The Financial Times posted an anonymous email to its Alphaville blog on Friday. Given the reputation of the FT, we can for all intensive purposes assume that this email is in fact, accurate, and written my an actual Wall Street financial worker, not by The Onion. Here is an excerpt: “We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable… Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.”

The rest of the email is in the same vein- now that we (Wall Street) don’t have jobs, we’re going to take yours. And we’ll make sure that you don’t have a job because we won’t spend our money. And you know what? We’ll be the scapegoat, and the administration can blame us and regulate us, but you know what? We won’t care. I believe that at the end of the email, there is mean to be a flick of the middle finger combined with a stick out of the tongue, but I don’t think that they actually put that in print.

Reading this email, I went through a whole array of emotions. First, I thought it was hilarious. The language, first of all, is definitely reminiscent of the high-class education this person got- after all, most CEOs went to the Ivy League, Amherst, or Williams. I also thought that this person was clearly inebriated, maybe playing a drinking game, and this was his or her stream of consciousness that someone first filmed to be put on YouTube and then wrote down. I then became aghast- this person really thinks this!  Maybe this is a clear indication that I’m not meant for Wall Street, but I can’t picture this every coming out of my mouth. Apparently Wall Street thinks that they rule the world, no questions or regulations needed. But whom did they need when the bottom fell out of ‘their’ market? The government. The same government that they seem to think won’t survive. This is the part of the email where I went all Hulk and got angry, very angry.

I surely hope that this email is in the mind of one person, and not the entire I-Banking industry. Because if it is, there’s going to be a long line at the Principal’s office- seems like most of them never left elementary school.

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