Banker Suicides

[Bits of this have shown up in various places; this is updated.]

Whether or not "banker suicides" were partly a myth of the Great Depression -- there is some historical controversy on that point -- they are definitely not a myth this time. I now count 22 banker/broker/top businessperson suicides internationally in 2008 and 2009. They are all men. An asterisk indicates that they killed their families or members of it as well.

James Lull (5/15/2009)
Mark Levy (4/30/2009)
David Kellermann (4/22/2009)
William Parente (4/20/2009)*
Christopher Wood (4/18/2009)*
Gil Weber (4/13/2009)
Patrick Rocca (1/21/2009)
Adolf Merckle (1/6/2009)
Steven Good (1/6/2009)
Rene-Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet (12/23/2008)
Christen Schnor (12/17/2008)
Eric Von der Porten (12/8/2008)
Alex Widmer (12/5/2008)
Choi Seong-guk (11/19/2008)
Paulo Sergio Silva (11/17/2008) (attempted suicide; survival or otherwise not reported)
Rajendra Gupta (11/15/2008)
Joseph Luizzi (10/16/2008)
Karthik Rajaram (10/6/2008)*
Kirk Stephenson (9/25/2008)
Edwin Rachleff (7/28/2008)
Scott Coles (6/2/2008)
Barry Fox (5/23/2008)
Walter Buczynski (1/19/2008)*

The now defunct Conde Nast Portfolio ran a piece on 1/12/2009 on all of these suicides up to that time except Schnor and Gupta, whom they missed:

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2009/01/12/Suicides-Tied-to-the-Economic-Slump?page=1

All the incidents can be easily Googled. In addition, the W.C. Varones Blog runs an ongoing "Greenspan's Body Count" that includes these and other economy-related deaths:

http://wcvarones.blogspot.com/

This New York Magazine article about rage among wealthy Wall Streeters helps put the phenomenon in partial perspective:

http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/56151/

Some business suicides at any time may be worried about legal and criminal consequences from past actions coming to light. But for others, and this is where the article is helpful, their notion of personal catastrophe is different from most of ours, because their notion of the scale of what constitutes a "good life" is also markedly different. Believe it or not, for some Masters of the Universe and for some wannabe Masters, the potential or actual loss of the vacation homes, the private schools for their kids, the boats and planes and luxury cars, the seven-figure bank accounts, means that it's over -- everything they worked for, everything they deserve. From the sidelines this appears preposterous, but of course depression usually seems over-reactive from the standpoint of one not depressed (and I suffer from clinical depression myself, so I know this). Real depression and real consequences can be triggered for super-achievers by the loss (or even threatened loss) of things that you and I will never come within a million miles of having.

UPDATE (5/17/2009): I'll add to the list above as more examples come in. Yes, this is slightly ghoulish, but no more so than an interest in serial killers, and that interest is widely shared. I am seriously interested in the sociology of this economic downturn.