Reporter David Ress recently recounted Richmond's experience with banks and other financial institutions. The story has not been a happy one. The city no longer serves as the headquarters of Virginia empires. The loss has affected prestige, and philanthropy.

The turbulence regarding Wachovia will affect Charlotte. The Queen City will survive, of course, and continue to prosper, but this is not good news for our Carolina kin.

S. Buford Scott, a longtime presence on the local financial scene, describes a change in attitudes and sentiment that had profound consequences not only for finance but for the greater community. Ress reported that according to Scott, "For many years, banks and brokers essentially represented their clients. Then they found out they could make more money for themselves, trading for their own accounts. That's not the way the Central National Bank, the Bank of Virginia, the Southern Bank and Trust, and the banks I knew when I was growing up in Richmond did things."

Economics columnist Robert Samuelson has discussed a trend in which firms switched from emphasizing their clients' needs to their own. Market absolutists counter that individual investors profit when the masters of the universe profit, so let everyone be "exploited." The argument suggests primarily that one does not have to be a Marxist to be an economic determinist and to deny society's moral basis and cultural obligations.

Fannie and Freddie, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Countrywide forever will symbolize an era of excess and vulgarity, of greed compounded by stupidity, of original sin manifested in unoriginal ways. Wachovia's purchase of a "pick-a-pay" mortgage outfit may have been the beginning of that bank's end. All in all these are stories of ignominy.

As banks and other institutions grew and expanded, merged and bought one another out, serious people spoke of the universal benefits lying just ahead. Yet skeptics attributed the stampede toward an ever bigger bigness not to economic necessity but to human ego and human pride. Global efficiency proved but the latest incarnation of the golden calf. It is not mere sour grapes to say that in their pursuit of wealth and presumed personal acclaim, individuals in Richmond and elsewhere betrayed their employees, their customers, and their hometowns. There were midgets in the Earth, weak men which were of old, men of infamy, not of renown.