In times of economic difficulty, Americans love to hate.

We traditionally search for people toward whom we can direct our hatred – during the Great Depression, the unlucky man was Herbert Hoover. Amidst the stagflation of the 1970s, President Carter took much of the flak. Now, for whatever reason, we are directing all of our hatred at some road in

New York City where apparently a whole bunch of money is being thrown. Yes, Wall Street was once a buzzword for financial success and excess (what I like to call “sexcess”); now it is synonymous with financial ruin and economic failure (or

“sleeping on the couch-cess”). Yet, of course, not all the derision that fabled street receives is justified; some of it should be focused on ourselves (or you can just blame Bush, in which case stop reading here).

A major source of public outrage lately? Some $18 billion in Wall Street bonuses paid in part by taxpayers as part of the $800 billion bank bailout. No doubt, $18 billion is a Godzilla-sized sum of money, but what most people fail to realize is

that “bonuses” are not just for toplevel

executives to buy gold trashcans. A better term for the money is probably “pay compensations,” which are given to many mid-level employees who work 80 hours a week and for whom bonuses comprise up to

80% of their total pay.

In addition, not every person in the financial industry was part of the mortgage-backed securities department of

their firm. Many employees in other departments were steady earners year after year, and they were also dragged down with the housing market implosion.

And people who actually did their jobs well are losing their “bonuses” (or their jobs) because of upper executives who could have helped prevent the financial disas-trophe if it weren’t for the lure of sexcess.

So the Wall Street Stigma should only really apply to the CEOs who are rich enough to avoid facing reality, not the employees who were simply doing their jobs, and doing them to the fullest of their capabilities. Yet these execs didn’t just create housing bubble money out of nothing: it was fed by people who couldn’t really afford homes who bought homes anyway.

To me, history shows Americans are rather reactionary in the short term. Everyone was envious of Wall Street when they were rolling in excess, but now that they are rolling in excessive losses to the point where they helped precipitate the financial crisis, the consensus is that they suck. When the housing bubble was forming, we took conspicuous consumption over financial solvency. Now that the bubble has exploded in the pretty rainbow colors of financial disaster, we are saving

more and spending less. We needed some shock to the system to stop our spendthrift attitudes and to start looking

at long-term goals. Unfortunately, the shock has taken the form of a potentially

long and deep recession.

What I’m saying is don’t hate all of Wall Street, hate specific parts of Wall Street and probably parts of ourselves. In the long run, we’ll all be much happier and on a less pessimistic Street to economic recovery.