Goldman Sachs and the culling of the surplus elites

Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.

All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe. 

What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone.