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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Monkey business

Monkey business

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This account of a Citigroup conference call with Ireland’s finance minister made me laugh:

Mr Lenihan had been speaking for less than two minutes on Friday before a mistake by Citigroup meant that the bank’s clients were all able to be heard on the line.

Between 200 and 500 investors are understood to have been on the call, and as they realized their lines were not muted many began to heckle Mr Lenihan.

Some traders began making what one banker on the call described as “chimp sounds”, while another cried out “dive, dive”. A third man said “short Ireland” before adding “why not short Citi too?”

Felix Salmon adds:

I think it also says something about the way in which even rich and sophisticated investors feel as though they don’t have a voice and aren’t being heard. Remember that the Tea Party started with a rant on CNBC. This is a sign of the times, I think: this kind of fiasco wouldn’t have taken place pre-crisis.

Felix Salmon is one of my favorite commentators (I would link more if I knew more about economics), but he’s wrong here: during the Thai currency crisis, a friend of mine saw traders wearing “I fucked the Baht” tee-shirts. Contra John, that’s just what frat boys are like, in general if not in every case.

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  1. 1.

    MattF

    I blame the intertubes. Everyone’s now got practical experience in being an anonymous asshole.

  4. 4.

    srv

    This is the difference between being in a frat at a poor state school and being at a major school where membership and money go hand-in-hand.

    Not sure why JC can’t connect those dots with his regular classism spiels.

  5. 5.

    Brachiator

    I think it also says something about the way in which even rich and sophisticated investors feel as though they don’t have a voice and aren’t being heard.

    WTF? It’s always been said that “Money talks.” It’s hard to believe that the rich and sophisticated aren’t being heard.

    What, are they sad because they aren’t getting their way as easily as the good old days when Bush, Cheney and the GOP had an open door policy for oligarchs?

  6. 6.

    Keith G

    even rich and sophisticated investors feel as though they don’t have a voice and aren’t being heard.

    So has Felix been doing shots of Jager as well? That is just a strange case to be making.

  8. 8.

    Corner Stone

    Contra John, that’s just what frat boys are like, in general if not in every case.

    Wait a second…

  9. 9.

    Dennis SGMM

    This only reinforces my perception that this proud land has an inexhaustible supply of assholes. They may be wealthy assholes or they may be poor assholes but, they’re all one in the brotherhood of assholery. They are the Republican base.

  10. 10.

    Yutsano

    I suppose the Irish could just tell them all to fuck themselves and they ain’t paying a bloody red farthing on their debt, but I imagine that would screw the Irish worse than laying there taking the humiliation like lambs.

  11. 11.

    Corner Stone

    I think it also says something about the way in which even rich and sophisticated investors feel as though they don’t have a voice and aren’t being heard. Remember that the Tea Party started with a rant on CNBC.

    Felix is out of his damned mind.

  12. 12.

    AB

    one of Douthat’s more perceptive posts:

    “Faux Underdogs”

    From Douthat’s perceptive review of The Social Network:

    The dark genius of meritocratic culture is that it can take a kid like Mark Zuckerberg, someone who grew up in Westchester and went to an exclusive prep school, and — by surrounding him with other hyper-competitive alpha students — make him feel like he’s an underdog, an outsider, someone who needs to fight and claw his way against all odds to make it to the top and stay there. Whether the flesh-and-blood Zuckerberg felt this way or not, I don’t pretend to know. But the phenomenon is real, and crucial to understanding the psychology of the American elite. And whatever liberties it takes with the facts, when it comes to depicting that psychology at work in an individual soul, “The Social Network” absolutely nails it.

    http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/10/faux-underdogs.html

  14. 14.

    srv

    @Yutsano: It is not hypocrisy to believe that Ireland and Greece should be held responsible for their actions, whereas Goldman and others who played a part in setting up those fiascos are the victims.

  16. 16.

    John Cole

    This is the difference between being in a frat at a poor state school and being at a major school where membership and money go hand-in-hand.

    Not sure why JC can’t connect those dots with his regular classism spiels.

    I was never in a fraternity in a major school. I was in a faternity at a school of about 800 people, and 80% of the campus was Greek. I understand the aversion to Enron-like frat boy assholes, but that just wasn’t my experience.

  18. 18.

    eric u.

    I used to deliver newspapers on fraternity row at a major university. Hazing week freaked me out half of the time, hate to think of what they were doing in those frat houses. That was before hazing was outlawed.

  20. 20.

    Linda Featheringill

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Why does everyone compare everything to high school? I can’t believe that it was a traumatic experience for so many…

    If you were part of the In Crowd it probably wasn’t so bad. Or if you are so far gone that you don’t remember high school, the suffering has probably slipped away.

    I think that the problem is that, school kids not having the option to just walk away from it all, the pain that is inflicted goes deep and takes a looooong time to heal. So for many people, high school is a metaphor for hell.

  22. 22.

    Cat Lady

    Isn’t high school where everyone learns their survival skills and where they belong, and everything from then on is a honing and refining of that? High school wasn’t hell for everyone, but it’s all prelude to what comes later. These dicks on the phone – they learned that dickishness in high school and honed that behavior on the geeks, the substitute teachers, and the new kids. The only difference is that they get paid to be dicks now and the cool kidz table is a global conference call.

  25. 25.

    parsimon

    @Cat Lady:

    Isn’t high school where everyone learns their survival skills and where they belong, and everything from then on is a honing and refining of that?

    Not to be all humorless and all, but this is glib. Sure, high school is a prelude to what comes later — by definition. Might as well say that elementary school is where everybody learns where they fit in. Etc.

    It’s more interesting to note that some stall at the high school-level survival skills, others at the college level skills, others at grammar school.

  29. 29.

    scav

    mmm, I had thought my personal past was untainted by traders, but we did that “dive dive” thing with rather a fine line in augmented and appropriate submarine sounds in AP English. I’m now going to have to go somewhere and worry.

  31. 31.

    John Bird

    Salmon is also wrong about “Tea Party” – as Taibbi noticed in his recent article, the term actually predates Obama’s election and was used by Ron Paul supporters to characterize their campaign rallies.

  33. 33.

    Uloborus

    @Dennis SGMM:
    I was just doing Spaceballs.

    Any actually serious meaning I intended was that, yes, the Republican Party is the party of assholes. Rich and poor, united in being mean-spirited, selfish, and unempathic.

  35. 35.

    geg6

    @Cat Lady:

    Although I agree with your conclusion, I don’t agree at all with your starting premise. I am nothing like the person I was in high school. I didn’t turn out as my guidance counselor and some teachers thought, and I am definitely not the person most of my peers would have predicted.

    High school is something I’d be perfectly happy to forget completely. And I was fairly popular, not the most popular but also not someone nobody noticed and certainly not one of the poor bastards the really popular kids tortured every day. Kinda like the assholes on that conference call, the most popular kids in my high school class have still not evolved or matured from the people they were back then. Still assholes after 33 years.

  41. 41.

    D0n Camillo

    On Friday it emerged that a small group of hedge fund debt investors were threatening to take Ireland to court if it pushed ahead with moves to impose so-called “haircuts” – or writedowns – on the value of their holdings in Anglo debt.

    So these hedge funds made bets on Anglo Irish Bank that went wrong and they want the Irish taxpayer to subsidise them for 100% of their value? Nice fucking free market you got there. Hedge funds seem to have some of the most pampered, entitled pricks on this planet.

  42. 42.

    Uloborus

    @D0n Camillo:
    The job rewards it. It’s one of the only jobs on the planet where the kind of thinking that embodies any 12 year old’s get rich quick scheme actually makes you insane amounts of money. We need enough regulation that these people get slapped with the cold hand of reality instead.

  45. 45.

    Billy K

    I would link more if I knew more about economics

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    Does not compute…

  47. 47.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Linda Featheringill:

    So for many people, high school is a metaphor for hell.

    Joss Whedon agrees with you; there’s a reason why Buffy the Vampire Slayer was set in high school. The “Hellmouth” referred to more than the portal underneath the school that spawned all sorts of nasty monsters.

    Another good example (with less supernatural stuff) was Veronica Mars with Kristen Bell.

  48. 48.

    d0n camillo

    @Jay in Oregon:
    And Veronica Mars proceeded to go off the rails in the third season when she was at college and no longer was fighting against her high school world.

  49. 49.

    Xboxershorts

    @D0n Camillo:

    So these hedge funds made bets on Anglo Irish Bank that went wrong and they want the Irish taxpayer to subsidise them for 100% of their value? Nice fucking free market you got there. Hedge funds seem to have some of the most pampered, entitled pricks on this planet.

    And their ego is so huge, having never gotten the smackdown they so richly deserved, if they dared once look in the mirror and saw themselves as part and parcel of the current shit sammich state of the world economy, they’d spontaneously combust from the friction caused by their brains grinding to an instant halt.

    They don’t get it. And they’ll never get it, as long as they are sheltered from the consequences of their own greed.

    In a “just” world, Citi-group would have ceased to exist as a corporate entity long before the spoiled class got a chance to heckle an entire nation.

    To die in a fire is too good for them and I hope Ireland has the balls to force a haircut on every single one of these bastards.

  50. 50.

    El Cid

    FWIW, the Irish Department of Finance says that while there was some “silliness” at the beginning of the first call when “technical difficulties” meant everyone could be heard, the tenor of the repaired call was completely different.

    If for a moment we take that claim seriously, it does sort of explain the chimp noises, because that would resemble people mocking those setting up some A/V or other system at a meeting who don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Or making noises like ‘cave-men’, etc.

  51. 51.

    satby

    @El Cid: Oh El Cid, you optimist! Nope, I worked tech support at the CBOT and Merc and I’m positive the traders were mocking the minister. The trading floors are like high school boys locker rooms, in the pits they even fart in each others faces if they’re annoyed with someone or to be “funny” (the pits have stepped levels).
    The more successful they are at trading, the more catered to they are by their business. Spoiled barely describes it.

  52. 52.

    lonesomerobot

    ok my frat boy rant, since John asked in an earlier thread.

    at my school we used to have a saying, “fraternities – the best friends money can buy.” sure, there’s probably something good that comes out of it. but the hazing, the childish pranks, the sense of entitlement that comes with being in an “exclusive” group, these are all, on balance, destructive things in our society. we responded when I was in school by staging an event called “geek week” exactly opposite our university’s “greek week” (with t-shirts that said “real friends don’t cost money”). it caused quite a stir. the greek orgs were so pissed that there were even fights and threats. and that’s even more telling. you challenge the entitlement and they respond like the call described here.

    i just think it’s funny how often the beltway mentality is attacked here but it’s basically the mentality of subdivision – when people join special groups that others aren’t allowed to join, there’s a tendency to be entitled about it, or even – *gasp* – act like an asshole.

  54. 54.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Sean:

    Wait, so people other than comic book geeks use the expression “pre-Crisis”?

    …did you just say what I thought you said?

    If so, my keyboard needs replacing.

  55. 55.

    Jay in Oregon

    @d0n camillo:

    Yeah, I just caught up on season 3. (It wasn’t available on DVD yet when I watched VM the first time.) It was good TV but not at the quality of the first two seasons.

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