Inquisited.com

The book “Liar’s Poker” offers an insider’s (and often, unflattering) portrayal of Wall Street culture: It describes a community rampant with unscrupulous greed, and lifestyles so hedonistic it would make even Caligula envious. As a testament to their gargantuan egos, the investment and trading moguls of Wall Street style themselves as “Big Swinging Dicks” or “Masters of the Universe”.

According to Michael Lewis, there is great scorn and contempt for any job that earns anything less than a king’s ransom. Success on the street is determined much less by one’s finesse in advanced financial knowledge than the ability to manipulate, exploit, coerce and spend long hours under high-pressure situations screaming orders.

Obviously, I am no Warren Buffet. But even before the current financial crisis I found myself wondering how much of the (then) phenomenal profit accrued in investment banking could be attributed to financial virtuosity, and how much of it to creative accounting. After all, with the banks as powerful as they are, they can essentially write themselves blank checks: they persuade investors to throw in their entire life’s savings to purchase financial instruments that are incredibly risky and overvalued at best (and next to worthless at worst), charge exorbitant management fees, and then buy each others stocks and debts in a way that connects every single financial entity on the street like a giant chain letter to cover their collective backs. If one of them goes down, the entire financial market is fucked.

When the bubble inevitably bursts, the engineers of this financial house of cards walk away scott free with their obscenely generous severance packages, leaving the central banks, taxpayers and investors the foot the bill - the most prominent and recent example being the fall of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Because of all the complex trades it had entered into with all the major banks on Wall Street, chaos would have resulted if the fund was allowed to fail. In the end, the Fed stepped in and brokered a deal between several major banks to bail out the ailing firm.

But the story has an unsatisfying epilogue. The founder LTCM, John Meriwether, walked away with a huge retirement package, and promptly raised $250 million of fresh capital to set up a new fund within a year of the collapse of LTCM. Wall Street financers, it appears, suffer from a serious case of investment amnesia. It seems we never learn and as a result pay, quite literally, for our ignorance.