Modern Grifters and The Golden Age of Fraud

We’ve all been watching the absurd antics of Hollywood’s newest self-reflective obsession, the Modern Grifter series like The Dropout, WeCrashed, Inventing Anna, and a host of other shows hold up a mirror to America’s worst capitalist excesses. While there certainly is a bit of moral hazard in painting what is at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/t-magazine/the-distinctly-american-ethos-of-the-grifter.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">best criminals</a> as tragic anti-heroes of late capitalism, the entire phenomenon is sparking some much-needed discussion about alienation, economic determinism, and the cost of hypercapitalism. These Modern Grifter series seem to secretly arise from how dual-class share structures (Facebook, Theranos, WeWork, etc.) create corporate governance problems when CEO-founders are unaccountable to their boards. This phenomenon is exacerbated by a period of historically low-interest rates, an excess of dry powder from the last bull market, and the investor class acting like lemmings chasing unsustainable yield in whatever the next shiny flash-in-the-pan thing is this week. Unsurprisingly this environment is kindling for every aspect of the Fraud Triangle: opportunity, motivation, and rationalization. The antics of how each of these psychological elements manifests in the grifter’s abnormal psychology make for great Hollywood drama. <a href="https://medium.com/@Stephen.Diehl/modern-grifters-and-the-golden-age-of-fraud-7ebb905dc282">Visit Now</a>