For the Love of Money
IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million and I was angry because it wasnt big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.
Eight years earlier, Id walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth meant. Id come to Wall Street after reading in the book Liars Poker how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I think about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes are made.
Id learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. Imagine what life will be like, hed say, when I make a million dollars. While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. and not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my moms nurse-practitioner salary.
Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be rich.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?_r=1
Squinch
(50,949 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)of honesty ... that will strike a nerve with any/all of his former peers, and be quickly ignored ... just like a junkie will see his fellow junkie OD and rush him to the hospital (or not), then start his search for more dope.
proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)GOPer Christie's New Web Ad Denounces Wall Street Greed, Features President Obama
ERIC KLEEFELD AUGUST 25, 2009, 7:50 PM EDT
Here's a great example of the new Republican populism -- a Web ad by a GOP candidate that bashes his opponent as a greedy Wall Street executive, using footage of the infamous Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street, declaring, "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good."
The new Web ad from Republican former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, the GOP nominee for Governor of New Jersey, attacks Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine's administration for having invested $180 million in state pension funds in Lehman Brothers, shortly before the firm collapsed, and insinuates a dirty connection on account of Corzine appointees having previously served at that same firm:
THIS VIDEO IS PRIVATE.
Christie might be a going little bit too far to the left, when the Web ad uses audio of none other than President Obama: "This financial crisis is a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years now."
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