THE BIGGEST HEIST IN HISTORY

not so long ago, the biggest robbery in history was considered to have taken place at the boston museum in 1990, where thieves dressed as policemen took off with rembrandt paintings worth an estimated $300m, crudely cutting the invaluable canvasses from their frames.

then with american invaders approaching, it looks like saddam had his hand in the cookie jar, for amounts not verified today but possibly bigger than the first one.

whatever the case, nothing compares to what we have seen last month in financial centers of the developed world, in broad daylight.

for several years, bankers gave loans to people who could never pay them back, then packaged and sold those loans to investors, who put them on their balance sheets as high quality assets and claimed their companies were now worth more.

everyone got rich in the process, and when the house of cards came down last month, governments in the west were left with no choice but to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to save these institutions, to prevent a complete melt-down of the world economy.

already now, this amounts to the largest transfer of wealth in history, from ordinary tax payers to wealthy bankers. many of these bankers have lost their jobs now, but not the sky high salaries and bonuses of the last 6 years. the trillions of dollars that will end up being spent saving these companies now unable to save themselves, should have been spent on education, social security, health care, clean energy research, better public transportation.

thomas friedman, writer of "the world is flat", lays it out in an excellent article in the new york times.

he also makes reference to a longer article which details the inner workings of wall street, called "the end of wall street's boom"