On April 30, FT Alphaville republished an email which had been doing the rounds of the various trading desks and Wall Street banks.
The contents of that email — which included the memorable line that Wall Street types were both smarter and more vicious than dinosaurs — has incited both outrage at the author’s “John Galt-ian insanity” and support for “finally telling it like it is.”
And on Wednesday, the author of the piece, which has been modified somewhat from its original form, emailed FT Alphaville to set the record straight:
The article I wrote was in Sept….now its all over the pace in different versions. Most just cut off the top to make their point that I am defending Wall Street. Which was not the entire point. My main focus was that the middle class was still going to get the short end of the stick in financial reform. That is why I finally wrote a follow up.
And here’s the original:
Being a big fan of the History Channel, I have seen about 3 zillion specials concerning the demise of the Dinosaurs. Some people theorize that it was meteor strike that set in motion the cataclysmic events. While others postulate global warming, ice ages, cosmic gas, alien invasions, red algae, and everything else imaginable.
In general I feel that this concept of constantly reexamining past events ad nauseam is one of the things that is destroying our country. We spend billions of dollars studying events, looking for secret and fascinating answers when usually the truth is simple. Trillions and trillions go to prove cigarettes cause cancer while the tobacco companies knew it Ummm no shit. We study every angle possible from the grassy knoll, why the Bay of Pigs was a disaster, were Washington’s teeth ivory or wood, why the Muslims hate us, etc etc.
Then of course we find out what happened, and then we apologize as an entire country. Slavery, relocation of the Native Americans, taking Iranian oil in order to fuel our tanks in WW2, we say sorry for it all now like we are in the “make amends” stage of AA. You also have the a-holes that come up with insane theories even though we all saw it happen in our life times and know the truth. Like king a-hole himself Charlie Sheen, who blames George Bush for blowing up the World Trade Center and Pentagon, even though we all saw Islamic extremists fly planes into the buildings, and they have admitted doing it proudly. (Um Charlie if a plane didn’t fly into the Pentagon, what happened to all the people on board that supposedly flew into it?). 50 years ago Americans would have hung Charlie by his nuts from a post, but now we are so soft that we just watch his TV show. That’s why the slogan “Never Forget” makes me laugh, we have already forgotten.
I’m getting away from my point here which is; as a culture we love to go over history with a fine tooth comb. You are already hearing that “The Age of Wall Street” is over. Bankers and traders are already being compared to dinosaurs. Networks, papers and politicians are already predicting we be extinct in the next decade. You can almost hear the joy in Keith Obermanns voice as he says Joe Main Street is taking back America and evil corporate America is on its way out. I say be careful what you wish for, cause unlike the dinosaurs we are not going out without a fight.
Certainly things aren’t rosy on Wall Street. Our President accuses us of reckless behavior, Congress calls for oversight and salary caps, and commissions and compensation are down throughout our universe. If the socialist agenda gets its way we might very well be extinct and go the way of the dinosaur. Before the Discovery channel starts production of its “10 possible reasons why” show, lets take a step back. My argument is that we are just doing what we were bred to do. We were trained from day one to “think outside the box” and have “breadth of vision” right? We were trained to come up with ways to make money for our firms and were rewarded for it. So when the regulators made that impossible in the Equities market, we found different instruments to trade. Maybe we didn’t know the ins and outs of credit default swaps, the same way we knew what INTC’s capex number meant to the semi-cap equipment space, but there was a vig in it.
We are traders, it’s our job to make money. Whether it is a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it was profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 12,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I have never heard of anyone going to Gamblers anonymous because they won too much in Vegas. Well now that the market crapped out, the government and the average Joes are looking for a scapegoat to blame. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well here we are.
Go ahead and take us down, cause you are only going to hurt yourselves. What is going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the street anymore? Guess what, we are going to take yours. We get up at 5am and go out after work till 10pm. We are used to not getting up to piss when we have a position. We don’t take and hour lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates we are going to devour them.
For years teachers and unionize labor has had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We are going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are sooooo underpaid for building the youth of America. Say good bye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for 5k extra a summer, thank you very much. So now that we are going to be making 85k a year without upside, Joe main street is going to have his revenge right? Wrong.
Guess what, we are going to stop buying the new 65k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35% tip at our business dinners anymore, no more free rides on our backs. We are going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars in with a garden hose on our drive ways. Our money was your money, cause we spent it. Difference is you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and Democratic National Committee might get there way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but its really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom. We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than them, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama is making Joe Main street our food supply will they?
There’s even a follow-up piece, which begins:
I’m not exactly sure when the people of this country who work in the financial industry became the pariah of the nation and media. I would guess that it started around the time the catchy phrase “Wall Street vs Main Street” was invented by some up and coming political speech writer.
(A note, by the way, that the contents of the author’s blog are generally NSFW/not safe for the sensitive).
Related links:
Kerviel says he was urged to flee – FT
French rogue trader recalls ‘banking orgy’ in tell-all book – AFP
JPM wishes the adults were in charge of financial reform [UPDATED] – FT Alphaville