Advance Indiana has a post looking mostly at Rahm Emanuel’s impressive feat of raking in $18.5 million in two years in the private sector as an investment banker despite having no previous experience in the field. After working in the Clinton White House, Rahm had good connections. He got hired into a lucrative position because of a connection, and he was able to obtain huge compensation by working other connections.
Gary isn’t being particularly partisan in this post. He also notes that Gov. Daniels came out of the Reagan White House with a professional resume that consisted only of politics. Nevertheless, “by the time he ran for governor in 2004, he had earned more than $50 million from Lilly and the corporate boards on which he served[.]”
There is big money to be made working the good old boy network. The average person can be excused for looking around and being skeptical of the notion that working hard and smart is a good substitute for knowing a lot of rich people if your goal is to become wealthy.
Unfortunately, I don’t know any other way, so I’d probably better get back to work.
Doug: I used to think it was about “what you know”, not “who you know.” Unfortunately, I now realize I was young and naive. I wonder if it was always this bad, or has it become worse over time?
This is probably one area where I agree with the leftists about Wall Street and what they do on the high end. “Investment banking” and hedge funds are a scam, and the high salaries paid in these fields are transferring money from ordinary investors to the pockets of a few insiders.
A surprising amount of the inequality statistics can be traced to these uber high end Wall Street folks, especially the hedge funds.
Where I disagree with the leftists is that these Wall Streeters should be regulated. When it comes to, say, securitization, CDS’s, or some of these other esoteric fields that no one really understands, I think the practices need to be banned outright. No one can be expected to regulate some of this stuff, because it is so complicated that few people even understand them in the first place.
What’s always interesting is to hear their versions of why they are so successful. Every time – delusional.
Why? Because it’s never about how they sold out to the man while in the public service sector, and afterwards simply swept up some big financial rewards for selling the rest of us out.