We saw on Bloomberg TV where Goldberg, Styx is shopping its proprietary trading functions. This news disgorged a cascade of thought, none of it very pleasant.
The Mob likes to tell you that there’s evil trading and then there’s good trading too, like Bad Superman on drugs and Bad Superman in rehab, I guess. Our readers need to understand why The Kid of Steel cringes whenever such a distinction is forced. Lets start with an objective look at Gangland trading.
Whether buy or sell, your every order runs cash through Crime Family books, and racketeers in the War Room pocket whatever they can dip their greedy little fingers into. The initial skim, plus anything else the Consigliore thinks he can get away with, becomes fees and commissions. If wise guys drub your a$$ real good, mob bean counters classify this egregious windfall as trading profits, bagging the loot inside a whole other ledger. The criminal mind associates a typical heist here with something they want to call market-making, and perps have come to view an outrageous swindle as proprietary trading. Make no mistake about it, that’s where these felons go for your life savings.
Watch the TV documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, noting its illuminating footage on electricity futures, particularly trader chatter at the time they were taking California down. It’s the only honest portrayal of who these bloodsucking thieves are, what they do, and how they go about doing it you’ll find outside of our own Filch & Finagle War Room coverage. Why this remarkable achievement in the cinematic arts didn’t take all the Oscars and Emmys that year baffles this ardent movie-goer.
The Kid’s mob connection, with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, explained that Gangland trading spawns from an unholy trinity of 1) the customer book, letting wise guys dance around orders, scamming marks before, during, and/or after execution, 2) concerted action, all the Families morphed into one humongous Satan, and 3) short-selling, also known as The Death Grip around our house.
Short-selling is how thugs shake the tree. That’s when the fruit falls down. All the fruit.
Shorts scare the bejeezus out of people, usually in a telephone-coordinated mob-wide frontal attack, often bullying victims into dumping everything they’ve got. In dire times, the psychopaths maniacally crush the entire global economy, as some of you may have noticed.
Whatever’s going on with Goldberg, Styx, three things are certain: 1) the Don won’t be letting go of his customer book anytime soon, 3) Organized Crime will continue to flood Washington with bribes silencing any talk about quashing the mob’s short-selling Death Grip, and 2) wherever Goldberg proprietary traders end up is still just a phone call away from home.
How the Crime Lords are going to put their personal capital to work becomes the real issue of the day.
Our last thought is more of a nightmare really. It recalls so many wise guys we once knew.
There are only two sources of money on Wall Street, you may have heard somewhere, yours and theirs, and recruiting armies of fresh-faced young MBA’s to wage a major campaign during boom years is one way they turn yours into theirs big time.
Twenty somethings wash through Wall Street on the tides, waves and waves of them rolling in while markets rise, then floating off in the fog of prices misbegotten like so much flotsam and jetsam. When combat ends, mob castaways lie beached - battered, bloodied and betrayed along with the rest of the battle carnage.
They’re disillusioned victims in this too, all the young ex-soldiers.
