Robert Waldmann reminds us of what that sage Scotsman told us 234 years ago:  (via Angry Bear.)

“All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters”

Adam Smith (1776) “The Wealth of Nations.” Book III Chapter 4.

Of course as Tom Wolfe observed (and as Wall St itself proudly proclaimed in recent years):

On Wall Street he and a few others – how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe