Opinion | Plutocrats feeling persecuted. Beware!
With ordinary people having bailed out the rich, how can it be the 1 per cent are feeling so peeved about an absence of adulation?
Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group, said something stupid the other day.
And we should be glad, as his comments help highlight an important but rarely discussed cost of extreme income inequality - the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths.
For those who don't recall, AIG is a giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating the global economic crisis, exploiting loopholes in regulations to sell vast numbers of debt guarantees that it had no way to honour. Five years ago, US authorities, fearing AIG's collapse might destabilise the financial system, stepped in with a huge bailout.
But even the policymakers felt ill-used - for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, later testified that no other episode in the crisis made him so angry.
And it got worse.
For a time, AIG was essentially a ward of the federal government, which owned the bulk of its stock, yet it continued paying large executive bonuses. There was, understandably, much public furore.