75 Yr old Wall Streeter: "There will be prosecutions & show trials & violence-mark my words"

[The Doctor.]

79. I'm going to assume you were not being deliberately dishonest

in your selective quotes.

The quote about 'making the bastards pay' in it's entirety:

"To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over."

It could not be more clear that he expects them to 'pay' legally and without violence. "Great", in this sense, does mean 'good' or 'fortunate' any more than it does in "Great Depression".

I'm not saying that he doesn't want to see these things happen, but from the article, the only way to come to that conclusion is to make the assumption that he does. It looks to me like he laments the prospect of any of this having to happen as he says here:

"I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood."

This is clearly a man not happy with the current circumstances. That does not mean that he looks gleefully forward to the impending violence.