It's true, the protesters were over an hour late. But running a bush hog, even the metaphorical kind, is no seat-of-your-pants operation. That is one wheel you do not want to fall asleep at, friend. In my experience you have to give people the benefit of the doubt in these circumstances. For this kind of massive protest operation every piece has to be in place or the center won't hold. The risk is that your group looks like a gang of amateur looters raiding a soup kitchen. So I located the nearest bar to the Fed building I could find to kill time before The Big Fed Protest went down.

Surveying the crowd of five or six Wall Street types that had gathered at the bar to shake off another grim trading day, I could sense the need to stoke the fire, to juice the crowd. It's a trick that predates Vaudeville. In fact, it goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. In Athens, it was customary for the military to form a phalanx and savage a herd of goat in a terrible and ferocious display of military precision and might just before a public performance of a play. By today's standards those tactics may seem cruel and unnecessary, but the principles remain as true as ever.


Ray Jay the Last Man Standing

"Did you know Raymond James Financial (RJF) is now the largest investment bank in America?" I asked the guy next to me who was nursing a scotch and pulling at his tie like a ripcord, as if he expected it to open an invisible parachute on his back.

He muttered a response but the way he was pulling at his tie, the only thing I could make out was something about Goldman Sachs (GS) and investment banks.

"You can forget about Goldman, man," I told him. "This time next year retirees from St. Louis to Des Moines are going to be idling at Goldman Sachs branch drive-up windows trading dollars for slot machine change." It was only a slight exaggeration. Any veteran Wall Street watcher knows Goldman would never open a branch in Des Moines.

"You need to keep this kind of talk down," the bartender warned. "There are people here who work in the industry," he whispered.

"Not anymore," I shot back. "I don't know about you, but I'm a taxpayer." I made a sweeping gesture of annexation and pure ownership toward the sad sacks sitting around me at the bar. "These people, all of them," I said. "They work for me now."

The bartender laughed nervously.

"Go ahead, laugh," I said. "But when the thunderous hammer of the Big Fed Protest gets thrown down you'll be chewing on those words like a stale TV dinner." 

 The Largest Five Investment Banks by Market Cap, via Econompicdata.blogspot.com.


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Beating the Populist Drum

When the screws get turned so hard on Main Street that The Man begins to catch a whiff of the shiftless deadbeats casing his gated community, the first thing he does is scamper down to the basement and dig out his Populist Drum. Then, he beats that thing like a toothless pickpocket in a paddy wagon.

(NEXT PAGE: The horrific beating of the drums...)