Roubini, a doomsaying economist who's as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil. (He simply had to spring for a helicopter "as Sao Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.) Check out who he hung out with: New York Times loan shark Carlos Slim Helù, disaster-exploiting hedge fund manager John Paulson, and demise-of-empire chronicler Niall Ferguson. They know all about meltdowns, too!

John Paulson
A hedge-fund manager who made $3.7 billion — yes, with a b — in 2008 by betting against the subprime mortgage market and the investment banks, like Lehman Brothers, that had profited from it. No relation to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (PIty. Wouldn't it be juicy if he were?)

Peter Kraus
An investment banker who worked only a few days at Merrill Lynch before Bank of America bought the troubled brokerage house, but walked away with a $25 million bonus — at a time when the government was propping up Merrill and Bank of America with a taxpayer-funded bailout. He then bought a $37 million Park Avenue apartment we dubbed "the People's Palace." At his new job as CEO of AllianceBernstein, he's due for a $6 million bonus this year and $50 million in stock over five years.

Hugh "Skip" McGee III
McGee, the head of U.S. banking for Lehman, helped negotiate the sale in bankruptcy of Lehman's U.S. operations to Barclay's the British bank. In the process, he argued the place would fall apart without him, and scored a two-year, $50 million contract, even as Lehman laid off thousands. “I’m feeling nauseous right now even thinking about McGee’s deal," one fomer Lehman banker told the Daily Beast. Update: Peter Truell, Barclays' director of corporate communication, called to say the Beast's figure was "categorically false," but wouldn't tell me what McGee's actual compensation was. Could be higher, could be lower! Anyone care to fill us in?

Nauseous, or envious? These three are clearly brilliant bankers. Anyone who could make so much money in a dissolving marketplace probably deserves outsized pay. Which is why it's so funny to see Wall Street pinstripes complaining about their success. Their only sin: reserving their skills for their own pocketbooks.

There is little wonder House Speaker and California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi seemed so immediately convinced, as Wall Street skidded toward apocalypse two weeks ago, that Congress needed to pass a bailout plan like NOW. What is truly sad is that she failed to convince so many of her state's fellow Democrats, most notably the congresswoman from the neighboring district of East Bay, Barbara Lee, to vote for her bailout bill.

Barbara Lee wanted the bill to include provisions protecting homeowners from foreclosure. Which makes sense. Just last year Lee's district had the highest price-to-rent ratio in the country: 51. Fifty-one. People were signing up for mortgages when they could have rented for less than a quarter of the price. They did this because they were stupid, but also because housing prices kept rising, and when the value of your house rose you could take out a home equity loan and use it to buy a new car (and in many cases, chrome rims.) Last year nearly a third of vehicle sales in California were purchased with home equity loans.

The attractiveness of a mortgage, from the perspective of the bank lending the money and the investment bank taking on the loan and rolling it up into securities and the hedge fund buying those securities and the insurer protecting the bond, etc. etc. etc., has always been that there was something solid, something lasting, underlying it: a house. An elementary school teacher who couldn't qualify for a bank loan to buy a $700 laptop could get a $450,000 mortgage because it had a house attached to it. No one ever anticipated that those houses would lose value quicker than the shiny new home equity-financed cars in their garages. In contrast, the lenders and the underwriters and the re-packagers and the insurers lobbied the SEC to allow them to amplify their exposure to the risk of that outcome exponentially by piling on debt of their own in a bid to maximize their profits, then proceeded to report said incredulity-straining profits in the assumption that they would continue rising and proceeded to pass those profits on to their employees, who in turn signed on for 100% mortgages on eight figure properties in Greenwich, where fear of the same sort of tidal wave of foreclosure has citizens proclaiming the financial crisis "Our Katrina."

The whole thing was a show of such dramatic private sector incompetence it could not be achieved had the plutocracy not known exactly what the fuck it was doing, just as that great Californian Ronald Reagan knew exactly what the fuck he was doing when he railed against government waste only to ratchet up that waste to unprecedented levels by outsourcing most of the government to crony capitalists whose fiduciary responsibility by definition required they do all they could to maximize government waste. It was all an ingenious plan to de-fund the left and its socialist bureaucracy of bleeding-heart "programs," and it worked so well the Bush Administration ripped off the strategy to launch a trillion-dollar war that represents a vast minefield blocking any of Obama's plans to "level the playing field."

Because while Obama's plans for the economy allegedly involve an average $800,000-a-household tax increase on the superrich, those plans were drawn up before the employees of Goldman Sachs spent their $21 billion in Christmas bonuses. The falloff in asset values has all the big pundits worrying we'll become the next Japan, but when you go to Japan and hear about the "Boom Years" of the eighties what strikes you is that most Japanese actually had some firsthand experience of said "Boom years." Did you?

We allowed America to become the land of ten thousand centimillionaires; now that we have a crisis poised to disproportionately — from a Year On Year perspective, anyway; that's how these people think — hurt that untouchable class, it is not going to be easy to wring out a massive increase in nominal tax dollars from them.

That is, of course, is what must be done. And it probably won't be positive for the Dow or the GDP or productivity levels or any of the arbitrary little numbers with which we're accustomed to measuring our economic well-being. It may well be a short term political windfall for the stubbornly fact-resistant class of politician who likes to say tax cuts on the wealthy always create jobs (when in fact no private sector of the economy besides health care has created jobs since 2000) or that Government "isn't the solution; more often than not it's the problem." What is the problem, of course, is people who think government is the problem who go into the government in what more often than not comes off like a twisted attempt to prove that. But the happy delusions of the state that brought us the Great Communicator are infectious, and the era clearly, desperately needs a Great Rebutter capable of optimistically guiding the country through what's going to be a rough time for all. The deep — and deeply unpatriotic — immorality of the "moral hazard" that has defined the past decade must be impressed upon every American voter. Every American voter needs to be able to visualize the 24-car garage of the billionaire hedge fund manager and wonder if some of the money might have not been better spent refurbishing the subway system or paying teachers more or helping an irresponsible homeowner renegotiate her mortgage or providing more comprehensive job training to some former welfare queen. All that stuff, after all, creates jobs too.

But to impress these ideas upon voters requires a kind of moral authority that is undermined by pandering partisan rhetoric and the pages and pages of pork-tasting provisions of the bill Congress is about to pass. (It's also sort of undermined by gazillion dollar tax breaks of the sort extended to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for taking the job, but whatevs.) Warren Buffett could certainly muster it; more importantly, he could articulate recent history in a way the politicians he supports can't. More importantly, he can inspire and/or shame his partners in uberwealth into accepting and acknowledging a measure of social responsibility, and more powerfully, broadcasting that sense of responsibility to the public. Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson profited handsomely betting against the housing market; he now is giving much of that away to helping screwed homeowners. More people should know about him; more rich folks should emulate him.

Okay, so, today's Times byline orgy re-enactment of that coupla days a coupla weeks ago where suddenly every banker was like "OHSHTWRSCRWD" achieved two important things:

1. Reminded "Main Street" (Aside: irk you as much as it does yours true that the pols keep calling it "Main Street" when the whole reason this started is because there's NO SUCH THING anymore in this country?? Because everyone had to have his own house, recall?? Anyhoo) that, you know, every business in this freakin country operates on debt, not because they're spoiled delusional children like every last CEO on the Street except John Thain (which reminds me, Johnny Boy is staying on with the new Bank of AMerillca! See, you KNEW he wasn't in it for the nine figure pay package, aw…) but because DUH, because that's like the basis of all civilization or something!! And

2. Reminded Wall Street Just How Crazy it is with a creepy/inspiring (which? both?) anecdote about Black Thursday over at Goldisachs. Lloyd was freaking out, Goldman stock in freefall, etc. etc.…and then one o'clock rolls around and someone they identify as a "prankster" starts playing the "Star-Spangled Banner" over the loudspeaker. All the bankers are like, what?! Some even put their hands over their hearts. And at THAT VERY MOMENT, the stock stopped falling. Turned up a little even! Guess what had happened? That's right, a short-selling ban had just been announced!! Capitalism itself had been suspended! Think that means there's something Goldman guys find inspiring about this country… other than its free market?? Yeah probably not, but I thought about shedding a tear!

Okay so moving on, the big story is…well shucks, got a few hours? No of course not! We're all about to hit me baby one more time with another public appearance by everyone's fave fakenbaked ratings black gold governess!!! (Broad is like Merrill with the CDOs after even AIG stopped insuring them, we know she's bad for us, but we just can't stop.) So I'll make it quick: everyone, except maybe Buffett and John not to be confused with Hank Paulson, is screwed: every other hedge fund is screwed, Veronica Peterson of Columbia, Maryland, who is trying to pay a $4,450-a-month mortgage on fifty grand a year — hey, why not have a go at that, quant jocks? — is screweder, the market that is being artificially propped up by the continued short sale ban managed to fall 350 points today anyway, not that anyone is paying attention to the market because the entire private sector is too busy wondering where the heck they're supposed to find a line of credit when the entire financial system won't trust anyone but the guv-mint with its money anymore. Yikes! Oh, though if Veronica Peterson's story shook your faith in private enterprise, here's a doozy from the public sector: there's a special provision in the new bailout bill offering (SORELY-needed) tax relief to the makers of wooden arrows used in bow-n-arrow sets for children. Think you could poke someone's life out with one of them things?

Anyway, if I were really Serwer this is where I would actually round up a few MORE asides and tangents here and call them "Loose Change," but in the Web 2.0 era that gets to be your job! Although if Dismal Science wants offer himself for the position of Serwer's old standby source "Deep Blue" (sug. nickname change: "Deep Shit") he knows who to G-chat!