Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America

[marmar]

from Newsweek, via The Daily Beast:



Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants’ joy.

Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.

Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement—I hesitate to call it “a career”—in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude’s home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/25/wall-street-has-destroyed-the-wonder-that-was-america.html

[frazzled]

1. Well, interesting (but with a big proviso)

I find it very ironic that someone who spent a full 30 years in this disgusting business and profited from it grandly suddenly has such high moral rectitude and is dispensing advice about it to the rest of us ... from the comfort of his leather armchair and estate in Greenwich, no doubt. Michael Thomas was to the manor born, drew on nepotism (to get his job both at the Met and Lehman's) and has retired in luxury from it. Now he wants to redeem himself by saying how appalling it all is. A little late, in my book.

By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels. His first book, Green Monday, published in 1980, was a critical and commercial success; it spent some two months on The New York Times’ best-seller list and landed his face on the cover of Institutional Investor magazine. ...

Michael Thomas was born in New York City in 1936. He went to Buckley, then Exeter, then Yale. Freshman year he read Duveen, by S. N. Beharman, and decided he wanted to be an art dealer. His father, Joe Thomas, a managing partner at Lehman Brothers, had a healthy disdain for money and suggested that was a lot more dignified than banking. ...

Bobby Lehman helped him get a gig as the curatorial assistant in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making $6,000 a year. He felt like his life was pretty much set. Two years later, he was locking horns with some asshole who was up to no good at the museum.

Mr. Lehman asked him if might like to try out finance. How much? Six thousand five hundred. Deal!

http://www.observer.com/2009/style/michael-thomas-finds-it-again

Married to Brooke Hayard, no less. How lush!

[Quantess]

2. He's working out his feelings of guilt on paper?