On finance

From an article in the LRB, discussing three books on finance, one of which focuses on Jim Simons who founded and ran the most successful hedge fund ever, but whose successor was Robert Mercer of Breitbart and Trump funding fame:

I'm not sure if this counts as an irony. Perhaps it is too gloomy for that. But the  fact is that the main impact on the world  of Jim Simons, both a deeply brilliant man  and a good person, was to make enough  money for his Renaissance colleague to get  Donald Trump elected president. That's all  Just a consequence of what modern finance  is, and of its grotesquely outsize role in  the way we live now. It is easy to diagnose  decadence in a society historically and geographically distant from us. It is harder to  see at close range.