Wall Street banksters are known to hire bright, young Ivy League graduates and working them like dogs by holding out the prospect of great riches for the relative few who rise to the top of the heap. They don’t need to have studied business or economics; any Ivy League degree will do. After many years of observing this hiring model, I’m beginning to see a real bankruptcy of economic understanding on the part of even the more successful Wall Streeters. Speaking at a financial planners’ convention last week I met two hedge fund managers who seemed to believe that the best way to understand depressions in particular, and economics in general, was to read the socialist John Kenneth Galbraith. They thought that quoting him made them look really, really smart. One fund manager who was introduced as someone who managed a zillion dollars in investments said that the economy will recover as long as Bernanke keeps pumping more and more money into the system until, eventually, it works. One attendee expressed the belief that it was a very bad policy for Obama to spend billions on road and bridge “infrastructure” without also subsidizing the high-tech “infrastructure.” I assumed he must have managed a high-tech fund. There were sounder economic minds there, but far too many of them seem to have been “graduates” of the Jim Cramer School of Economics.

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