It is time for an addition to the Gawker glossary. We need an abusive term—a new one—for banker. The financial slang of the last twenty years has been begrudgingly admiring. Big swinging dick carries an undertone of arrogance; but also swaggering status. Any respect has been lost of course in a few months of bank collapses and the last few sickening days on the stockmarket. Bankers now draw the opprobrium they did during the Depression. So it would be timely to revive a word from the 1930s used to describe a hybrid of banker and gangster: the bankster. (After the jump, a passage from Ron Chernow's book, the Death of the Banker.)

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