They're considered the "Smartest Guys in the Room" (yeah, they're mostly guys).
They're the financial "wizards" like Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon -- They invented what Warren Buffet called "financial weapons of mass destruction" which earned them each hundreds of millions while wrecking the global economy.
They're the government regulators like Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson (yeah some of the financial wizards and the "regulators" were the same guys) and Alan Greenspan, and Larry Summers who had the brilliant (but as Greenspan later admitted, slightly flawed) theory that financial markets are self regulating.
They're the nameless economic technocrats in Berlin, Paris and Brussels who invented the brilliant idea that a common currency without a common government was just what Europe needed. They're now forcing austerity on the nations they helped bankrupt.
They've gone to the best universities. They've rewarded each other with tens or hundreds of millions in compensation even when they fail.
And the "Smartest Guys in the Room" have been monumentally, catastrophically WRONG about just about EVERYTHING!
Some of them should be wearing striped pajamas. But instead, they're spending tens of millions in legal bribes to politicians and in lobbying regulatory agencies to be sure the multi-trillion dollar global financial casino they run doesn't stop spinning.
No wonder citizens have been occupying public spaces around the world! No wonder Time Magazine named "The Protestor" as the Person of the Year for 2011.
My prediction for 2012 is that targeted occupations like Occupy Foreclosures, Occupy the Courts, and Occupy Congress will be popping up like wack-a-moles throughout the winter. And with the first buds of spring, Occupation 2.0 and other offshoots of the 99% movement--both around the globe and in America--will return bigger, stronger and smarter to take back the power from the "Smartest Guys in the Room".
What they didn't account for is how the growing ease of global communication would empower the people with both knowledge and solidarity. This is a new era! This is the people's era.
This isn't just about greed, it's about power and thus politics. They very accurately "predicted" that the people would take to the streets. It was one of the prerequisites for gold climb to the top, along with investors needing to feel like their governments were both politically and economically bankrupt. The problem is, the people were supposed to rebel against their governments, not Wall Street.