House of Cards

So tonight I am sitting in a class offered by one of New York's many financial institutions listenening to a very nice gentleman go on about sub prime loans, auction rate securities, special purpose vehicles, structured investment vehicles, credit defualt swaps, collateralized debt obligations and so forth. All of this leading into a plug for the book, "House of Cards" by William D. Cohan which depicts the downfall of Bear Stearns. Having become disgusted by my chosen profession, yet still bound by human laws such as one must feed oneself and so on, I continue to pursue these courses, but really, while sitting through them my mind wanders with a frightening frequency towards visions of using the pen given to me by one of my former brokers as a device with which to perfom a tracheotomy right there, in the middle of this very nice gentleman's class.
When I return home, I look up the book online to see if the famous Jimmy Cayne had anything to say for himself. We all know he liked to golf - so much so that he wasn't around much while the sky was falling. We know that he liked to smoke pot and play bridge - I mean what CEO of a major investment bank whose personal worth at one point touched upon, what, a billion or so dollars, shouldn't be able to slack off, smokc pot, and play his favorite card game whilst the rest of the firm collapses. However, I had been remiss in not having heard that Mr. Jimmy Cayne, the pot smoking, bridge enthusiast was also a homophobic misogynist. I am certain everyone on earth already knows this. I am sure everyone has already read how JC called Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner a fag, and as for Ms. Kate Kelly, a Wall Street Journal Reporter, JC went so far to call her a, "cunt....whose capability is zero".
So, these crass, pot smoking, evidently incompetent, bullies with limited vocabularies are the very men we as a nation simply cannot do without. Despite the fact that the CEOs in Asia and Europe seem to get the job done for a fracton of what we pay our CEOs without referring to their journalists as "cunts" and their treasury secretaries as "fags', we have been so convinced that the "market" here has accurately assessed our nations CEOs worth that we dare not challenge the market lest we be denounced a communist or a socialist. Hmmm, let's say we have two competing theories, one is our crass, incompotent, pot smoking, mysogonist CEO JC is worth every dime despite the collapse of Bear Stearns, and that if you disagree you are in fact a communist or a socialist. The other theory, is that over the years, JC has cagily appointed members to the board who have looked past his behaviour due to favortism, nepotism, cronyism, a couple of decent rounds out at Bethpage, what have you. Occam's Razor, I think, might point us in the direction of the latter rather than the former explanation.
Well, this you all already know. Tomorrow, I will write about a CEO of a hedge fund I knew personally as he not only spent a good deal of his time shagging my ex-fiance, but when he lost that loving feeling for her, he decided to pump a 23 yr old tanning assistant in Vegas so full of cocaine that she died. He did in fact settle out of court for a very handsome sum with the family of the deceased, as an American CEO can do when that CEO is worth 150 millon or so dollars. Well, all of this bullshit is either exactly as the market dictates and we are but it's servants, or really, this is all a house of cards, and all it takes is just one.. simple..push.
Until tomorrow.
TST