Financial racketeers across the globe will see a decline in pay of 27% for all of 2011, some compensation consulting service guessed today.
"There are only two kinds of money on Wall Street", Presbyterian Mafia spokeshoodlum Grabbe Allugots explained, "theirs and ours, and seriously, if they ain't got some, how can we possibly make any ours?"
"Pockets are empty on Main Street," Allugots added in a speech kicking off the mob's 2011 Media Day Press Conference. "Wall Street don't dip in unless something's actually there to pull out."
While income statements are not made available to outsiders, industry sources tell us that extortion revenues, cash scared out of public suckers' hands with massive mob buying or selling attacks that are coordinated among all the Families, have been suffering the most. In dire times, State Attorney Generals crawl out of the woodwork looking for the headlines they need to make Governor, and Dons "don't want nobody nosing around there", traditionally what has always been the most profitable criminal activity in investment banking, so they "cool it for a while" ... "until the heat is off".
"Tap ain't doing no better neither," Allugots went on to point out. Tap dancing, known as tap to Gangland wise guys, involves selling out your customers, either trading against therm, like buying up good stuff you're getting them to dump, or pricing their orders with The Street's traditional "some for me, some for you" funny-business model. "And I don't even want to talk about short-selling."
Nobody ever wants to talk about short-selling, which is "why we pay for the Securities and Excuses Commission", the spokeshoodlum revealed. Bloodbath Mary Schlepiro, Chief Obfuscation Officer at the Agency, is in place to see that the no-talking ban gets enforced. In place until Wall Street offers her a job back on Wall Street anyway.
Exacerbating industry problems, political payoffs, far and away the biggest cost of doing business in the financial rackets, are about to go through the roof. "2012 is an election year", keynote speaker Dudley "Slippery Fingers" Westminster-Buckingham lamented, and we've got to keep our Washington stooges under the rotunda."
Industry lobbyists have been calling for across-the-board 25 year terms of office for all publicly-elected officials, attractive given who they've got in there now, but until that happens Wall Street has to flood TV airways with the kind of misrepresentations that make Rigged-Market Capitalism work, at least for the rigged-market capitalists.
"Don't worry, we'll game all these stock prices up again," Slippery Fingers concluded - on a high note. "We have to. I've got Maseratis to buy."
