Maybe we really should "Release the hounds!"

These guys are rich, literally and figuratively.

Wall Street To Washington: "I Want My Campaign Contributions Back"
By Moe Tkacik - March 25, 2009, 1:33PM

Yes, that was an actual sentence spoken -- or more specifically "groused" -- by an anonymous Wall Street executive concerned for his "personal safety," though not enough to be dissuaded from attending or talking to a reporter at yesterday's Wall Street Journal 'Future Of Finance' Conference, where the future sounded like it had gone back in time and purchased a hundred billion dollars worth of extra credit protection, which is to say suspiciously like Finance Past.

It looks like Wall Street, no doubt emboldened by the recent 20% runup in the S&P 500, the fourteen bucks in matching leverage the government is offering them for every dollar they invest in toxic/"legacy" assets and the prospect of better-than-awful numbers at Citigroup and Credit Suisse, got its hubris back along with its proverbial groove. In the six months since it nearly triggered global financial Armageddon, the investment banking community has seemed, if not quite chastened, at least somewhat subdued amidst the nation's ever-heightening awareness that their industry engineered the ever-intensifying economic morass. But not anymore!

Similarly, Justin Fox notes the fascinating similarities between Wall Street's increasing loathing for the guys trying very hard not to nationalize their firms in 2009, and the guys who called FDR a traitor to his class in 1933.

This quote from Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, by way of historian Eric Rauchway, is awfully interesting:

He was surprised and wounded at the way the upper classes turned on him…. Consider the situation in which he came to office. The economic machinery of the nation had broken down…. People who had anything to lose were frightened; they were willing to accept any way out that would leave them still in possession…. Although he had adopted many novel, perhaps risky expedients, he had avoided vital disturbances to the interests. For example, he had passed by an easy chance to solve the bank crisis by nationalization…. His basic policies for industry and agriculture had been designed after models supplied by great vested-interest groups. Of course, he had adopted several measures of relief and reform, but mainly of the sort that any wise and humane conservative would admit to be necessary….

Nothing that [he] had done warranted the vituperation he soon got in the conservative press or the obscenities that the … maniacs were bruiting about in their clubs and dining-rooms. Quite understandably he began to feel that the people who were castigating him were muddle-headed ingrates.

He's talking about FDR, of course. It made me think of a dinner party a couple of weeks ago with a Wall Street friend who complained that Barack Obama was out to get him and his kind. "What?!?!" I said. "He's doing what he can to protect you from the baying wolves."