The Age of Greed
When I think of great movie soliloquies, I can’t help but think about Michael Douglas standing before a board of director’s annual meeting in his attempt to take over the company to slice and dice it into his pocket and into oblivion, and saying to the the crowd, “Greed is Good!” It is one of the most memorable lines from Oliver Stone’s quintessential and defining 1980’s classic, Wall Street. We all know the line and we all understand the sentiment that wrecking a corporate culture that is providing a supposed gravy train to its executives (including its labor bosses) and rendering shareholders penniless while propping up an otherwise lumbering and perhaps anachronistic company is a social good deed. There is a certain truth which many of us on Wall Street during the 80’s accept, and that is that companies, like many institutions and most people, have their day and then move into the prolonged stage of their lifecycle where the whole game is about squeezing the last few drops of milk out of the cow that we possibly can. Those companies deserve to die according to Wall Street common knowledge and the hospice hosts are the leveraged buyout and corporate raider gurus who use financial engineering to line their own pockets and serve the public good the way vultures help cleanse the world of carrion.
I worked on Wall Street for the better part of forty-five years and now I am finishing up my twelfth year of teaching finance in one form or another to eager young minds in graduate business school. I believe that the era of the fifty years from 1970 to now will go down in the history books as the age of greed and it dominated all aspects of human existence on this planet far more than just the corporate board rooms and Wall Street trading desks. I was a part of the phenomenon and touched it and even participated in it in so many ways that I have good cause to ponder its righteousness and the righteousness or not of my and my band of brothers’ actions during those fifty years.
This Saturday morning, a time that means so much to me and my Baby Boomer brethren (cartoons again, right?), I am awake fairly early and trying to find reasons to stay indoors and clean for the day since we are going this afternoon to see Liam Neeson go batshit in his newest movie, Memory. It hadn’t occurred to me before typing that movie name, but what an apt movie title to be going to see as I take this Saturday morning trip down memory lane. I am in my office and remember that I am giving the final exam this coming Wednesday in my Law, Policy and Ethics course at University of San Diego. Teaching at USD is my second-stage retirement gig. I first taught for ten years as a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell and that was sort of the start of my retirement…at least from Wall Street. I used that time to write a few books and consolidate my thoughts on my career and life. You can only do that shit for so long and I dropped out of Cornell after ten years and becoming eligible for a proper Cornell Professor’s retirement, complete with post-retirement medical coverage. I restarted my teaching after a three year hiatus when I went into my second-stage retirement out here in San Diego. I wanted to graduate from teaching hard finance to teaching (pontificating) ethics and this semester I arrived there.
My last class lecture included a review of my seminal work on the global retirement crisis and my book Global Pension Crisis: Unfunded Liabilities and How to Fill the Gap, published by Wiley & Sons in 2013. I told my students that I would bring them some copies to give them as a reward for participating in my pontifications. As I gathered up 15 copies of the book from my office bookshelf, I realized I was going to be short for my 33-person class. I thought that maybe a good economics lesson of “first come, first served” would suffice, but instead decided to grab 18 more copies of my self-published book Gulag 401(k): Tales of a Modern Prisoner. I hadn’t looked at it since I published it five years ago, so I glanced through the table of contents and read a few parts, remembering that it too gives a good account of the ethics trip I spent forty-five years traveling through Wall Street. In some ways, I think it is an even better book to give students to whom I taught ethics. It does a decent job of using personal stories to chronicle the age of greed that I lived through and participated in.
I then noticed on our collective bookshelves (I would never have installed bookshelves in this day of digital domain, but they were already here when I bought the place), amongst all the great memorabilia (each piece carrying countless interesting memories for me this morning), I found a book by Jeff Madrick called The Age of Greed, published in 2011. I didn’t even know I owned this book. Someone must have given it to me and I blithely put it on the shelf without giving it much thought. But on this morning, with these thoughts flying around my brain, I took it down and glanced through it. It chronicles the 1970’s to the present and gives the era the name I think it deserves. I am inclined to say that great minds think alike, but I am not worthy of comparison with Jeff Madrick. He does a fine job of defining my adult life and times by starting with Walter Wriston (ex-CEO of Citibank and a guy who was a banking God when I got out of B-School) and ending with Jimmy Cayne (that nasty-ass SOB…RIP…who ran Bear Stearns, where I ended my career). As I skimmed through his chapters I decided that he has done a masterful job of connecting the dots of all the people who contributed over fifty years to the undoing of the American Dream. It was hard for me not to read the list and the connections without recognizing my own role in this Kabuki,
At almost every step of the story he lays out, I can retell my particular version of that story (which I effectively have done in my Gulag 401(k) book). I was not one of the big-time movers and shakers and yet I was not a pawn either. In chess-terminology, I was a Castle, not a mere Rook or a stately Bishop, but a very solid Castle. I had moves and I had a modicum of power, but I could just barely affect the ultimate play and never got close to being one of the brokers who drove for checkmate. I haven’t yet processed enough about this morning’s discovery to say too much more about my role in this Age of Greed story. I can see that I will have to read the book or perhaps look to buy the audiobook version if it exists. After all, I may be in the business of giving students copies of my hard books, but far be it for me to ever want to crack open a dusty old thing like a book when I can listen to one in my hot tub.
As I put Madrick’s book back on the shelf I stopped to read his bio on the dust jacket. He had not been a participant in the Wall Street era but has been a big-time journalist on the subject, writing for all the big rags. In some ways, he is the professional version of my amateur efforts to ponder the Age of Greed. To add one final insult to my Wayne’s World “I am not worthy” paean, I notice that he dedicated his book “To Kim”. Damn, he even beat me out on the home front.