"Goodbye, Mr Bond"

After Steve Mnuchin and his wife posed with a sheet of newly printed money for that photo, a few people commented that the couple looked like Bond villains. Was the multimillionaire former banker and hedgie embarrassed?  Of course not:

“I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie,” the treasury secretary told Fox News on Sunday.

Two things:

1. Who said anything about all Bond films being "great" or "successful"? Clearly, somebody's never seen Octopussy.

2. Talking of "successful", even the dimmest movie goer should have worked out by now that the salient feature of Bond villains is their total lack of success. Ever since Dr No in 1962, Bond villains have been reliably failing to realise their fiendish plots and coming to sticky ends, generally a few minutes before or after 007 destroys their life's work in a series of massive explosions.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the closest thing to not-a-complete-failure in the Bond-villain-verse, having at least survived several defeats. In his eight film incarnations to date, he has, however, lost comprehensively to Bond on at least seven occasions.

If you were being insanely generous, you could could call the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, when Blofeld manages to assassinate Bond's new wife, a score draw. But, as Bond has just comprehensively destroyed Blofeld's world domination plan, along with his supervillain base, this looks less like a draw to me and more like some sore loser knocking over the Scrabble table in a fit of pique.

I guess that when you've worked in a Wall Street that crashed the global economy, then for a guy who couldn't successfully make a profit out of the suckers queueing up to lose their money at casinos, your idea of a "successful" role model must be a little bit odd.