“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the
fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”
The statement came from a man sitting three or four stools away from me in a
sparsely populated Midtown bar, where I was waiting for a friend. “But I have to
buy you a drink to hear it?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I can buy my own drinks. My 401(k) is intact. I got
out of the market 8 or 10 years ago, when I saw what was happening.”
He did indeed look capable of buying his own drinks — one of which, a dry
martini, straight up, was on the bar in front of him. He was a well-preserved,
gray-haired man of about retirement age, dressed in the same sort of clothes he
must have worn on some Ivy League campus in the late ’50s or early ’60s — a
tweed jacket, gray pants, a blue button-down shirt and a club tie that, seen
from a distance, seemed adorned with tiny brussels sprouts.
“O.K.,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had
started working on Wall Street.” He took a sip of his martini, and stared
straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now
over.
“But weren’t there smart guys on Wall Street in the first place?” I asked.
He looked at me the way a mathematics teacher might look at a child who, despite
heroic efforts by the teacher, seemed incapable of learning the most rudimentary
principles of long division. “You are either a lot younger than you look or you
don’t have much of a memory,” he said. “One of the speakers at my 25th reunion
said that, according to a survey he had done of those attending, income was now
precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class, and that was
partly because everyone in the lower third of the class had become a Wall Street
millionaire.”
I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student
had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street
standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic
records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street
dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as
Rocks for Jocks.
“That actually sounds more or less accurate,” I said.
“Of course it’s accurate,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong: the guys from the lower
third of the class who went to Wall Street had a lot of nice qualities. Most of
them were pleasant enough. They made a good impression. And now we realize that
by the standards that came later, they weren’t really greedy. They just wanted a
nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families
that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in
Greenwich. They didn’t feel the need to leverage the entire business so they
could make the sort of money that easily supports the second oceangoing yacht.”
“So what happened?”
“I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street.”
“Why?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, making a practiced gesture with his
eyebrows that caused the bartender to get started mixing another martini.
“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall
Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing.
At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably
prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went
to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much
money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever
they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories
about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to
go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go
into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these
geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in
physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”
“But you still haven’t told me how that brought on the financial crisis.”
“Did you ever hear the word `derivatives’?” he said. “Do you think our guys
could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t
have done the math.”
“Why do I get the feeling that there’s one more step in this scenario?” I said.
“Because there is,” he said. “When the smart guys started this business of
securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running
the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who
didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys
knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like
that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”
“So having smart guys there almost caused Wall Street to collapse.”
“You got it,” he said. “It took you awhile, but you got it.”
The theory sounded too simple to be true, but right offhand I couldn’t find any
flaws in it. I found myself contemplating the sort of havoc a horde of smart
guys could wreak in other industries. I saw those industries falling one by one,
done in by superior intelligence. “I think I need a drink,” I said.
He nodded at my glass and made another one of those eyebrow gestures to the
bartender. “Please,” he said. “Allow me.”
