Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Infrastructure week. at last.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

T R E 4 5 O N

Let there be snark.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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76Comments

  2. 2.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Please don’t get my hopes up.

    The smashing of the Ferengi is one of my fondest fantasies.

  4. 4.

    slag

    Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding.

    The more I think about it, I’m finding how much I would love to believe this to be inversely correlated with how much I believe this. Too bad too…it’s a nice story.

  5. 5.

    Mnemosyne

    We got a chance to see Margin Call and I ended up liking it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I keep comparing it to The Andromeda Strain, in that a very small error in a calculation ends up nearly bringing about the end of the world (or, at least this particular company’s world). It’s really very good, and not especially sympathetic to the Wall Streeters who chose money over engineering.

  8. 8.

    jl

    Thanks, Cole. Printed and will read when have time later.

    Also, everyone note the date and time, for another worthless jl prediction.

    Yep sir, I predict continued, still weak ass, but very slightly accelerating recovery, BHO wins, GOP has trouble retaining House.

    Why?

    Theeyyyy’re baaaaaaaaack!

    House flipping clinics.

    You wanna flip 3 houses in 90 days?
    You wanna get in, get out, and get PAID?
    Your long wait is over.

    Anyone want in, send me money (small bills preferred) and I will scout out some likely prospects for you.

    Hey, Cole! Hey! You wanna get in get out and get paid? Email me some small bills. Tunch will be rolling in feed.

    Edit: due to immediate and unexpected mass demand, I am only accepting small bills, unmarked. Sorry, losers, who want ‘records’ I don’t need nor have no time for no stinking ‘records’. You snoozed. Gotta move fast in the new economy.

  9. 9.

    Steve

    I am a Wall Streeter and this is one of the best articles on the subject I have seen in a while.

  10. 10.

    slag

    @RobertB: I know. The funny part of that for me is here:

    “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

    Oh noes! More people might actually gravitate toward areas of the economy that create things that people want or need! How will we ever survive?

    That said, as far as I can tell, if your main motivation in life is making money, that’s all you’ll end up making. You’ll never create anything of real social value as long as money is your first goal.

  11. 11.

    jl

    I’ll be driving through Manteca in a week or two, and can check out, drab, isolated, totally sterile, commuter developments that are almost totally empty, out in the middle hay fields. Ripe for flipping. Let’s go people! You snooze, you lose.

    Seriously, anyone else, outside of Northern California, hear adverts for house flipping clinics?

  12. 12.

    Felinious Wench

    @slag:

    If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley.

    Great, a repeat of the .com bust. Let’s NOT allow that.

  13. 13.

    Alan

    OT: Is anyone else not seeing the latest post on the home page when you first come to the site? I have to click through every post from yesterday to get to the latest.

  14. 14.

    Legalize

    @slag:
    I that that was pretty special, too. It strangely reminded me of that part in “The Doors,” when a fat, bearded, stoned Morrison is berating his New York audience about how “it’s all happening out in California, man”. And in “Taxi Driver,” when Peter Boyle’s character is impressed that (“in California”) when a homosexual couple breaks up, one of the couple has to give the other alimony. Boyle notes credulously that “they’re way ahead out there in California.”

  15. 15.

    Comrade Mary

    The Emasculation of Wall Street? really? I never thought I’d have a hankering for prairie oysters (Hogs & Heifers style), but really, if you insist …

  20. 20.

    Martin

    @Felinious Wench:

    Great, a repeat of the .com bust. Let’s NOT allow that.

    The .com boom/bust was as much a product of Wall Street as of Silicon Valley. Hedge funds and VCs were investing in websites instead of houses in that day, but both were driven by the same thing. With deleveraging, there’s fewer dollars to throw around, so you tend to be both more cautious about where you throw them, and how many you throw.

    So, no, a repeat of that is unlikely to happen. What may happen are better ideas out of Silicon Valley, which has really sort of deteriorated into a handful of innovation drivers and a bunch of guys just trying to figure out how to build a PC for $1.82 less. And a change back to more innovation would be very welcome, indeed.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @barath:

    from you link

    ” Still, I suspect the NY Mag cover is a bullish sentiment indicator. ”

    Yeah, looks like some bull scored big on that guy.

  24. 24.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Martin:

    Yup, the dotcom bust was about too much money chasing too few actual products that anyone had any want or need for.

    A lot of clever nerds figured this out, and took some big money boys to the cleaners. People created backbone networks just to sell them off at ridiculous prices which soon collapsed.

    My techie friends loved to laugh at giant .com office buildings standing empty along I-5 between Tacoma and Seattle.

  26. 26.

    kindness

    @jl: At least the sugar beet factory closed down so it doesn’t smell so bad when you drive through now.

    I don’t live far from there and I am guilty of being a commuter….alas.

  27. 27.

    Felinious Wench

    @Martin:

    With deleveraging, there’s fewer dollars to throw around, so you tend to be both more cautious about where you throw them, and how many you throw.

    This is what I’m hoping for. I was deep in the middle of building .coms. There was one client who, I shit you not, said “we’re not sure what we want you to build because we don’t know what our business plan is, but we need to have it up in 6 weeks because we already took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal.” They were VC funded.

  28. 28.

    The Moar You Know

    House flipping clinics.

    @jl: Glad you spoke up. Went into my oh-so-safe credit union this last Friday, and they’ve got the usual loan blurb sheets about – advertising adjustable NegAm ARMs.

    HOLY FUCK.

    I thought we were over this playing with fire shit. Bad enough that anybody’s doing it. That my local credit union has decided that this is a good way to boost the income stream is mind-bogglingly hurtful.

    There ain’t no end to Wall Street, John. They’re just getting started.

  29. 29.

    Citizen_X

    Great article. Sorry to get all Jesus-caps-y here, but gosh, it sure seems like DODD-FRANK TURNED OUT TO BE A PRETTY EFFECTIVE BILL AFTER ALL. I mean, to hear ’em whine about the end of the infinite money trough and all.

  30. 30.

    jl

    @kindness: Tired of Manteca? Want to get rich quick? If real estate is back in, send me some small bills. I hear some nice future homes still available in Mountain House. I have my eye on some plowed up plots about twenty stop signs over from the parkway. All that conduit sticking out of the ground has to hook to something someday.

    @The Moar You Know: Where are you? SF Bay, Central Valley? Anyway, when I heard the commercials foe house flipping clinics, I figured people are starting to have money to piss away again. So, I took it as a bullish sign. But, I might well be very wrong.

  31. 31.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Steve:

    I am a Wall Streeter and this is one of the best articles on the subject I have seen in a while.

    Let’s hope so, insofar as it suggests that a change in thinking about the role of Wall St in the larger economy is taking place on Wall St. Because if Wall St doesn’t either reform itself or permit outsiders to reform it, in a substantive way within the current decade, then the next logical step (after OWS and other non-violent forms of populist pressure prove to be toothless) is car bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombers on Wall St. Don’t think it can’t happen, because it did happen back in the Gilded Age, and there is no reason why violent anarchism of that sort can’t make a comeback. And when violent populism collides with the agenda of the early 21st Cen. national security and surveilance state, the result is going to be really ugly for everybody.

  32. 32.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Martin:
    I think, we need to stop chasing mirages and fund basic research and rebuild our infrastructure. There are no short cuts to prosperity for the nation as a whole. These bubbles only succeed in enriching the select few.

  33. 33.

    Steve

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Wall Street’s first reaction is that they think they can bully all the new regs out of existence. That isn’t working, so far, but the 2012 elections are still to come.

    The thing with the Durbin Amendment and the debit card fees is a case in point. They seriously thought they could impose a $5 fee on everyone and blame it on over-regulation by Democrats in Congress and somehow win the ensuing PR war. Didn’t work out very well for them, but that’s how they tend to think inside the bubble.

  34. 34.

    The Moar You Know

    @jl: Back home in San Diego. Lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years, loved it, got priced out like everyone else – so I know there are real human costs to housing bubbles, not just fiscal ones.

    But San Diego had a whopper of a bubble, and I’m pissed that the usual suspects are trying to squeeze just one more hit out of the cotton ball instead of stepping up, taking some responsibility, and getting off the housing smack.

  35. 35.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Steve:

    Didn’t work out very well for them, but that’s how they tend to think inside the bubble.

    Yes, but what is very hopeful in the article cited at top it that is suggests that the bubble is more permeable than I’d feared it might turn out to be. I was concerned that at worst nobody on Wall St. was going to want to change a damm thing or would even understand the need to change, and as a result they would fight tooth and nail to roll-back even Dodd-Frank, and at best that while lone individuals might understand the need for reform the industry as a whole would have an insurmountable collective-action problem to overcome.

    Time will tell if that article is accurate or not, but it is about the most hopeful thing I’ve read to date re: the internal dynamics within the industry, so here’s hoping it proves out.

  36. 36.

    jl

    @The Moar You Know: The new ads around here are surely partly due to coming ramp up in foreclosures, after the banks’ title and mortgage record mess got, to some extent, cleaned up.

    But also must mean that people have enough money now so that there are dupes, marks, fools, er, I mean savvy early bird future millionaire investors who will show up to house flipping clinics with some spare money.

  37. 37.

    burnspbesq

    I’m curious to see people’s reaction to Lloyd Blankfein as the National Corporate Sponsor (or some such) for marriage equality.

    It could be PR-driven, but I’m not ruling out the possibility that Lloyd agreed to do it because he genuinely believes it’s the right thing to do.

    Was that Taibbi’s head exploding that I just heard?

  38. 38.

    WaterGirl

    The government has strangled the financial system

    Yeah, ’cause the world looks a little different when you have to risk your own money and bear the consequences of your risky bets.

  39. 39.

    Southern Beale

    Oh can’t wait to read this. You know, I’m just finishing Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short.” Like, seriously finishing — I’m on the epilogue as we speak. I have to say this is the most gripping, engrossing, page-turner on what heretofore was an incredibly dull and opaque topic. If you haven’t read it, do.

    Anyway, I find myself craving more information about all of this, so can’t wait to read the article. My take-away is that we’re still in the middle of the social/cultural/political fallout of the disaster — that everything from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party have been populist expressions of rage (sometimes confused ones, sorry Tea Party y’all really don’t know who to be mad at here). But “business as usual” is over. We’ll be seeing some changes for years, even if we aren’t seeing it now.

  40. 40.

    JGabriel

    Gabriel Sherman:

    “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

    I know this hedge fund manager is bitching and whining, but as a society this is precisely the outcome we want: that person with the PhD from MIT going into research and creating things, not crunching numbers on Wall St. to make rich people richer.

    .

  42. 42.

    jheartney

    Finance really should be a somewhat dull backwater. When 40+% of corporate profits were going to Wall Street (as happened before 2008), it’s a big red flag that something is way out of whack.

    The article states that the Street is becoming something like a big box store, with standard products sold at low margins. Hope it’s true.

  43. 43.

    Ken

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I have to disagree with your “next logical step,” though it may be wishful thinking on my part. My nightmare scenario is Wall Street gets back to their bad habits and the parasite ends up killing the host economy.

    Though I sometimes have a fantasy where someone says, “Wait a minute, these twenty firms all claim they’re making hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but when you look at their annual reports all they do is sell financial instruments to one another. How does that work?…” followed by audits and trials. Mind you that still might end up killing the host economy or causing your bloody revolution, but it would at least be more satisfying.

  45. 45.

    Southern Beale

    @srv:

    Thanks, I was interested that he lived in Nashville for a while when he was in Med School. Didn’t know he’d spoken here, but we get lots of interesting people lecturing.

    Burry is an interesting guy, but I find myself more drawn to Steve Eisman. More of the social justice radical.

  46. 46.

    kindness

    @jl: No, no thanks. Me & the other half bought 3 years ago when the market tanked. Got a foreclosure house for half what the previous Trump-wanna be paid. & when I said near, I meant 30 miles farther south east, not the wunderland of Manteca.

  47. 47.

    matryoshka

    @Southern Beale: I read Lewis’s book, too, and thoroughly agree. Robert Reich’s Aftershock is very good, as is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. I love reading about this stuff, because by the time I’m 90, maybe I’ll understand what happened.

  51. 51.

    Chris

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    Don’t think it can’t happen, because it did happen back in the Gilded Age, and there is no reason why violent anarchism of that sort can’t make a comeback. And when violent populism collides with the agenda of the early 21st Cen. national security and surveilance state, the result is going to be really ugly for everybody.

    This.

    It’s worth noting that the anarchists of the 1920s didn’t challenge the system so much as they gave it another stick with which to beat down on people. The anarchist bombings led to the Palmer Raids, with all the unpleasant consequences they had for thousands of people: also gave J. Edgar Hoover an opportunity to get started.

    Imagine what the crackdown would look like now.

  52. 52.

    burnspbesq

    @Maude:

    I’m in moderation. Didn’t say anything dirty.

    That’s as good an explanation as any. Moderation is as random as random can be.

  53. 53.

    Irony Abounds

    @slag: That quote was the single most uplifting thing I’ve read in a while, and if true is exactly what this country needs. The article also talks about how Wall Street profits had risen to 41% of all corporate profits. A staggering misallocation of economic capital. Get the nerds back where they belong, creating real products rather than unproductive money fountains for Wall Street and 10 years from now maybe the USA will be back in saddle riding high.

  55. 55.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    That article really reminds me of the post Dot.com bubble. The whole attitude of there is some social contract with these fools doing this BS was the same you heard from the Dot Comers.

  56. 56.

    trollhattan

    @kindness:

    You have to admit, there’s something deviantly romantic about living in a city named “Lard.”

    Poor San Joaquin Valley, I don’t see it recovering (whatever that could possibly mean) in my lifetime. I only travel through it to get to the mountains (did live there, once upon a time).

    House-flipping? NegAm ARMs? Did I step out of the Wayback Machine?

  58. 58.

    Arclite

    From the article:

    For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

    For chrissakes, cry me a river you fuckin’ douchebags. I’ve worked hard on projects and gotten a $2000 bonus. I’d kill for $75K.

    And you know what, if MIT or Harvard grads end up spurning the banks for silicon valley, I’m all for that. Silicon valley isn’t making world peace break out, but at least they are building products. Wall Street uses the money it gets to make more money for itself. If smart people are less focused on that, and more on research, technology, etc. that’s great news.

  59. 59.

    Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal

    even if the top prospects go some where else, i don’t think wall street really really needs them, their game just isn’t that difficult. what soul searching they do will be a way to find a more diverse group of like minded assholes to do the same things for the same reason.

  61. 61.

    gex

    Oh, do the poor widdle kiddies that have been outsourcing our jobs for decades have to face a tough job market for the first time ever? I welcome their opportunity to see what that does to actual human beings. It’s very different than what it does to corporate beings.

  62. 62.

    Comrade Mary

    “Let me try to put it another way.” Judy broke in. “Let me try.” “Well…all right.” “Darling,” said Judy, “Daddy doesn’t build roads or hospitals, and he doesn’t help build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money.” “Bonds?” “Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake, a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that.” Judy was smiling, and so was Campbell, who seemed to realize that this was a joke, a kind of fairy tale based on what her daddy did. “Little crumbs?” she said encouragingly. “Yes, said Judy. “Or you have to imagine little crumbs, but a lot of little crumbs. If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake.” “For real life?” asked Campbell. “No, not for real life. You just have to imagine that.”

    Also: YouTube

  64. 64.

    gex

    @burnspbesq: Perhaps he thinks SSM is the right thing to do. But sending out a person Americans don’t know or, if they know him, hate, to sell SSM? There have to be 2 million better choices if HRC wants to actually influence or persuade people with this position.

  65. 65.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    This caught my eye right away:

    And yet, the complaining has settled to a low murmur. Even as bonuses have withered, Wall Street as a political issue is gaining force. Bankers are aware that populism has a foothold, even in the Republican Party, and that these forces are liable to accelerate the process already taking place. “There’s a real sense the world is changing,” says a private-­equity executive with deep ties to the GOP. “People are becoming aware there’s real anger out there. It’s not just some kids camping out in some park. The Romney attacks caught everyone by surprise. We have prepared for this to come from the Democrats in the fall, but not now. You could run an entire campaign if you’re Barack Obama with ads using nothing but Republicans saying things about finance that you’d never hear two months ago. It’s an amazing thing.“

    Yes, it is an amazing thing that people are finally waking up to the fact that our markets and financial institutions have been manipulated to benefit TPTB. It’s amazing that people are angry at the theft and screwing over they’ve been getting for decades now. It’s amazing that people are calling for changes in the laws to protect them from being abused by TPTP in the financial world.

    It’s only amazing if you think that you can keep ripping off larger and larger groups of people and getting away with it forever. That’s why he’s amazed. Some Republicans will stoop to any level to win an election, even going so far as to attack the very thing they revere; money and the markets.

    That’s what happens when you bet on opportunists to run interference for you.

  66. 66.

    Arclite

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I think, we need to stop chasing mirages and fund basic research and rebuild our infrastructure. There are no short cuts to prosperity for the nation as a whole. These bubbles only succeed in enriching the select few.

    THIS.

  68. 68.

    Cap'n Swag

    I can’t wait for McMegan to comment on this article. She’ll have a good cry for all these poor Wall Street traders who are the engines of New York’s economy. /wanks.

  70. 70.

    elftx

    @Southern Beale:

    Thanks for the link to that interview. Was not aware Michael Lewis had started out on Wall Street..rather gives the book some cred. As a former peon for a financial firm, the culture was not amenable to my nature and this should be an interesting read.

  71. 71.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Like an addict, Wall Street is now taking its first step toward recovery by accepting its failings. […]
     
    And Dimon acknowledges the issue highlighted by Occupy Wall Street. “I do think we’ve become a less equitable society,” he told me. “So I’d ask the question—let’s say we agree it’s become less equitable—what would you do about it?”

    No, that part of the article should read:

    Like an a cornered addict, Wall Street is now taking its first step toward recovery by accepting its failings finding a way to avoid the coming intervention. […]
     
    And Dimon acknowledges the issue highlighted by Occupy Wall Street takes the first step by trying to sound reasonable. “I do think we’ve become a less equitable society,” he told me. “So I’d ask the question—let’s say we agree it’s become less equitable—what would you do about it?”

    Dimon is trying to sound reasonable now so that he can later claim that those coming after him are the ones being unreasonable. He knows that shit is close to hitting the fan and he wants us to think that he is concerned about the way things are going for us. Yeah, like he ever really cared about the economic inequality that his type has inflicted on us for years.

    The weasel is looking for a way out and isn’t finding one so now he’s trying to play nice with us.

  73. 73.

    superdestroyer

    What will happen to the current culture of Manhattan without all of the money that is paid to Wall Street types. Can all of the restaurants, clubs, and culture survive if everyone becomes middle class?

  75. 75.

    Bill Arnold

    @slag:

    “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,”

    This usage of “smart” == “smart and greedy” is characteristic of the Wall Street culture.

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