Linda > Recent Status Updates

The weirdness of the denial of evil (I.e. the only reality is that the unreality of sin, sickness, and death seem real) is heightened by Eddy’s replacement explanation of Malicious Animal Magnetism.

Interesting, the contrast of absolute idealism (denial of existence of matter) versus the inevitable “calculating materialist…thoroughly enjoy(ing) all the material comforts derived from denying their existence.”

My favorite parts about Christian Science thus far: (1) “there’s no warrant in common law and no permission in the gospel” for plagiarism, except when you’re recasting ideas from the sainted Dr Quimby, and (2) the death of third husband Asa from “arsenic poisoning mentally administered”. No surprise the autopsy expert/Dean of Bellevue Medical College had no real credentials.

Like the explanation of Mormonism as a masquerade of Christian principles “complete with an exclusive message, infallible prophets, and higher revelations” leading to a “polytheistic nightmare of garbled doctrines”. This “spiritual maze” has drawn away many intro a great deal of pain and trauma.

After using Scripture to combat the Mormon position on universal salvation, ‘free grace’ ending in earned perseverance of the saints, the triple-layered heaven, and celestial marriage…Kimball’s puzzlement over “how anyone could question our being Christians” rings hollow.

Making decisions cutting against convention - are they all good because they’re unexpected? “It was refreshing to hear a case for unpredictability in this age of careful career planning. It would be nice if it were true.”

“But how can you speak of loyalty to the firm when the firm is an amalgam of small and large deceptions and riven with strife and discontent? You can’t. And why even try? But now it was abundantly clear that the money game rewarded disloyalty. The people who hopped from firm to firm and, in the process, secured large pay guarantees did much better financially than people who stayed in one place.”

“Who’d have imagined that our largest single equity underwriting would coincide with the largest drop in history in the stock market? …It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying f—- all the time.”

“our chiefs never seemed to suffer for their mistakes. They applied a kind of marginal analysis to each new screwup and said that what had been done was behind us and that no good would come from further shock to the firm…My feeling was that our woes were caused, at least in part, by the feeling among the men at the top of the firm that they had no personal exposure if their empire collapsed.”

Junk bonds financed raids w/ assets of undervalued corporations as collateral. “A take-over of a large corporation could generate billions of dollars’ worth of junk bonds, for not only would new junk be issued, but the increased leverage transformed the outstanding bonds of a former blue-chip corporation to junk. To raid corporations, however, Milken needed a few hit men.”

This “strange inversion” also happens in churches when official leaders are clueless: “The grunts were better able to diagnose the problems of our business than the generals. Ordinary salesmen were on the telephone all day every day with the source of our revenues: European institutional investors.”

“The plain fact was that a combination of market forces and gross mismanagement had thrown Salomon Brothers into deep trouble. At times it was as if we had no management at all. No one put a stop to the infighting; no one gave us a sense of direction; no one put a halt to our rapid growth; no one wanted to make the hard decisions that businessmen, like generals, simply have to make.”

“It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn’t know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.”

“But I was willing to take greater risks than if I had felt deeply proprietary about my career. I was, for instance, willing to disobey my superiors, and that caused them to sit up and take notice far more quickly than if I had been a good soldier.”

“Many of our French and English speculators, however, honestly believed the charts contained the secrets of the market. They are aboriginal chartists. They would have used the charts even if no one else did. They communed with their charts as if they were Ouija boards. The charts were speaking to them.”

“The attraction of options and futures, our specialty item, was that they offered both liquidity and fantastic leverage. They were a mechanism for gambling in the bond markets, like superchips in a casino that represent a thousand dollars but cost only three…options and futures have no equivalent in the world of professional gambling because real casinos would consider the leverage they afford imprudent.”

“Rumors were far more relevant than bad jokes because rumors moved markets. It was widely believed that a small, bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumors to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy. The rumors bore an uncanny resemblance to whatever people feared most…In two years, for example, Paul Volcker resigned from his post as chairman of the Federal Reserve seven times and died twice.

“The money was made, therefore, with ever more refined tools of analysis. But the traders did not become correspondingly more refined in their behavior. For each step forward in market technology they took a step backward…they became louder, ruder, fatter, and less concerned with their relations with the rest of the firm. Their culture was based on food…stranger still to those who watched mortgage traders eat.

“To win the money, you had to know how to identify situations in which the lender would get his money back prematurely. These, it turned out, were of two sorts. The first were the financially distressed. Where there was distress, there was always opportunity.”

“Instead of focusing on profits, trading managers focused on revenues. They were rewarded for indiscriminate growth. Gross revenues meant raw power. Ranieri had finally been made partner in 1978.”

“When the firm was a partnership (1910–1981) and managers had their own money in the till, loose controls sufficed. Now, however, the money didn’t belong to them but to the shareholders. And what worked for a partnership proved disastrous in a publicly owned corporation.”

“The Salomon trading floor…had minimal supervision, minimal controls, and no position limits. A trader could buy or sell as many bonds as he thought appropriate without asking…Salomon Brothers was the only major firm on Wall Street in the early 1980s with no system for allocating costs…people were judged by the sum total of the revenues on their trading books irrespective of what those cost to generate.

“The only thing the thrift managers knew was how much they wanted to sell…no matter how roughly they were treated, they kept coming back for more. They were like ducks I once saw on a corporate hunt that were trained to fly repeatedly over the same field of hunters until shot dead. You didn’t have to be Charles Darwin to see that this breed was doomed.”

“Brothers. “The irony,” says Ranieri, “is that the firm would always point to the mortgage department and say, ‘Look, see how innovative we are!’ But the truth is that the firm said no to everything we did. This department got built in spite of the firm, not because of the firm.”

“The industry that held most of America’s home mortgages on its books was collapsing. In 1980 there were 4,002 savings and loans in America. Over the next three years 962 of those would collapse. As Tom Kendall put it, “Everybody hunkered down and licked their wounds.”

“The mortgage trading desks on 41 were between the elevators and the corner in which I had chosen to hide. I had selected my corner with care. It housed a friendly managing director and his small team of mostly nonviolent persons.”

“From the way we were treated we were able to infer both the standards of behavior in every market and the degree of dominance Salomon enjoyed. Though perhaps not articulated by every trainee, the ultimate message was lost on no one: Join equities and kiss ass like Willy Loman; join bonds and kick ass like Rambo.”

“the most obvious question no one asked was why Jim Massey, the man in charge of hiring trainees, the man directly responsible for the explosive growth of the firm, was not worried that the firm was expanding recklessly (yes, it was apparent even to trainees)…Curious minds were not what Massey was after. Massey was looking for cult followers. But he repulsed the most slobbering front-row people.”

Easy come, easy go? “Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles—flair, persistence, and luck.”

More jungle law. Trainees creating the “illusion of desirability”: “Then bosses wanted him not for any sound reason but simply because other bosses wanted him. The end result was a sort of Ponzi scheme of personal popularity that had its parallels in the markets.”