A Garland Briefer than A Girl's

Robert Rubin is retiring.

It is past time. He has had a long run, but I am afraid the former charter member of the Committee to Save the World has worn his honors and his reputation out.

Now he must play an old man's game, working long days and nights, against declining health and energy, to salvage the reputation he squandered in his dotage. There certainly is no upside to him remaining at Citigroup, where he has been reduced to shooting holes in his own resumé by defending the indefensible.

I used to like and respect Bob Rubin. Not so much any more. No-one gives a shit what I think, but I know I am not alone.

They say investment banking is a young man's game. Rubin is yet another example, from a sad and unexpected direction, of the ultimate truth of those words.

* * *

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

— A.E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

© 2009 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Greatest Hits of 2008

Whew! I'm glad that's over.

What a miserable and bloody year 2008 was. I don't know about you, Dearly Beloved and Much Suffering Readers, but I couldn't wait to see the back of it. Alas, my relief is tempered by certain knowledge that we will only be allowed to doff last year's stylish habiliment of funereal black in exchange for donning this year's model of sackcloth and ashes.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

— T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Anyway, I am sure many of you are wondering why I am troubling you on the morning after what should have been an epic quest to forget 2008, so I will make my remarks brief.

Dedicated followers of these pages will remember that I have been accustomed in the past to intermittently publish a brief list or two of posts appearing on this site which my Esteemed Audience has deemed worthy of particular attention, under the characteristically modest rubric of "The Canon." Attentive readers will also have noticed that it has been some time—since mid-2007, in fact—since I have updated this list. At the same time, this very period has been one during which an unusually large and varied quantity of folly, hubris, incompetence, greed, and other forms of Human Ordure particularly susceptible to your Dedicated Correspondent's gimlet gaze has been hitting the Fan of History.

I would apologize to you for this omission, but I must admit I have been rather too busy trying to keep my own head above water, and dispatching real-time reports from the front lines of chaos and despair, to be much concerned with conducting retrospectives. After all, when you are up to your ass in live alligators, it is usually considered ill-judged to devote much time to skinning, tanning, and mounting the hides of the few you have managed to kill.

Fortunately, you busy little scamps have continued to click away on this site throughout my absence, and, through the good offices of Google ("Do no evil [which does not lead to increased profits and the humiliation of Jerry Yang]") Analytics we have the results of your voting at hand. I must say I am gratified by the continuing increase in traffic to this little opinion emporium. Why, total page views on this site during 2008 edged comfortably into six figures, even after subtracting the tens of thousands of hits generated by the small army of Howler Monkeys I employ to boost ad revenue. (Word to the wise: bananas, bought in bulk, are still cheaper than AdWords.)

By a huge margin, the vast majority of you Dear Readers seem to come to this site via the main page. This indicates to me that either a) most of you are eager to sample my nutritious and tasty morsels of wisdom the minute they have been published—fresh from the oven, as it were—or b) most of you have shockingly indiscriminate taste. (Being in reasonably equable temper this morning, I will be magnanimous and assume the former.) The second most frequent page visit last year was to my profile, presumably by readers new to the site, email-harvesting spam-bots, or those few deluded souls who still look forward to the day I reveal my true identity (q.v., when Hell freezes over).

Barring these two entries (and the former's paler, wonkier cousin, /index.html), seven actual posts show up in the top ten list of visited pages for 2008. Without further ado, here they are:

THE CANON, Special Limited 2008 Edition

1) Overheard at 85 Broad Street (June): Venerable former white-shoe investment bank and now toaster-retailer Goldman Sachs demonstrates conclusively how not to fire people. (Warning: rated 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 on the Excoriometer, for very, very naughty language. TED was—how shall I put this—more than mildly pissed.)

2) The K-T Boundary (September): My prediction for the "future"—if one can call it that—of the investment banking industry after The Panic of 2008. Many, many words, most of which actually mean something for a change.

3) Ring, Ring! It's the Cluephone, for You (October): Pity the poor investment bankers. They really, really wanted bonuses this year and were hoping against hope a few months ago they might actually receive them. In cash. Oh well.

4) Scatology (March): Bear Stearns takes the pipe, in every sense. I would not object if you characterized this as a rant.

5) Et in Arcadia Ego (November): TED takes advantage of the recent ass-whuppin' of Harvard University's endowment to draw a few measured conclusions about higher education in America. Hey, I just spent a small fortune on private school tuition, so I'm allowed.

6) Molon Labe (September): Ruminations on the parallels between soldiers of fortune from different ages: Sparta and the present day. TED feels besieged by political correctness, and wallows in paranoid self-pity.

7) Bubble Land (May): A semiotic deconstruction of the Blackstone Group's first annual report as a publicly-owned company. Given that BX has lost almost 79% of its value from the 2007 IPO price, this annual report may soon become a one-of-a-kind collector's item. Snap it up, campers!

And for those of you with absolutely nothing to do over the long holiday weekend, feel free to peruse some previous entries from the list.

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!
More Works to Look On and Despair

One of these days, I might actually get around to filling in the lacuna from the second half of 2007, as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Happy New Year.

© 2009 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Holiday Tonic II

December 19, 2008:

As I came over Windy Gap
They threw a halfpenny into my cap,
For I am running to Paradise;
And all that I need do is to wish
And somebody puts his hand in the dish
To throw me a bit of salted fish:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

My brother Mourteen is worn out
With skelping his big brawling lout,
And I am running to Paradise;
A poor life do what he can,
And though he keep a dog and a gun,
A serving maid and a serving man:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

Poor men have grown to be rich men,
And rich men grown to be poor again,
And I am running to Paradise;
And many a darling wit’s grown dull
That tossed a bare heel when at school,
Now it has filled an old sock full:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurry upon my way,
For I am running to Paradise;
Yet never have I lit on a friend
To take my fancy like the wind
That nobody can buy or bind:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

— William Butler Yeats, Running to Paradise

Things may go quiet here at the Volcano Lair for a bit. I am sure you will all get along just fine without me.

Happy holidays. Be good.

© 2008 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Three Faces of Bernie

Will the real Bernie Madoff please step forward?

Stories, news articles, and rank speculation continue to rocket around the mainstream media and the blogosphere concerning everyone's favorite bubeleh, Bernie Madoff. As of this writing, real information about the nature, extent, and Bernie's motivations for what appears to be the investment shitstorm of the century¹ remains in short supply, so it is difficult to get a good handle on the former knacker's character. (I do not know the man personally, but he always seemed balbatish to me.)

Since nature—and human perversity—abhors a vacuum, commentators, kibbitzers, and assorted know-it-alls have jumped in to offer their opinions on the great man. Currently, there seem to be three leading theories in circulation:

1) Bernie as goniff

Goniff: Crook, thief, burglar, swindler, racketeer²

As in Snidely Whiplash, dastardly ur-villain of stage and (small) screen, who preferred to act out his antisocial tendencies by tying Little Nell to railroad tracks and rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation of her impending dismemberment. While perhaps most satisfying to the enraged victims of his shenanigans, this image seems most at odds with the known facts about the life and public personality of Mr. Madoff, who previously resembled one on whose tongue butter would not melt.

So, barring further disclosures—such as the discovery of paste-on handlebar mustaches next to falsified trading records in a locked safe in Madoff's 17th floor volcano lair—I suggest we put this characterization aside.

2) Bernie as Destroyer of the Jews

As in Pharaoh, one distinctly unpleasant Austrian housepainter, or the Senator who voted last month against sending TARP money to Israel. We can probably put this characterization down to understandable hyperbole, brought about by some big shot's momentary rage triggered by an unsettling phone call from his accountant. Otherwise, it does seem a bit much. While fifty billion clams is a lot of shellfish to have lost in your sock drawer, at last report Bernie's victims still seem to have their freedom and their health, which is far more than one can say for millions of their less fortunate ancestors.

That being said, the Madoff Scheme does seem to have been one of the largest affinity frauds ever perpetrated. While Bernie did not limit his predations to Jews, he does seem to have delivered several Members of the Tribe a rather heavy blow, at least in the pocketbook. Representatives of certain Palm Beach country clubs, New York synagogues, and Jewish charities might be forgiven if they view old Bernie as the Jewish Neutron Bomb: a device which vaporizes its victims' liquid wealth while leaving them, their creditors, and their rapidly depreciating real estate intact.

Given that some contend that investors who withdrew funds or collected dividends from Madoff's firm before the scandal broke might be required by a court receiver to repay those monies so investors who lost it all can be compensated, he certainly has set the stage for some long drawn-out, vicious infighting. It could turn out to be the most titanic struggle of Jew against Jew since Bialystock v. Bloom.

3) Bernie as shlemiel

Shlemiel: Clumsy bungler, an inept person, butter-fingered; dopey person

As in Alfred E. Neuman and pathetic shmendriks everywhere. This theory, for which I am developing a growing fondness, contends that Bernie did not start out to swindle his clients, but rather got caught up in spiraling losses and/or overwhelmed by shoddy record keeping. Once he found himself in the soup, he figured it would just be easier to make things up, rather than trying to make things right.³ There is some preliminary evidence for this, but the size and extended timeframe of the fraud does seem to indicate Bernie got pretty comfortable camping out on the dark side.

In any event, given the pathetic behavior of Madoff's investors and other enablers, I am sure we will have plenty of other candidates to choose from as the biggest shlemiel of the bunch. Leading candidates include the SEC, hedge fund-of-funds Fairfield and Tremont, Bramdean Asset Management's "Superwoman" Nicola Horlick, and any individual, charity, or institution foolish or greedy enough to place all or most of their money under Bernie's control. The only question will be whether these players should be considered shlemiels or shlimazels.

Shlimazel: Luckless person. Unlucky person; one with perpetual bad luck (it is said that the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlimazel!)

I know Bernie is waiting for all this to be resolved, too. In the meantime, I imagine

Er drayt sich arum vie a fortz in russell⁴

Stay tuned, campers. It's going to be a busy Chanukah.


¹ Don't relax yet: the century is young.
² Today's Yiddish definitions and usage brought to you courtesy of Thomer M. Gil. Any errors of emphasis or usage are completely his fault, as my own native knowledge of Yiddish is strictly limited to reruns of Mike Meyers skits.
³ Thereby ignoring the Law of Holes, which states that if you find yourself in a hole with a shovel in your hand, stop digging.
⁴ He wanders around like a fart in a barrel (aimless).

© 2008 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Plus ça Change ...

But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100£ each, deposit 2£ per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100£ per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98£ of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000£. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.

— Charles MacKay, "The South Sea Bubble," Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Bernie Madoff was a piker. A piker on a grand scale, I grant you, but a piker nonetheless.

Cold comfort, I know. But look on the bright side: it's a banner day for misanthropes.

© 2008 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.