Wall Street Wives Did Dumb Girly Things With Bailout Money

There’s a whole new reason to be mad at rich people- they’ve got wives.

Matt Taibbi’s new piece for Rolling Stone- charmingly titled “The Real Housewives of Wall Street”- attempts to stir up righteous populist rage against those Monopoly Men who ran down the street post-TARP clutching burlap sacks with big black dollar signs decorating the sides and laughing at Poors by appealing to American populist rage against women. It’s puzzling as to why an article that makes otherwise salient points- that the American middle class is, pardon my French, getting fucked in unprecedented ways- wastes time on appealing to old fashioned sexism, pointing out the outrage over a lack of business acumen displayed by Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Taibbi implies that the women who benefitted from TARP were silly and unserious. Gee, that’s novel. Let’s imply that women don’t belong in business because they’re too busy pondering their manicures and feng shuiing their mansions purchased by their rich husbands.

Writes Taibbi,

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

While American taxpayers have every right to be irate with what amounted to the giant corporate welfare check issued to undeserving corporations, seeking to amass a pitchfork-weilding mob by pointing out how silly the ladies involved were seems at best misguided and at worst cringe-inducingly misogynist.

Why does it matter if money was funneled to men or women? Why is it necessary to single out two Wall Street wives rather than their idiot husbands who actually had something to do with the crisis occurring in the first place? And if the piece isn’t really about anger that women were given money that they did not deserve, then why even call the piece “The Real Housewives of Wall Street?”