You could make the case that this era has produced possibly the worst bad guys in business history. Think about that for a minute. That’s really saying something. They’ve got a lot of competition. Carnegie and Frick, who shot their own workers. The guys who fomented the Teapot Dome, whatever that was. Who remembers? 

Somewhat more recently, during the days I still wore suspenders and power ties, there were a lot of bad guys, too. Many are philanthropists now, just like Carnegie and Frick, come to think of it. God bless ‘em and the work they do, but they were pretty bad. The fad then was to rake up companies as if they were fish in a net, gut them, and profit from the asset. It was called, in a most Orwellian twist, “the democratization of capital.” Most of the clever little miscreants got away with it, but a few got crazy greedy and messed it all up for the rest of us normally greedy people. There were a few really gross ones. Dennis Levine, for instance. Insider trading? Seems so mild now. 

Ours seems worse somehow. Just look at the harvest! Dick Fuld, the former head of Lehman Brothers, just sold his $13 million dollar Florida home. To his wife. For, reportedly, $10. You read that correctly. Ten dollars. You have to excuse me, but I just have to say… that’s so cool. What bravado! Mess with Dick Fuld, will you? Well, Dick Fuld has a few tricks up his sleeve! And the guys from GM, Ford and Chrysler, who flew to Washington to ask for money, each in his own private jet? Now Citigroup, which took a huge bolus of bailout bucks, is said to be purchasing a $50 million jet. Amazing. I’m sure there are a host of excellent business reasons they are completely justified to do so. I bet they will even save some money, in their minds. But really. You’ve got to hand it to them.

Then there’s Bernie. I really enjoyed the piece in last Sunday’s New York Times that did a thorough mental D&C on him. It was very entertaining. I’ve always thought that it took a certain kind of psychopathy to succeed in business. The bigger the nut, the better he or she does, pretty much. There are exceptions, of course. But Bernie is such a huge, juicy example. The sharp kid who didn’t do so good in school. All the smarty-fartys went to Harvard and Yale, and he had to go Alabama, which was fine, but not so Ivy League. Couldn’t take it.  After a year, went back to Long Island and attended Hofstra at night. He would show them! And he did, too. Put it over on everybody for a long time. Really stuck it to them all in one way or another. Even now, totally busted, and when he goes outside there’s a crafy, insouciant, twinkly, beamish thing going on. Something… proud. Fifty billion dollars. What an achievement in bad guy history. 

And then there’s the rest of us. All the Bernies in the world couldn’t exist without the support of the brokers, bankers, regulators, credulous investors, and enormous bigshots in their own right who make up the neural network that makes Bernies possible. 

But are we the worst? There’s a lot to consider. Take the guys who run the Chinese railway system, controlling the supply of tickets with violence when necessay, stabbing people, beating them upside their heads. Saw in the LA Times. That’s bad, if not quite as sophisticated. Still, they’re no slouches. I mean, putting poison into children’s toys, toothpaste marketed to kids, and pet food? That’s seriously not good, I admit it.

At the end of the day, however, I’d put our guys up against theirs anytime, at least for now. They’re coming up the ramp. But any nation that can produce a Rod Blagojevich has nothing to worry about in this particular contest.

Perhaps you guys can help me understand something.

Word comes today from a most credible source that the failure of smaller banks may soon lead to more consolidation and mergers in the banking industry. One analyst told the New York Times that 200 to 300 small banks might fail in the near future, and be forced into mergers, presumably with larger entities.

This is a solution?

Didn’t we just see what happened to Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC)? Aren’t both now being deconstructed due to unsuccessful, if not heedless, acquisitions? Haven’t empires from Rome to ITT fallen into rubble as a result of getting too big, too fast? And haven’t we seen ample evidence of that fact as recently as this morning, as the implied value of AOL ratchets down in the wake of a Google writedown (GOOG)?

This is not to say, as some have contended, that all mergers and acquisitions are bad. When two strong entities come together, it’s a beautiful thing. But ugly monsters made out of dead body parts yield the expected results, usually ending when a group of townspeople with pitchforks chase the poor creature into a barn that is then burned to the ground.

Certainly the merger of these bankettes, which are now suffering from being in the same room with the commercial real estate market, is preferable to their failure.

But is the future truly served if the muscle of capital does its usual thing, providing fees to all the lawyers, MBAs and other financial types as they once again set up great hulking behemoths destined to lurch over the cliff in the next high breeze?

I’ve been in business for about 5,427 dog years and at no time during my career has there ever been a day when somebody wasn’t worried about what some security analyst was writing about us. This factoid stretches over six iterations of four separate companies, with enough corporate permutations to confuse a particle physicist.

“Bob Weasel of Finster-Koolaid says we’re off on our guidance and won’t make our EBITDA for the quarter!” the CFO will write while forwarding the latest analysis from Weasel, who long ago decided to take a negative turn on our stock because it differentiates him from the other analysts and gets him quotes in the Wall Street Journal.

“What are we going to do about it?” people will cry. And of course there’s nothing you can do about it. Weasel has every right to his take. Its can’t be corrected, either, even if he’s wrong, because Weasel’s opinion is based on a deep understanding of the marketplace, our business sector, and the economy.

Ha!

Weasel and his kind are, as I am sure you know, generally found to be employees of banking institutions. Real banks. Investment banks. Naturally, you know, the research side is (relatively recently) well-separated from the side that actually invests in stuff, but still. Who’s going to argue with Finster-Koolaid? It’s a division of Omnivorous Potentate, the largest investment bank in this brane of the cosmos!

A few years ago, the former CEO of a former form of a former corporate entity that morphed into one of my prior corporate entities appeared at a conference of these geniuses. Granted, Bob was a loser. He had bad affect. Still, the company had a lot going for it. But the security analysts didn’t like Bob’s style. So within 30 minutes of the close of his presentation, our stock went down like Eliot Spitzer. 

People went off to Froggies Tavern early that day, I can tell you. Because those guys ruled. And we drooled, for a long time afterwards. Then a new guy came in that people liked, for whatever reason. And our stock went up. Same company. Actually, slightly worse off, if I remember correctly. Go figure.

So now we look around us and the very same guys who were telling us why we sucked hose water, boy, are they drinking from the other side of the tap. All the great intellects who said people should divest this or that, or that such-and-such would never grow, or that management needed a kick in the kiester… they represent firms that are hawking up huge chunks of lung every day!

Where were these Einsteins when their companies were lending more money than they had to sub-prime borrowers? Were they any less shocked than the rest of us when the piper came to call?

In retrospect, who the hell were they to tell anybody what to invest in, or any corporation what they should or should not do? And why is anybody still listening to any of them?