In a post entitled, “The Harrowing,” The Epicurean Dealmaker (TED) makes quite a spectacle of himself, not at all unusual for investment bankers, but somewhat unusual from him in its straightforward straits, forward! bullshit, wherein he’s lamenting that investment bankers will “suffer the greatest harm” in their ongoing self-made financial collapse:
Now is the winter of investment bankers’ discontent. The long foreshadowed harrowing of my industry, the great winnowing of its inhabitants, is underway. The huge, tottering edifice of proprietary trading, structured products, and bespoke derivatives, which suckled at the twin teats of Greenspan’s largesse and investors’ desperation for yield in the age of negative real rates, will suffer the greatest harm. But the rest of us-innocent or not of the worst offenses of our industry-will suffer the fallout, too. Pay will be slashed, jobs will be cut-never to return-and egos will be racked upon the callous indifference of executives and shareholders more concerned with their own personal trials and tribulations than the suffering of their bought-and-paid-for minions.
[egos racked? the bought-and-paid-for minions? Say it ain’t so, Mama!]
Our enemies will rejoice. Spiteful, envious souls will gnaw greedily on the bitter bones of schadenfreude in cramped and narrow defiles, sucking out the meager marrow to satisfy their self-righteous, operatic anger. Let them. Those humans among us who remain, who survive-and rest assured, Dear Friends, some of us will survive-will remember.
O yes, Dearly Beloved, we will remember. We will remember our friends and enemies. We shall never forget.
Enjoy the show.
Egos racked upon callous indifference? Say it’s not so, bro!
Look, pal, believe it or not, I know people who are trans-global executive CEOs and whatnot, people who explicitly rejected the business of financial parasitism, people who make things, people I trust. One guy I know, I axed him, bro, “That’s pretty high-end technical shit you guys are into, do you spend your whole time doing powerpoints on the technical advantages of your products?” His response, more or less was, “Nah, we tried that. It [being technically honest and explicit] doesn’t work. Buy them dinners and drinks.” And that’s’ the whole show.