[...] He stressed the importance of the modern corporation as a social organization which serves the material and cultural needs of the people, and in this vein, "those endowed with the ability to lead these great organizations should begin to conceive of their remuneration partly in terms of the satisfaction of making a real contribution to national progress" [...] equate business leaders with educators, scientists, and public servants, stressing the importance of employee confidence and security.

At the end of the year that's how you tell who's doing the best job - who's made the most money for the firm. And that's also, then, how much money you will make in your bonus. And so when it's all judged on that, you get a skewed version of what life is like because then you judge everybody on how much money they make. And it's not even your fault because that's how you are judged at work every day. So a lot of it is just that you are a product of your environment. So then out in the real world [where] people aren't making that much money, then they don't really matter. They don't really count, so you can treat the guy that gives you coffee as a lesser citizen.

Investment banking practices both promoted a surge of predatory lending to originate the loans and created a market to buy the bonds based on them. Bolstered by rising housing prices, low interest rates, and a new worldview of "refinancing" such that predatory and unsound loans could easily be refinanced (often with hidden fees) at the end of the year or two with a higher home valuation, Wall Street investment banks rationalized their behavior. They also claimed that their ingenuity was finally breaking down barriers of race and class, which the traditional "redlining" commercial banker was unable to do with his simple, "vanilla" toolkit of conventional loans that lacked the advantage of global securitization. Again, the discourse of globalization was used: Wall Street investment bankers invoked their creation of a global market of "opportunity finance" and of extending home ownership to those left out of the global market. For example, Corey Fisher, an African American male managing director at Vanguard Investments, subtly linked Wall Street's creativity and aggressiveness with "expanding the pie." By focusing on the best way to make money, the new Wall Street challenged the elaborate and exclusionary protocols traditionally associated with elite banking, creating a new "high-yield" credit market and thus opening monetary access to anyone deserving:

Wall Street has helped to improve the efficiency of the economy, ... they have gotten rid of certain middlemen that were highly inefficient players. These inefficient middlemen were the bankers, the commercial lenders. Their pricing and the servicing that was built into that wound up extracting a cost that was exorbitant. What has been beautiful is - and this is one of the things that was good about the high-yield market - is that regardless of what your credit rating is, there is a market for you out there [...] frankly, you would not have gotten a loan from the banks [...] Nobody should be denied access to credit within reasonable means ... The cost of that capital should be a function of the earnings capacity and the cash flow capacity of the enterprise. That is the direction that we are moving in. What that does, from my standpoint, very selfishly, is it allows and other people of color and women to be able to participate in this marketplace.