By Leah McGrath Goodman
In April 2008, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital gave a speech decrying privatized profit and socialized risk, calling Wall Street on its “reverse Robin Hood system.” As the market unraveled later that year, hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde blasted “corporate America, which owns Congress” in a farewell missive announcing the closure of his wildly successful Santa Monica, California, fund, Lahde Capital Management, and his early retirement to a Caribbean island. “Institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen,” he wrote. “This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it.”
It’s safe to say the common citizen has since caught on. Today, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, which blasts corporate greed and government-sponsored bank bailouts, has spread to an estimated 1,500 cities around the world since...