Finance Fiction Pales Beside Finance Fact

Forbes magazine is a rich trove of unintended satire, with its brand scion, Steve Forbes, AKA the Fauntleroy who dreamed of being president, conveniently furnishing the bulk of the entertainment. So it’s hard to know how, exactly, one should greet the Forbes brand’s dalliance with the idea of deliberate mirth-making, via its annual roster of make-believe plutocrats, packaged as “The Forbes Fictional 15.” At the least, the exercise feels redundant-after all, if one hies over to the adulatory lists that furnish the template for the package thrown together by editors Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, there’s plenty of fiction already there to be descried between the lines. Take the Forbes recent ranking of the World’s Billionaires. For one thing, the concentration of mega-wealth into a few privileged hands is far from a reliable indicator of an economy’s overall well being, as research from economists Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran demonstrates.

What’s more, the big takeaway from this year’s billionaires list-that “Asia is leading the comeback” of the global economy, as Cheerleader Steve put it, turns out on closer inspection to involve many of the same forces that led to the great financial calamity of 2008, which claimed the nest eggs of untold ordinary workers and homeowners, and a few billionaire portfolios into the bargain.

“These are paper billionaires,” Brookings fellow Homi Kharas told the Guardian about the ballyhooed new class of globalized moguls-noting that they have typically run up their heroic stock gains as financial exchanges in emerging market economies have matured. While much of the new wealth is resource-based and therefore presumably less volatile than the dubious assets involved in the mortgage collapse, there’s nonetheless been no shakeout of overall exposure in the global derivatives market, which last year officially passed its one-quadrillion-dollar milepost. All in all, there’s little to celebrate in a flush new billionaire class minted from economies already groaning from the strains of gruesome levels of poverty and domestic inequality-and still less reason to believe that such pelf marks an empirical gain over the multileveraged fictions that plunged the oughts global economy into oblivion.

But let’s not dwell too long on such glum thoughts, and spoil the Forbesters’ fun. The “Fictional 15” list is clearly intended to be a lark for the long-suffering Forbes staff, which is routinely tasked with the quasi-fictional duty of making paper-wealth impresarios seem like the heart and soul of entrepreneurship.

So let’s have a look at how they go about gleefully ransacking pop culture and literature for figures of monied fun. The list is topped by Carlisle Cullen, the patriarch of the vampire family in the YA “Twilight” franchise-though in lieu of any distasteful analogies Forbes readers might draw between the lords of the investment economy and, well, bloodsucking fiends, Noer and Ewalt conjure more harmless japery involving the immortality and supernatural gifts of the undead. Cullen, aged 370, amasses his fortune via “long-term investments made with the aid of his adopted daughter Alice, who picks stocks based on her ability to see into the future,” they write.

Likewise, “Gossip Girl” Lothario Chuck Bass doesn’t occasion much comment from the entrepreneur-worshipping monthly for being born into his real-estate fortune, or leveraging its proceeds into an endless round of dreary adolescent sexual intrigues. Instead, he’s seated for a painfully contrived fictional interview, which mainly permits him to repurpose his “I’m Chuck Bass” catchphrase to nothing even faintly resembling comic effect.

Bass and Cullen-together with the Watchmen’s delusionally pacifist titan of commerce Ozymandias — pretty much exhaust the Forbes list of imaginary well-to-do villains. Oh, sure, there’s the “Simpsons” energy mogul Montgomery Burns, but he’s too broad a caricature-seemingly as ancient as Cullen and as self-infatuated as Bass-to get up to much in the way of hard-core expropriation. And Jay Gatsby, for all the whispers of mob ties helping to bulk up his drugstore-cum-bootlegging fortune, is too dreamy a figure of romantic tragedy for his wealth to be much more than a haunting reminder of his shady past.

Indeed, the absence of any serious malefactors of great wealth speaks volumes about the pinched state of the Forbes collective imagination. The list strains all sorts of credulity to include entries like the Tooth Fairy, who-let’s face it-distributes all her revenue on hand in exchange for a commodity that represents even less tangible value than a credit default swap, and yet can’t find room for a Patrick Bateman or an Augustus Melmotte.

Hell, there’s a rich murderer featured almost every week on some “Law and Order” franchise or another, yet we’re treated to TV entries like Topham Hatt, from the prissy U.K.-set “Thomas the Tank Engine” kiddie franchise-together with hoary Nick-at-Night perennials like Thurston Howell from “Gilligan’s Island” (a layabout scion in the Chuck Bass vein) and Jed Clampitt of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame (an oil mogul improbably cast as a plain-folks adversary of scheming West Coast bankers).

Likewise, ur-free-market heroes are curiously shortchanged by a magazine that fondly refers to itself as a “Capitalist Tool.” How can someone like the great Rand mouthpiece John Galt escape inclusion, for example, given his elevation to the front ranks of Tea Party protest? Are we really to believe that comic-book protagonist Richie Rich is a more arresting avatar of ever-striving privilege? (One can only really imagine Mr. Rich’s legacy inclusion on the list is based on the striking affinity his own CV shares with that of Steve Forbes-a comparison bruited even by former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, one of the most ardent champions of Forbes’ beloved flat tax.)

And of course, the list also contains a pointed political sideswipe at the growth of government spending, evicting the figure of Uncle Sam from atop last year’s list for the crime of living beyond his means-without pausing to note, of course, that the spendthrift icon was largely sent into Keynesian overdrive by the significant chunk of the real-world Forbes pantheon that produced the financial crisis in the first place. It’s a bit like pinning the death of Little Eva on the abolitionists.

Taking in the full sweep of the Forbes list, indeed, prompts one to worry that the crisis in American free enterprise is far worse than anyone suspected. We know from painful experience that an entire generation of investment banks, market watchers and federal regulators were on the verge of sacrificing our collective livelihood because of their failure to imagine the worst. So what, exactly, are we to make of a financial press that confuses biting satire with write-ups of the Tooth Fairy?

Chris Lehmann is also undoubtedly thinking, “And what about Armando Mendoza”?