to grow up to be Henry Kravis, but since they hadn’t raised the money to do that yet, then yeah, our client’s deal might be worth their while in the interim.

I have never seen a pitch meeting (and this had been arranged at the senior levels of the firm) devolve into such a naked display of personal greed. The two partners who were there with me, neither one of them naifs, were as appalled as I was. As much as I have seen a lot of unprofessional conduct in my life, this still ranks as one of real doozies.