Where's Our Scapegoat? (Slate - The Net)

By Sam Kean

We aren't eating shoe leather just yet, but in one way, people in the 1930s had it easier than we do today: They had a scapegoat. The stock market crash that began in October 1929--and continued for years, lest we forget--was the result of heady speculation on shaky assets, paid for with the Monopoly money that new, highly leveraged financial tools provided, all of it abetted by legal bribes to oversight agencies. Seems like yesterday. But unlike our predecessors, we lack a satisfying villain, despite the efforts of the press and President Obama to pillory unnamed "bankers" and metonymic "Wall Street greed." Forget our economic well-being for a minute; for our emotional health and happiness, we need someone to go down hard. We need Ivar Kreuger.

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