Читать книгу Manhattan Voyagers - Thomas Boone's Quealy - Страница 4

Tucker ‘Tuck’ Hobbs, 58, a potbellied man with flinty blue eyes, an incipient double-chin, and salt and pepper hair rapped the bar at Harry’s Bar in India House on Hanover Square for emphasis to his lunchtime drinking buddies. “The USA has lost its AAA credit rating; this is a watershed event, a defining moment in our country’s history.”

A tipsy pal swayed precariously. “The spin-doctors are trying to put a happy face on it, however, it’s another nail in the coffin, another sign that America is in decline.”

“I blame it on the clowns in Congress.”

“According to the latest poll, Tuck, 91% of the American people disapprove of the job Congress is doing.”

“I’m one of them.”

“Me, too.”

“The Dow dropped 635 points yesterday and it’s down 220 so far today.”

“Do you think it’s time to buy?”

“Forget it, Jocko, you’d be trying to catch a falling knife.”

“Here we go again, Tuck, it’s beginning to smell like 2008 all over again.”

“Don’t remind me, most of my clients lost 40% of their portfolios when the stock market cratered because of all those sub-prime mortgages going bad.”

The tipsy man belched. “That doesn’t say very much about your skills as a stockbroker.”

“Hey, the economic gurus Greenspan and Bernanke never saw the Great Recession coming. Give me a break for Crissakes.”

“So what are you telling your clients to do with their money now?” the horsy brunette with tortoise shell glasses asked.

“I feed them my firm’s standard party line,” he replied, “the same message we’ve been broadcasting since 1946: buy our diversified mutual funds, adopt a long-term horizon, don’t sweat the daily ups and downs of the market.”

She sneered at his advice. “Do you really believe that horseshit you’re peddling?”

He shook his head vigorously from side to side. “No, Janet, of course, I don’t, I’m not a total jackass. Investing in the stock market today is akin to gambling in a casino; speculators are driving wild swings in prices. Anything-goes and the little guy is at a big disadvantage. ”

“Correct.”

“There aren’t any long-term investments anymore, everything is a trade now. Long–term means hours -- you buy a stock in the morning and you sell it in the afternoon or the next day, at the very latest. We’re all dead in the long run.”

“So why don’t you be honest, Tuck, and tell your clients the truth?”

His eyes scrunched downward. “Because if I did, they’d pull their money out of the market and I wouldn’t earn any commissions.”

“I guess that makes you a hypocrite.”

“Yeah, Janet, but I’m a hypocrite who still has a fucking job and can make his fucking alimony payments.”

“Point taken.”

“In the old days, buy-and-hold was the strategy. We told our clients to purchase blue-chip names like GM, CIT, Pacific Gas & Electric, Texaco, or Eastman Kodak and then to forget about it for the next twenty-five years. When it came time to hang up the spurs, there’d be a pile of cash waiting for them.”

“All those companies have filed for bankruptcy.”

“Yeah, Janet, it only goes to show you how times have changed.”

“And change doesn’t happen gradually now, Tuck, it comes at the speed of light.”

He nodded. “I’m overwhelmed by it; the world is moving too fast and I feel as if I’m on a merry-go-round. I’m running scared and I don’t know where I’m supposed to be running to.”

“There are no safe havens anymore, everybody is scared.”

The tipsy man sighed. “Going to work for a major corporation after you graduated college used to be a sure ticket to a secure, prosperous life. That’s certainly not the case these days.”

“No, it isn’t,” Tuck agreed. My brother-in-law was let go by Citigroup and has been out of work for almost two years. A 99-weeker, he’s exhausted all his unemployment insurance benefits. Nobody will hire him and the guy’s got an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School of Business.”

“If your brother-in-law had a degree in a useful field such as engineering or computer science, Tuck, he’d have his choice of jobs at Google, Intel, or Oracle. An MBA means he was just another over-paid, paper-pusher packaging crappy mortgages like all the other scam artists at banks.”

“Hmm.”

“Tell him to burn his Brooks Brothers suits on the Barbecue grill and enroll in a vocational school to study plumbing or cesspool cleaning, a trade that’s practical.”

“Egad!”

“If he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, Tuck, he can go to Barber College.”

“Barber College!”

“That’s right. He’d make a fortune giving $5 haircuts to down-and-out Wall Street guys who have to look respectable for their next job interview but can’t afford the $160 cuts they used to get when they were flush.”

“My sister would get hysterical, Jocko, they’re members of the snooty Scarsdale Country Club.”

“All he’d require is a folding chair, a mirror, a comb, scissors and a nice smock. He could set up shop in the parking lot of the Scarsdale railroad station and clip the city-bound commuters before they boarded the train in the morning.”

“What the hell have you been smoking?”

“Duh! It’s called thinking-outside-the-box, Tuck.”

“You’re fucking nuts!”

A bartender interrupted. “Keep it civil, guys, or take it outside.”

“Sorry,” Tuck apologized, “we’ll tone down the rhetoric.”

Jocko shrugged as though he didn’t care whether they were tossed out of the bar or not. “My final suggestion is that your brother-in-law go to Bodyguard School. The gap between the rich and poor in this country is getting so wide that soon you’re going to see a rash of kidnappings for ransom like what goes on in Mexico and South America.”

“You’re depressing me, Jocko, let somebody else have a word.”

“I feel sorry the most for retired people,” Janet said, “they’re sitting on top of a ticking financial time bomb. Many of them behaved responsibly -- they worked hard; didn’t overextend themselves by buying fancy houses, boats, airplanes, cars or taking vacations they couldn’t afford; they saved their money and were expecting to live off the interest on their savings the same as their parents had done -- but, with the Federal Reserve forcing interest rates down to almost zero, this elderly group has taken a big pay cut and is totally screwed.”

“Yeah and Social Security is going broke on top of it. In a way, it’s good my folks are dead and not here to see all the bad shit coming our way.”

“It’s a recipe for disaster, Tuck, most of our 55 million seniors will end up broke long before they die. Our society is going to be confronting a massive poverty problem.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Janet, my objective is to spend my last dollar on the day I die.”

Jocko exhaled noisily. “A longer life expectancy has turned out to be a curse instead of a blessing. The glitch is we’re not dying fast enough; the Government is going to have to start knocking people off once they get to be 73 or so.”

“That’s such a horrible thing to say.”

“I don’t see any other way.”

Tuck took another sip of whisky and smacked his lips. “We’re facing a death spiral: the too-big-to-fail Zombie banks will only lend to big corporations who don’t need the funds; small businesses built this country but they can’t get loans to expand because the community banks are tapped out; house prices continue to decline while qualified home buyers can’t get mortgages to buy homes standing vacant; and the true unemployment figure is probably closer to 20 %.”

“I was watching CNBC the other day,” Janet said, “and they had an economist on who estimated the U.S. national debt, including entitlements for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at over $120 trillion. I’m not a scaredy-cat, Tuck, but that’s an upsetting number.”

“Refresh my memory, Janet, is a trillion a thousand-million?”

“No, a trillion is a million-million, it’s got twelve zeroes.”

“Now that’s what I call serious dough.”

“The day of reckoning is coming,” she continued, “the national credit card is almost maxed out.”

Tuck nodded. “This country may already be technically bankrupt.”

“True,” Jocko agreed, “plus the politicians in Washington are mostly anti-Wall Street; enacting strict new regulations designed to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The Dodd – Frank Reform Act is 2,200 pages long and creates an alphabet soup of new agencies to oversee our business.”

“The Ten Commandments is only 179 words long.”

“Wall Street will never be the financial powerhouse it once was.”

“What hurts Wall Street hurts Main Street,” Tuck said, “don’t those Tea Party activists realize that?”

“No, they don’t; ignorance is a virtue in some parts of this country.”

“I can’t argue with you.”

“Tough times require heroic leaders but our tone-deaf politicians are more interested in holding onto their jobs than doing their jobs. Instead of making the hard decisions and facing our problems head-on, they kick the can down the road to saddle the next generation with even bigger problems.”

“And they’re all crooks and betraying the public trust,” Janet said, “a day doesn’t go by without a politico being arrested for bribery or for sexting pictures of his pickle to college coeds.”

“That’s true.”

“We don’t live in a Democracy anymore, the USA has deteriorated into a KLEPTOCRACY where our elected officials are all on-the-make and robbing the country blind.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Jocko said.

Tuck chewed on an ice cube, trying not to gawp ravenously at the deep cleavage of a blonde standing nearby. His oral fixation created an overpowering tremor in his hands to reach out and stuff both her magnificent breasts into his mouth at the same time. “I’m thinking if Wall Street publicly apologized to the American people for screwing things up, then Washington might go easier on us.”

“You mean like what the Japanese did when Toyota fucked up?”

“Exactly. Get the CEOs of the banks and investment firms to go in front of Congress and the TV cameras, make them bow solicitously and say they’re truly sorry for the awful mess they made of the American economy.”

“It would help if a few of the bigwigs took out sharp knives and disemboweled themselves in public, Tuck, committing seppuku as Jap officials often did in World War II.”

“Boy, Jocko, that’d be a sight to behold in living 3-D color.”

“Yeah. The scalpers would have a field day.”

Janet glowered. “My son is graduating from Vanderbilt University next June and he asked me if he should come to Wall Street for a career. “

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to forget it and go suck on the Government teat just as all the other freeloaders are doing in this country; to go work for the Post Office instead. He’d have more job security sorting mail and can retire in 20 years at 85% of his full pay.”

Tuck took another sip of his whisky. “My oldest daughter graduated from NYU last year with almost $80,000 in student loan debt; she still hasn’t been able to find a job and is living at home, driving her mother crazy, while waiting tables at a local diner in Short Hills for nickels and dimes. To make her loan payments, she’s been selling off her personal stuff on Craigslist.”

Jocko belched again. “I say the best thing to do is to live high on the hog and let the good times roll; borrow all you can, spend as if there’s no tomorrow; eat out at the best restaurants seven nights a week and dance your ass off at the trendy clubs; take luxurious trips to Asia and Europe, ski in Aspen, visit the spa in Baden-Baden, and lease a yacht to sail the Mediterranean in style.”

“But what happens when the bills come due?” Tuck asked.

“DEFAULT! You renounce your debts like Russia and Argentina did a few years ago; you walk away like all those homeowners are doing today in California, Michigan, Florida and Arizona; you file bankruptcy like GM and Chrysler did, there’s no social stigma anymore.”

“Your credit rating will be ruined?”

“Screw my credit rating! I’m not going to be buying any more houses or cars; I can’t even afford the ones I already own. Who needs a fucking credit rating?”

“Hmm.”

A nerdy, young guy in a tie-dyed T-shirt with long greasy hair and a scraggly goatee strutted by the group and nodded at the potbellied man. “Howdy Doody, Tuckeroo.”

Tuck scowled at him as he passed.

“Who’s the hippie?” Jocko inquired.

“Fred or Ted, some such name; he’s a new hire at my firm, a Quant.”

“Another Rocket Scientist.”

“Yeah, he’s got a Ph.D. from MIT in Quantum Theory or String Theory, way-way-out shit. It’s all above my simple mind.”

“Me, I had trouble with fractions in school.”

“Apparently we’re paying him a gazillion dollars to create mathematical models that will predict the ups and downs in the stock market.”

“The black-box guys got their heads handed to them in 2008,” Jocko said, “their supercomputers and models failed miserably.”

“True, however, this kid is supposed to be another genius like Einstein.”

“Einstein lost money in the stock market when he was alive, Tuck, I read it in his biography.”

“Tell my Senior Managing Director to read that fucking book.”

Jocko grimaced. “You can’t apply scientific reasoning to fluctuations in the stock market because human behavior is impulsive and illogical.”

“You’re right.”

“The fallacy is that scientists think risk is a measurable uncertainty.”

“Well, Jocko, isn’t it?”

“It is when you’re talking about known unknowns, Tuck, the risks we are all aware of.”

“Hmm.”

“The difficulty arises with the unknown unknowns, the risks that we don’t even know exist.”

“I think I’d need another drink, Jocko, to understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Does this kid know a lot about the securities business?”

Tuck made a face. “Nada; my cat knows more about it than him.”

“Then a clairvoyant with a deck of tarot cards would be of more use to your firm.”

“You betcha, Jocko, and much cheaper too.”

“It’s a case of the blind-leading-the-blind, Tuck, no wonder the country is in so much trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“The kid is a smart aleck,” the tipsy man said, glaring in his direction, “I’d like to cold-cock him and then kick him in the nuts while he’s down!”

Tuck drummed his fingers on the bar, a sure sign that he was about to disclose awful news. “Did you guys hear about what happened to poor Jimmy Donovan?”

“What?” the others asked in unison, clutching their cocktail glasses more tightly as they sensed the news was going to be very bad indeed.

“Let’s order another round before I tell you,” Tuck suggested, “it’s a grisly tale and a possible harbinger of things to come for all of us.”

“Make mine a double!” Jocko shouted to the bartender before anyone else could react.

*