Those crowing about sinister machinations by the banking cartel to topple world finance, buy up the scraps on the cheap, and set up a dictatorship while they’re at it are overestimating today’s financial honchos. Morgan and Rockefeller were the real deal, but these guys are just amateurs. Do these look like the spoils of a successful machination?

• Dick Fuld’s Lehman shareholdings went from $1.2 billion to under $500k (Bloomberg). He was paid a total of $168.5 million from 2005 to 2007 for destroying the company, but after NYC and federal taxes, his real take-home pay was under 100M. Cool-Aid drinker that he was, how much of that has since been spent or lost in bad investments?

• Jimmy Cayne’s stake in Bear Stearns, once a cool $1 billion, sold for $61 million in March.

• Lloyd Blankfein’s 1.64 million Goldman shares have gone from $410 million to $164 million (and falling) within the last 12 months, but at least he has been taking home $50 million bonuses lately.

• Last but certainly not least, the venerable Hank Greenberg has gone from mega-wealthy to just plain rich. Yahoo! Finance reports that he holds roughly 12.8 million in AIG stock, which would have gone for over $900 million last year, but today would fetch under $30 million. Bloomberg has a higher figure, counting controlled entities that collectively seem to have lost nearly $24 billion since AIG peaked at over $70 per share. My last quote was $2.25, putting the present total at well under $1 billion.

The US financial system is indeed corrupt and anything but a free market. Bankers do have politicians and regulators (such as Fed chairmen) in their pockets, but the boom-bust cycle is not intentional. It is the inevitable but unintended result of very narrow, short-term interests run wild. Bankers have bought from the government a license to inflate (most inflation is due to credit), and the fraud of fractional reserve lending with socialized risk always ends badly.

Most people used to understand that only gold and silver were money, and that paper promises (aka ‘notes’) could only create phoney wealth and depressions. Maybe parts of this latest lesson will take, but I’m not holding my breath.