I found this interesting article by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, discussing a bit of what’s been happening on Wall Street in the twenty years since he left. I liked Liar’s Poker when it came out and find it disturbing that the next generation of Wall Streeters found it to be a useful how-to manual.
There is an object lesson somewhere in all this involving doom-sayers, pessimists, and people trying to see the dreams all the while ignoring the nightmares. How to make reality the nightmare? Ignore it for a while. Wall Street seems very good at ignorance.
Eisman was appalled. “Look,” he said. “I’m short. I don’t want the country to go into a
depression. I just want it to fucking deleverage.” He had tried a
thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the
business was, and no one wanted to hear it. “That Wall Street has gone
down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They
built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I
come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a
crisis of conscience.”
Even I, an uneducated fiscal novice, could see that a house of cards was being built with my, and everyone’s, money for the past decade. And it was being built in an earthquake zone. And I was asking at every chance “how can I protect my investments?” And knowledgeable folks couldn’t help me. Even those that agreed that an earthquake was coming didn’t have any viable alternatives. Now I see, I should have shorted the mortgage/CDO/CDS market.