Don't worry! The right people are still making money; plenty of it. Times:

Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms.

One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. He reaped that bounty, probably the richest in Wall Street history, by betting against certain mortgages and complex financial products that held them.

The richest hedge fund managers keep getting richer — fast. To make it into the top 25 of Alpha’s list, the industry standard for hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $360 million last year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year.

Combined, the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29 billion.

In one way, I don't begrudge them the money; after all, it was a good and sensible thing to be short when the market was in the throes of a horrific bubble, and the people who did that made a lot of money this year.

Howeve, it's awfully hard to distinguish smart from lucky, in this context; and what could a human being do that could possibly be worth a billion dollar payday? How many legs do their pants have?

However, it also seems to me that they're making that money because the market is broken; two humongous bubbles in the last eight years, both of them very painful for many and very destructive, is at least one too many, and maybe two.

And it also seems to me that making this kind of money creates no incentive to fix the market, but in fact creates perverse incentives to make it even more broken, so the payday for the smart guys who profit on the broken-ness is even greater (and every one of these guys believes that they're the smartest one in the room).

So...