Reversal of Fortune: Wall Street Merging With Main Street

Flickr: Dennis Gerbeckx

In perhaps the greatest financial paroxysm yet, a spate of gigantic mergers sparked by the recent global crisis has overnight reordered the American economic landscape — if not America itself.

Once almighty Wall Street is being forced by its nosediving fortunes into a shotgun marriage with Main Street — relying on Midwestern hardware stores, the savings accounts of little old ladies in Dubuque, California tanning spas and thousands of other small-time institutions nationwide to refill its empty coffers and provide new leadership. The Street’s current leaders will be retrained as grocery baggers, parking valets and other jobs not involved in handling money.

A symbolic condition of Wall Street’s self-dissolution is that everybody on Main Street will receive an unearned Wall Street-style bonus of $24 million, a giveaway meant to be as senseless as every other Wall Street bonus payout of recent years — but with the beneficiaries and the losers reversed.

It will also be compensation for the economic consequence of this and other recent financial moves: nobody except Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. will have a job.

Meanwhile, General Motors’ merger with Freddie Mac, while it might appear to be — and in fact is — a union of the halt with the blind, is anticipated to be a win-win situation. The complexity of the merger will indefinitely prevent GM from building vehicles nobody wants. At the same time, Freddie Mac will be distracted from conjuring further fiscal mischief.

Chrysler’s merger with bankruptcy administers euthanasia to a patient that has been begging for it ever since being left by Daimler-Benz AG on the doorstep of Cerberus Capital Management with a note and no forwarding address.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”