But the deeper issue is, how can one trust this talent? The shamelessness with which bonuses have been collected has heightened the sense of distrust. Americans cannot help asking how their ruling elites, a few of their best and brightest, acquired so much power and arrogance. So much power that they can even turn their own incompetence to their advantage, and use the crisis to extort. So much arrogance because there does not seem to be a trace of contrition about mistakes made, responsibilities evaded. The degree of brazenness in the complicity between government, the world of finance and even some parts of academia, and their distance from the rest of the country, is now seen as truly breathtaking. One measure of this gap is the fact that when CNN recently ran a poll on what most Americans think is the most important economic issue, taxes ranked the lowest. Yet with the honourable exception of Warren Buffett and a few others, in most of elite circles, the focus is still very much on tax cuts, including for the rich.

It is no wonder that the most ubiquitously used word in the American media now is “greed”. The legitimacy of capitalism has rested on that thin line between a personal striving that leads to improvement for all, and a greed that destroys the very foundations of individual liberty. But what Americans worry about is how a small elite got to hijack the agenda of democracy: how an economic crisis has revealed the depth of democratic deficit.

... contd.