I’m a news junkie, really, I am. The internet is the single greatest bong for the news junkie. Instead of reading a local newspaper every day, I have access to hundreds of news sources, information resources and brain vomitoria! Being a news junkie helps my social life! On several occasions I have been able to maintain a conversation with other people for up to seven minutes without having to refer to my butt! Reading the news helps me take my mind off my butt!
Anyway…
So, I read a lot of news and I’ve noticed this curious trend. It seems as though many newspapers are trying to add more humor to their regular rotation a la The Onion. The really weird thing about it is that I keep seeing the same damned joke over and over in the various paper from the NYTimes to the Wall Street Journal (though, WSJ has been freefalling into a bit of a rag lately). I’m sure you’ve seen this joke too. It’s the one about how wall street can’t cap the salaries of their executives because they’ll lose all that ‘talent’.
I mean that’s funny, right? Talent? It’s funny to refer to the people responsible for your company’s insolvency as ‘talented’! That’s humor 101 right there.
Except then I realized they weren’t joking. These people were serious. Perhaps their definition of ‘talent’ differs from mine? This is a possibility. I would not use the word ‘talent’ to describe the act of selling insurance on a product to a person who does not own the product against a possibility that would not affect the person buying the insurance.
Right?
You have a car, you have insurance. This helps cover unforeseen accidents and whatnot. You pay in, you get into an accident, the insurance pays out. It covers your losses. It’s a nice blend of capitalism and socialism, everyone pays in so that those who have a need will be covered. Nice (well, except that more often than not, lately, people pay and pay and pay and then find themselves not being covered). Using this model, you would not take out insurance on your neighbor’s car. That would be foolish, you have no risk to cover, you do not own the car or drive the car. If the car gets into a crash and is totaled this would not affect you financially. So, you do not need to be insured against possible risk.
If you own a lot of stock in a company, you can take out insurance on that stock in case they tank. You pay in to cover potential risk. If the stocks never tank, then the insurance company has made money, if they do tank, your loss is covered to some degree. Still, this is making sense, these are good ideas, take some risks but wear a life preserver.
But, of course, the ‘talent’ of wall street had this awesome idea, it was like gambling only more…retarded?
You could buy insurance for stocks you didn’t own to cover a risk that you were not taking. Get that? You’ve insured your neighbor’s car even though you have nothing to do with the car! You have to pay giant premiums of course, so you have to hope the stock tanks so that you can get a good return on this investment. Except it isn’t an investment, it’s just gambling. Then it gets better! In order to cover the premiums you have to pay for the insurance on something you don’t own, you can sell insurance to other people for the same items that they also do not own! And they will pay giant premiums to you and you will shuffle that money along to pay your premiums (minus the profit you keep) and when the company goes belly up, you get your giant payday, which you share to a lesser extent with those who bought insurance from you.
And eventually there is exponentially more dollars covered than the actual company is worth. It all goes shitacular when a place like Lehman Brothers has insured more than they can pay out! So when Harry’s Hairy Chicken Butts dies, they can’t pay! and the next person in line can’t pay their people, and the pyramidical domino effect explodes!
Now that’s what I call talent.
Then there’s short selling, selling stock you don’t own and buying it back later for less than you sold it. except you don’t own it.
And lending money to any warm body that passes by! No need to assess risk, you’ll just bundle up those loans and sell them off. Sure, some might default, the interest rates should cover it….right?
This is the talent we don’t want to lose.
And who could forget John Thain, the Merrill Lynch CEO that spent $1million of bailout money to redecorate his office. Part of the redo was that dirty little $1200 trash can.
I could dry hump a thesaurus all night long and still never come up with enough words to describe the brilliant irony of this. A trash can, a receptacle for waste, purchased with semi-filtered (through BoA) public money meant to help plug up the leaky dike that is wall street talent. He spent $1200 on a trash can! Moliere himself could not produce anything near the level of this self consuming satire!
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
BUT! What the hell am I going on about? Losing talent, keeping talent, salary caps, hordes of obviously retarded wall street skullfuckers wandering around in their Ferragamo ties! WHAT?
Look, I’m a motherfucking genius when it comes to shortsighted decision making and bad ideas! I’m practically BRIMMING with terrible notions that will cause much harm. So this is my proposal to wall street! Fuck the ‘talent’, I’m every bit as terrible as they are but I’m willing to work under the salary cap! I can guarantee you that within 6 months I will bring your company into insolvency! I will use a fiscal trepan to open the economy’s skull and I will hump it to death with my metaphorical penis of bad ideas!
Seriously, I can get you a constant stream of bailout money and I work cheap. Call me.