One summer when I was a little boy our family embarked on a trip across the US.  Somewhere in Wyoming the gentle scuffle between myself and my two older sisters, who had me pinned against the backseat of our station wagon, turned into a true struggle. My ragged but cherished teddy bear flew out a window to a painful roadside death.  The wind coming through the windows (lowered whenever my dad chose to smoke inside the car, which was often) was no match for my repeated screams of "I want my teddy bear!"

Why tell this story? Well, for starters, when I read that the investment advisor Paul Greenwood spent $80,000 of other peoples' money on a teddy bear collection, it was the first thing that came to mind.  At the point where my bear got sucked out the window, I would have given anything to have a collection of replacements in the back seat. Granted, I was eight at the time and not 61, but obviously I had a lot to learn about insuring against loss.  Whereas I had put all of my bears in one basket, Greenwood had spread his risk, an essential skill to investing. In the event of a house fire he could race into basement, open the safe, grab a teddy, and then race outside to phone his wife and tell her that the house was on fire.

The second reason I bring this up is that there may be a deeper lesson for us here.  Ever since the Bernie scandal hit we've been out for banker-blood, ready to chop heads and put them on a stick like some third-world arranged marriage gone bad.  We're ready to assign all investment types to cyborg status, inhuman metal hands coming to kill us as we hide behind a boiler quaking in fear.  But think about it. If someone collects stuffed animals they've got to have some humanity inside them.  As far as I know, Pol Pot and Stalin didn't have stuffed animal collections.

To wit: When I mentioned the Greenwood-teddy connection to a friend, he laughed and told me his grandfather had a similar collection. This man was a revered community banker who built almost the entire midwestern county in which he founded his bank. He was a good, honest, God-fearing and teddy-bear-owning human in a far simpler time and place, where success was measured by deeds, not assets. He cared about people and literally built a small corner of America.

I'll admit that I've never trusted the new Wall Street/financial world and don't put money anywhere but banks. When I see an older man in a BMW with perfect hair, a spray-on-tan, and a business suit, the alarm bells start ringing.   These guys aren't my friend's midwestern grandfather-banker, and they've never had to care about people. They're more like extras in Top Gun wishing they could be the one singing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" to the hottie  on the barstool.  But I need to be careful not to lump all financial professionals into the Thain/Stanford/Madoff camp.  I need to remember that the majority of the people handling my money are still good and trustworthy people, and I need to take responsibility for keeping my money away from the charlatans of unregulated finance.

Primarily, I need to remember that in a regulatory vacuum men (and women) will become children to satisfy their child-like needs for security and praise.

The bears are trying to tell us something. They're not showboaters, they're missionaries of wisdom. The bears have come into the spotlight for a reason, and they love us. They're telling us that until we get back to the days of the archetypal midwestern banker, using the forces of regulation and nationalization if necessary, the guys collecting them will screw us over.  They're telling us that a that world equating wealth with success will suck all human values out the window. And they're telling us that these guys really, really need help in becoming stable adults.

And like the bear that disappeared from our station wagon into the bleak Wyoming night, they're telling us that the "financial professionals" in the shadowy world of unregulated finance desperately need parental oversight.

I have no idea what that human-attacking chimp was trying to tell us -- that's for someone else to figure out.