Banks

First they couldn't be big enough, now they can't break up fast enough.

See : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e03c20ba-e197-11dd-afa0-0000779fd2ac.html.

First they had all the solutions, now they have nothing but problems ; first they despised state intervention, now they beg for it.

I shall never forget the thinly veiled reverence with which so called specialists and analysts of the big ones were received by general management of major industrial groups, nor the thinly veiled disdain with which most of them treated the management of those industrial groups. They - the anointed ones - knew ; the industrialists almost begged to be let in on their secrets.

Those poor industrial bastards just made real money ; the anointed ones multiplied it by their own miraculous means of haute finance, and - to be fair - the poor working bastards all wanted a piece of that miraculously aggrandised pie.

A thing of the past ? Forever ? I wouldn't be too sure ...