Laid Off By Lehman: One Broker's Story
Speaking of anecdotal sentiment indicators: What does a Lehman Brothers' broker do with his days now? Untucked Films found out. Directed by Chuck Divak and Jonathan Emmerling.
OMG, this is hysterical:
Perfect entertainment for a quiet Friday --
Hat tip: themessthatgreenspanmade
Friday, October 17, 2008 | 11:45 AM | Permalink
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Comments
funny humor...tells me people can still laugh about it. WERE GOING LOWER!
Posted by: Concerned Citizen | Oct 17, 2008 12:00:12 PM
I just feel out of my chair laughing. Nice find.. That was hilarious.
Posted by: Emini Addict | Oct 17, 2008 12:10:23 PM
LOFL!!!
The AmEx card in the subway is the funniest scene I've seen in a long time.
Thats a great clip.
"Am I in fucking brooklyn!!??"
Posted by: I-Man | Oct 17, 2008 12:22:07 PM
Thank you Barry!! Perfect way to start the weekend.
Posted by: dgov | Oct 17, 2008 12:22:43 PM
"Paying bums to blow each other...
never got old."
What a "leh-ment"
Posted by: I-Man | Oct 17, 2008 12:27:45 PM
hilarious..Thanks Barry! Now lets go rally! credit indicators coming in big time!!
Posted by: Noah | Oct 17, 2008 12:29:03 PM
These guys worked 60 hours a week (80 now) and they basically become slaves of these companies.
They sacrificed every other part of their lives for their job and the money. Now they have nothing.
Lesson learned:
No matter how much you make, You can't buy your life back.
I'm taking the rest of the week off.
Posted by: Vermont Trader | Oct 17, 2008 12:37:17 PM
Brokers, what a bunch of leaches. We still have plenty more to get rid of.
Posted by: Bill | Oct 17, 2008 12:40:12 PM
Hilarious. Eventually we will reach the point where resumés will be altered to conceal the employment history from public revulsion.
Posted by: leftback | Oct 17, 2008 12:49:05 PM
leftback:
I'm sure it's already happening. I've seen job posts on craigslist that say "Realtors and Mortgage Brokers need not apply."
Posted by: Empire | Oct 17, 2008 12:55:17 PM
But this is better. What happens when you try to bully around Billion dolar companies and lose?
" The Starfire, a 177-foot yacht owned by Carl Icahn, is for sale, Icahn's office confirmed Friday. SuperYachtTimes.com Monday reported that Northrop and Johnson, a brokerage firm, had listed the Starfire for sale at a price of $37.5 million. A spokesman for Icahn confirmed that he is the owner of the yacht. Northrop and Johnson declined comment."
Posted by: John Borchers | Oct 17, 2008 12:57:52 PM
"scrape buy on a couple hundred thousand"....hahaha...too true.
Posted by: josie the berry picker | Oct 17, 2008 1:02:33 PM
@ Empire: I am waiting to see "No investment bankers" on the dating web sites !! I am also looking forward to seeing those gently used BMW ads.
The 3-month T-bill is out to 0.83%, the short end safety trade is selling off, the 5-and 10-years will follow next week.
I am 50-60% long a bunch of index funds, also I am short the 10-year and junk bonds and long gold stocks. Not trying to do anything clever here until maybe the middle of next week, but at some stage I am interested in buying energy stocks and some emerging markets. Right now I think the commodity/EM sell off still has a little way to go. I like $60 crude as a floor. we'll see if we get there.
Posted by: leftback | Oct 17, 2008 1:10:19 PM
How long until the market goes back to euphoria? My guess is not long.
Posted by: John Borchers | Oct 17, 2008 1:11:40 PM
@ Empire: I am waiting to see "No investment bankers" on the dating web sites !! I am also looking forward to seeing those gently used BMW ads.
The 3-month T-bill is out to 0.83%, the short end safety trade is selling off, the 5-and 10-years will follow next week.
I am 50-60% long a bunch of index funds, also I am short the 10-year and junk bonds and long gold stocks. Not trying to do anything clever here until maybe the middle of next week, but at some stage I am interested in buying energy stocks and some emerging markets. Right now I think the commodity/EM sell off still has a little way to go. I like $60 crude as a floor. we'll see if we get there.
Posted by: leftback | Oct 17, 2008 1:12:06 PM
Left be careful with emerging markets. Over the last few years Asia has built up huge capacity. We will find shortly that they have too much capacity and they will undercut each other in an ugly game of too much competition.
Posted by: John Borchers | Oct 17, 2008 1:17:07 PM
Where does one get up-to-date information on the 90 day t-bill rate? thanks ahead of time
Posted by: Concerned Citizen | Oct 17, 2008 1:32:33 PM
BEST QUOTE I HAVE EVER READ: "... In the absence of force (as George Washington said, "government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force), the market will award honesty and industry above all else. When force is used liberally, Society rewards George Bush Jr. and Angello Mozillo."
from: http://sovereignspeculator.com/2008/09/21/why-bailouts-will-not-stop-the-depression/
Posted by: Concerned Citizen | Oct 17, 2008 2:04:23 PM
This is Wall Street -- If you want a friend, get a Blog.
Posted by: Wisdom Seeker | Oct 17, 2008 2:06:21 PM
Where does one get up-to-date information on the 90 day t-bill rate? thanks ahead of time
Posted by: Concerned Citizen | Oct 17, 2008 1:32:33 PM
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/RI/OFBills
Posted by: pj | Oct 17, 2008 2:31:47 PM
Well here's how I see it.
So there's this new beer coming onto market and it's all the rage... everyone wants a piece of it as rumors abound have the price skyrocketing...the market trends show that indeed this is true and that this beer is in fact doubling in value at an exponential rate...
So a bunch of drinking buddies start looking into getting kegs of this beer- a few pals have bought some and held onto them and then flipped them at extreme profit...and hell, if you don't sell you can still drink it...awesome. So these guys go to the bar and they ask for these kegs... the bar owner says why the hell not- it's a great investment; I'll "sell" these kegs and allow payment to be made slowly fort he first month and then I'll just raise the monthly payments whatever. The bar owner's partner sees this and thinks to himself... hmm,, so we just "sold" all these kegs and the price is skyrocketing...let's bundle all these pieces of equity together and then slice them up and sell them to people as investments... yeah some people will default on the kegs but so what, we'll have the beer and it'll only be a small percentage of people... Plus our "stock" will skyrocket because on paper we'll "have" all this money that the buddies are going to pay us...
Everything is going well everyone is making a killing. Of course there's always risk so people start looking for insurance against this risk. Some of the investors who bought these packaged keg-quities (keg-equities) approach some large bars and look to buy some insurance. The bars see a pant load of money being made by everyone else including competitor bars down the street and see the need to have some cash flow to buy a whole bunch of kegs to "sell". So they start selling insurance to people... Thing is that they don't call it insurance because the dept of alcohol regulated that...so they make us some bullshit name and avoid the rules and regulations. They then go buck wild. They promise payouts of 10 or 15 to 1 if these keg-quities go bust. They can't imagine that they will and they figure that if one or two do go belly up they'll have made enough off the payment for the "insurance" to cover it... Word gets around and some of the investors start doing this... but it's not for keg-quities they actually own... because there's no regulation they are buying "insurance" for keg-quities owned by other people! So on one hand they are buying a payout ratio of 10:1 in case a particular keg-quity fails and on the other hand they've engaged in some really nasty business involving the owners of the keg-quities... Some of these investors know that the buddies who "bought" these kegs are all on the wagon and shouldn't really be playing with alcohol in the first place. They start betting with others that these guys will fall off the wagon, and while most folk want the buddies to succeed a lot of people are hoping that they fail. If they guys do fall off the wagon then this group makes a killing not only on the original bet that the buddies will fail but on the "insurance" against the buddy-owned keg-quities will too.
So... Much like an inverted pyramid build out of empties this thing is growing...everyone is getting in on this...pension funds, foreign investors, hell other countries are even buying in without knowing too much about how the whole system is built all banking on the hopes that this uber-sweet beer is going to be all the rage.
After a while people start getting a bit sick of hearing about this beer- and it turns out that it really isn't all that great-it's good but not the second coming. So the value of these kegs starts falling a it- nothing too much bus dropping for sure. Next thing you know it's been a month and the ultra low payments the buddies have been making to the bar for these kegs is about to skyrocket per the contract that nobody bothered reading.
Well, half-way through the kegs the buddies all of a sudden realize that all the money they were supposed to use for this balloon payment went to a new keggerator, pint glasses, beer helmets etc... and now they simply can't afford to pay the bar. And as word of all of this spreads the value of those half kegs starts to plummet. Hardcore. The keg that was bought for $100 is now only worth $30 but the owner still owes $90 on it. So he rolls the keg up to the bar and leaves the tap and disappears.
All at once the investors/speculators who were banking that the buddies would drink half the keg and default have made a bunch of cash...they also now go to the big bars who sold them the "insurance" and call it in. So for the $1000 payment the return is $100000. Not bad.. .they're rolling in pantloads of cash. The small bars that "sold" all these kegs are now seriously fucked. All this "money" they "had" is gone and these kegs are worth shit. Time to jump out of the boardroom window. This bar's gotta close- it simply has too much debt on it's hands to be considered living. The large bars that had sold the "insurance" are also fucked. They now have to pay out all this insurance on something they thought wouldn't go bust. To make matters worse, instead of investing the insurance payments into gold or bread, they reinvested it into kegs and the small bars selling kegs because of course everyone was making a killing! Oh shit.
So all of a sudden bars of all sizes and shapes are collapsing including some of the biggest watering holes in the world. If these close well, kiss sudz goodbye. So the Federal gov't comes in and says that it'll buy all the warm kegs at nearly full price. The investors love it- so do the bars. Well everyone who bought a pony keg, or a six pack and kept it in the fridge and used plastic solo cups is livid... and so the Fed decides that not only will it buy some of the warm kegs at a negotiated price it'll also buy a few tables at the bar...banking on the fact that they can re-carbonate the beer, and that once it's frosty again people will have the thirst and that the bars too will come back to life.
To make matters oh so much worse, the buddies used to work for the local hop grower and what with the failing of the beer market they lost their jobs and now need help from the fed. Meanwhile all the folk who have thus been drinking responsibly are now pissed because the money they paid for their beer is now going to bail out those alcoholics who blew their wads.
And stuck in the middle of all this are folk like you and I who are thirsty as fuck and have been saving for a pony keg of our own and just need a slight loan to cover the cost of the tap and cups...but now since beer is so risky we can't get that small loan and so we're stuck drinking nasty-ass tap water.
Geez, can't a guy get a freaking High Life when he's thirsty.
Posted by: scott_colbury | Oct 17, 2008 2:42:59 PM
Speaking of hilarious:
"Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F---- You"
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2008/10/17/hedge-fund-manager-goodbye-and-f-you
And it's a real letter too!
HCF
Posted by: HCF | Oct 17, 2008 3:26:21 PM
scott_colbury
It looks ridiculous when you put it like that, as all these bubbles do when viewed from 1000 feet up. But we'll do it all again 25 years from now. I hope it is a beer bubble next time. At least I'll get some good suds out of it.
Posted by: beerdrinker | Oct 17, 2008 3:30:37 PM
Wow!!! Really well done. Top notch. The closing line ices it.
Thanks, Barry.
Posted by: Douglas Watts | Oct 17, 2008 3:52:13 PM
But, of course, America’s problem is way deeper than one kleptocratic president or even a generational binge coupled with a three decade long vacation from responsibility, not to mention rationality. We have established a pervasive culture of greed, and that’s one angry chicken that has now come home to roost. What’s worse, we’ve lost the capacity as a society to even imagine an alternative ethos to guide us, though the looming economic tsunami may be just the thing – and likely the only thing – big enough to get us thinking once again.
This massive poverty of imagination is what is killing us now, undermining us at the most fundamental levels of societal identity. To grasp the magnitude of our problem, consider how we socialize our citizens and how our culture sets the priority structure of their values and aspirations. Sure, some Americans think it is noble and wonderful to pursue careers which serve the public interest, but most are taught, and simply accept, that one should aspire to making boatloads of money, and that the measure of one’s achievement is the size of their bank account and the number of toys parked in the driveways of their McMansions. I am constantly astonished by the quantity of Americans whose expressed goal in life is simply to make lots of money, which I find especially bizarre since they don’t seem to have any particular use in mind for all this cash. What this phenomenon has long suggested to me is a country full of sheep so unoriginal in their thinking that they can’t even figure out what to aspire to on their own, and a society so bankrupt in its morality that it feeds them the goal of wanton greed to fill that yawning void.
All that’s bad enough, but, besides the current economic meltdown and a society populated by moral midgets, there are also other repercussions to this ethical failure and this poverty of imagination. Chief among these is the false choice we are always presented between governance in the public interest, on the one hand, and prosperity, on the other. This bogus diversionary tactic forms the central argument of the economic predators who’ve been bleeding the country of its wealth (and, in fact, prosperity), as to why we can’t have regulation. You know, all that Washington red tape (you can’t profit off of pollution, you can’t exploit children as factory workers, you have to pay a minimum wage – horrible restrictions like that) will keep innovators from innovating and entrepreneurs from, uh, entrepreneuriating.
And, you know what? They’re actually more or less right. They’re right if, that is, you accept as a predicate would-be innovators and would-be entrepreneurs who are only motivated by an ethos of personal greed, which has been duly pounded into them through the socialization processes of a society that lost its mind and its moral bearing decades ago. Sure, okay. Under those conditions it’s probably true that most people will only work for themselves, and will only be motivated by self-interest. But what if we taught these people something different, right from the get-go when they were toddlers, and reinforced those different values throughout their adult lives? What if we taught the members of this society to value the community’s welfare as much as their own? What if we taught them that massive personal wealth was not only not the highest achievement to aspire to, but actually a sort of crass and tacky goal, only to be found amongst the most juvenile and selfish in the society? What if we strongly imprinted the idea among our people that improving the welfare of the country (or, gulp, the world) is an important life aspiration, and that those who do so are considered among our most admired countrymen, rather than those who have acquired the money to purchase bitchin’ toys and trophy wives? Is it not possible that our citizens would innovate, and that they would be every bit as motivated as they are today by greed? Maybe even more so?
And, therefore, could we not transcend this false choice of good governance versus prosperity? (Not to mention the fact that whatever prosperity we’ve experienced of late is not going to the society, anyhow. In the last three decades, while GDP has grown at a handsome clip, the middle class – and, of course, we’ve long ago now abandoned even talking about those below middle class status, let alone fighting a war on poverty – has not even stood its ground, but rather has actually lost overall purchasing power. That, of course, leaves only one mathematical explanation for what has happened. You guessed it. All that growth in national wealth has gone to the already richest Americans.)
You know, I’m not a subscriber to the prescriptions of communism for constructing the best system of political economy, much as that might come as a shock to any conservative reader of this piece. And I think it’s fair to say that the world’s experiments in communism to date – to the extent they weren’t actually just experiments in totalitarian brownshirtism – failed in large part because they possessed just the opposite flaw as that described above. They attempted to build economic systems on the equally false notion that selfishness can be completely erased from human psychology as a motivating force. It can’t. And any system dependant on that proposition for its success will have none. But, by the same token, a system that is built on the premise that people are only motivated by selfish greed, and therefore can only produce prosperity by letting every actor pursue their own self-interest, unfettered by any societal concerns, is an equally disastrous notion.
And such a society is equally bound for the ash heap of history, just as was the Soviet Union or Maoist China.
In fact, I ‘m pretty sure that’s just exactly what the cosmos is screaming in our ears, at about 150 decibels worth of volume, right at the moment. The only question is whether we are so deaf we can no longer hear the warning call, even when it’s broadcast over a galactic PA system.
But just in case, here it is. Newsflash for America! This just in! Sorry to burst your little bubble, people, but it turns out, after all, that...
Greed is not good.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
Posted by: AGG | Oct 17, 2008 9:43:37 PM
