'Fessing Up

Wall Street Professionals Admit: Yes, Lots of Us Are Corrupt

By Rich Smith, The Motley Fool


Is Wall Street corrupt? Responses vary depending on whom you ask. But ask the folks who work in the financial services industry and you'll get a surprisingly clear answer: "Yes."

A recent survey of 500 financial services professionals, conducted by market researcher Populus at the behest of law firm Labaton Sucharow, turned up some surprisingly candid results from the folks surveyed. For example:
• 39% of financial industry insiders surveyed "reported that their competitors are likely to have engaged in illegal or unethical activity in order to be successful."
• And this was more than just suspicion. "26% of respondents indicated that they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace."
• Nearly one in four "believed that financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct in order to be successful.
• Nearly one in three said they themselves felt "pressured by bonus or compensation plans to violate the law or engage in unethical conduct.

But pressure need not be succumbed to. Surely these financial industry professionals put their ethics, and the interests of their clients, ahead of personal gain, right?

Well ... not necessarily.
• 16% of respondents admitted that they -- personally -- would break the law by trading on insider information "if they could get away with it."
• Fewer than half could say unequivocally that they would not engage in insider trading in a situation where they knew for sure that they would get away with it.
• What's more, chances are they can get away with it. Because "only one in four financial services professionals believe [financial watchdogs such as the SEC or other government regulators] are effective."

Lies, Damn Liars, and Statistics

Needless to say, these numbers are a bit discouraging. After all, these are the people to whom we entrust our money, our nest eggs, our life savings. The people who are supposed to use their expertise to help us establish a secure retirement. The folks who, in theory at least, have a fiduciary duty to obey the law and put the interests of their clients first.

Yet out of the ranks of these supposed paragons of virtue -- bankers, fund managers, asset managers, and analysts -- one in six lacks sufficient moral backbone to resist the temptation to break the law unless someone's constantly looking over their shoulders, making sure they play by the rules. (And that's the best-case scenario. Theoretically, as many as half of our financial "professionals" are potentially corruptible.)

Now add to this fact the apparently widespread conviction that "everybody else is doing it" -- and getting away with it -- and the further belief that breaking the law is almost a job requirement.

All of a sudden, the epidemic of mortgage fraud, the Bank of America (BAC)-Merrill Lynch bonus debacle, the Madoff scandal -- all of it starts to make sense. Suddenly, you start to understand why Goldman Sachs (GS) CFO David Viniar, when asked earlier this week whether decreased profitability at his firm was a cue to cut costs after he had just noted that Goldman was paying out 44% of all corporate revenue as compensation for his employees, responded simply that "we aren't going to cut our way to prosperity."

As I heard it, he might as well have responded: "Hey, I've got mine, Jack." Because on Wall Street today, that's apparently all that matters.

Mitt's Experience, an Example

           This guy's story is getting more ridiculous by the day.  This morning we learn that the carried interest hedge fund manager/laugh-a-minute cop impersonator was also a registered lobbyist.  Yesterday, we read the following article about one of his company's investments:

Bain Capital Created 'Demoralizing' Culture of Layoffs At Florida Plant

huffingtonpost.com   

WASHINGTON -- When Dade Behring started cutting employees under Bain Capital's management in the late '90s, Cindy Hewitt was on the front lines. As a human resources manager for the Dade East plant in Miami, Hewitt had to decide which employees had needed skills and whose jobs were expendable.


News of the latest layoffs trickled down to the Dade company cafeteria. The room could seat more than 1,000, and it had been enough of a draw that it even offered breakfast.


But as the layoffs hit, the mood in the cafeteria could be as somber as a funeral, Hewitt recalled. Multiple members of the same family might be gathered to commiserate over being laid off one by one by one. Some of them had worked for the medical diagnostics company for more than a decade.


Hewitt saw her colleagues crying on a daily basis and loudly celebrating on the rare occasion that someone found a comparable new job. "There was a tremendous sense of loss and this kind of outpouring of grief and mourning as every day they waited for the announcement of who was going next," she said. "People were on pins and needles. Who's going next? They're worried for themselves, worried for their co-workers, worried for their families. They'd talk about how they were going to send their kids to college. It was an incredibly depressing and demoralizing environment."


Since the Republican presidential primary, Dade Behring, which made blood-testing machines and conducted animal tests at its Miami plant, has become something of a focus. Bain Capital, GOP presidential hope Mitt Romney's firm, had bought Dade and shuttered its factory in Puerto Rico in 1998. The closings continued under Bain's management.


It's become a familiar tale about Romney and Bain's business dealings. The New York Times reported that Bain pushed the profitable company into bankruptcy. The Miami Herald followed with its own chronicle of the mass layoffs and mass profits for Romney and company. The Tampa Bay Times reported that Dade had received millions in tax breaks to promote job creation in Puerto Rico one year before it closed the factory there.


Bain, of course, walked away with a huge profit. In 1999, the private equity firm grabbed $242 million after it pressured Dade to borrow more millions to buy up Bain's shares in the company.
So many Dade workers lost their jobs -- 1,700 in the United States, 850 in Miami alone -- that the Bain-Dade dealings have become a symbol of corporate bloodletting and a painful memory to those who witnessed the layoffs.


Fred Gregory, an information technology consultant, said he was brought in to assist the plant closing in Miami. The cafeteria scene also stuck with him. At a certain point, he told HuffPost, he stopped eating lunch there. "I didn't want to see the women crying," he explained.


"You could walk in there and hear a pin drop," Gregory said. "You could see the emptiness. It was just huddled-up sheep. It was pathetic. It was heartbreaking, heartwrenching. You just want to hug them."


The layoffs continued for months and months. Gregory saw people fired and workers running out of the Dade offices in tears. "These people were scared to death," he said. "This was their livelihood. Some people couldn't bear it. It was a horrible place to work." Some would get an hour's notice before being shown the door.


The plant added higher fencing and concertina wire, Gregory said. Each day, a pair of security guards would check his back seat and trunk on the way out to make sure he wasn't stealing any office supplies. "It was all so well orchestrated," he said. "And so evil."


The Romney campaign, Bain Capital, and Siemens, which bought Dade Behring's operations in 2007, did not respond to requests for comment.


Michael Rumbin had been a Dade vice president. "No one ever came up to me to ask if we could create more jobs," he told HuffPost. "There was very little in the way of job creation. It was a business undertaking in which the Bain Capital people created a tremendous amount of wealth for themselves and their investors."


Hewitt has an idea of what the corporate bigwigs were doing at the time. One incident still sticks with her.


In the summer of 1998, amid mass layoffs and mandatory overtime at the Dade East plant, she saw workers crowded around a glass executive suite. Some shook their heads and walked away, and others just stood there staring, she recalled. She walked over to check out what was going on and found several department heads putting golf balls in the office.


"Here are these people whose lives are upside down, doing mandatory overtime, and the executives are playing golf where all the employees can see," Hewitt said. "I was so upset that I walked in and picked up a golf ball and said, 'Get out and go to the golf course if you don't have anything to do.' It was the most callous, insensitive thing I had ever witnessed. I was completely dumbfounded."


Hewitt said the golf putting incident was so traumatizing for her that she quit her job the following month and began a career in animal advocacy. She never took another job in human resources again, despite having a master's degree in the field.


"There's a part of me that tries very, very hard to not think about that experience," she said. "I felt I had been a part of treating people very poorly, and I could not in good conscience put myself in that kind of position again."

Fact No. 72

In 1990, the three largest U.S. banks held 10% of the industry's assets.  By 2008, the top three controlled 40% of the assets.  -  100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Two-thirds of Dodd-Frank still not in place

By Jennifer Liberto


           WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Two years after Congress enacted sweeping reforms intended to rein in risky practices on Wall Street, only a third of the new rules are actually in force.


           The rest of the so-called Dodd-Frank rules are either stuck in a regulatory bog, ready-to-go but delayed, or substantially weaker than originally envisioned after pressure from financial industry lobbyists, according to data compiled by the law firm Davis Polk.  Former FDIC chief Sheila Bair said the reforms are "drowning in a sea of complexity." Regulators charged with carrying out the rules aren't doing their job in a "muscular enough" way, she added.


           Even some top bank CEOs recognize that the regulatory process has been slow after Congress punted many of the more controversial decisions to regulators.


           "A lot of Dodd-Frank, as a bill, was skeletal and a lot of the very, very important details were left to the regulatory process," said Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), which has spent $15 million lobbying since 2009. "The regulators themselves are having problems coming to the right conclusions and filing those in."


Top super PAC donors


           With so much on their shoulders, regulators have been meeting regularly with bank lobbyists, many of whom are experts but also have an agenda to ease or roll back parts of Dodd-Frank.


           A recent analysis of public records by the watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation chronicled the number of meetings between regulators and some of the nation's most powerful banks. Goldman Sachs: 181 meetings. JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500): 175. And Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) -- 150.


           "All the lobbyists come in and they want this exception or that exception, and [regulators] are accommodating that and they shouldn't," said Bair, who ran the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. during the financial crisis and its aftermath. "They need to just tell these folks no."


           Indeed, securities and investment firms spent more $101 million lobbying regulators last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. That's on top of $103 million spent lobbying lawmakers and regulators in 2010.


           Wall Street's representatives say lobbying is not only their right but necessary to ward off unintended consequences


           "Congress uses broad strokes. Regulators do the nitty-gritty. These are new rules of the road and the topics they're discussing are complex and inter-related," said Scott Talbott, a senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable. "Everyone can and should comment to the regulators on how to implement these ideas."


           To be sure, some of Dodd-Frank's signature provisions are in play.


           The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- the first of its kind at the federal level -- is up and running, regulating corners of finance like mortgages that had gone unwatched for years.


           And the biggest Wall Street banks are starting to submit so-called living wills, or blueprints of the fastest way to ensure failure of big financial companies without taxpayer bailouts.


           But the financial industry has had time to make its mark on Dodd-Frank, which President Obama signed into law on July 21, 2010.


           Many rules have been delayed. New regulations requiring larger capital cushions at the big banks, which had been over-leveraged going into the financial crisis, don't start to kick in until January. The safest, thickest capital cushions won't be in place until 2019.


           When it comes to shining a light on derivatives, the trades that got insurer American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500) in trouble, new rules will start to kick in later this year.


           Thanks to financial industry lobbying, however, those rules will affect a much smaller group of companies that use derivatives than had been originally imagined.


           And it's anyone's guess as to when some of the even more controversial regulations will kick in.


           Take the proposed Volcker rule, brainchild of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.


           The rule was designed to protect the public by curtailing Wall Street banks from making big, risky trades on their own accounts. After two years, a final ban has yet to be released or enforced. Last fall, regulators released more than 300 questions


           One of the main things holding back Dodd-Frank, critics say, is the complexity of the law and the regulations that implement it.


           Even the consumer bureau, an agency dedicated to making things simpler, can get mired in complexity. It took nearly 1,100 pages to officially propose a simpler mortgage disclosure form.


           "The majority of the proposal text is background information," said consumer bureau spokeswoman Jennifer Howard. "That we have included so much background information is part of our effort to be a responsible and transparent regulator."

Fact No. 62

From 2002 to 2008, 12 congressional incumbents lost in primary elections. During that time, 13 members died in office.  So the odds of losing a primary are lower than the odds of dying in office.  -  100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Fact No. 97

According to the Pew Research Center, every one of the eight largest EU nations ranks Germany as the hardest working  -- except for Greece, which ranks itself as the hardest working.  Five of the eight rank Greece as the least hardworking.  -  100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Facts No. 86, 87, 67, and 71

According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, 80% of all income growth from 1980 to 2005 went to the top 1% of wage earners.


From 1970 to 2012, median household income increased at one-tenth the rate it did from 1949-1979.


According to writer Tim Noah, average stock options granted to CEOs between 1992 and 2000 rose from $800,000 to $7 million, and average total compensation quadrupled.


In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest U.S. banks earned an average of 100 times what a typical household made. By 2007, more than 500 times.  -  100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool


Theft of shareholder savings by CEOs and them, a.k.a. equity compensation or, as it is commonly misnamed, “stock options”, accounts for the entire mindboggling transfer of wealth to our superrich corporate elite since Jan 1, 1981, when the enabling legislation became effective, and this criminal activity could be shut down by simply repealing that bogus law, only nobody but me ever mentions that.  – MacDougal Irving, The MacDougal Post

Fact No. 24

The U.S. makes up less than 5% of the world's population, but a third of the world's spending on pharmaceuticals, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare. - 100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool - 100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Fact No. 51

A study of retired investors between 1999 and 2009 showed those who hired a stockbroker underperformed those managing their own money by 1.5% a year.  "Fees accounted for only about half the gap," writes Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal. - 100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool - 100 Mind-Blowing Facts About the Economy by Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool

Where are the Records?

Ole Carried Interest Hisself has a problem with the concept of accountability, and it’s way bigger than the 1040 Forms the Criminal Mastermind says he won’t be showing his political opponent's staff any time soon.  We think that this tax return issue is being used to deflect attention away from the elephant in the room.


Carried Interest does something for a living, letting hired hands tend to the details while he's in public office, voters have no idea what that is, and his media mogul buddies aren’t letting their talking heads ask.  There are all kinds of documents that could tell us, but the conspiracy doesn’t seem to want anybody to find out.


The basic business model for “hedge” fund management consists of blindsiding the investing public.  The principal tactics there are lying, cheating, and stealing.  Maybe if the electorate knew how good Carried Interest is at the lying, it would help his ballot count.  Voters have to assume that the Muslim is a lot better at it than Carried Interest, given the continuous flow Umama came out with during the 2008 campaign.  If some of us knew that Carried Interest, based on actual books and records, had been a much bigger liar than that while sneaking all those Swiss bank account bucks overseas, he might at least carry the sociopath block.  Umama’s hope and change isn’t all that big a fabrication.  Every politician jawbones shinola like that.


Whatever, the “hedge” fund boom occurred during the heady days of job outsourcing and credit default swaps.  Lately – now that the impact from putting America out of work and into homelessness has destroyed the demand side of our economy - there’s been nothing but mediocre performance, at best, and fund shut-downs.  Some thieving punk from Iowa turned his “hedge” fund into a Ponzi scheme according to the latest news blurb.


Produce the paper trail, Carried Interest, and let the Nation see just how big a crook you really are.  We’re dying to peruse the full list of your past “investments” – and all those “hedges” you guys couldn’t stop bragging on - way back before wheeling and dealing gave us Financial Armageddon.


A list of positions in your fund(s) would do.  No, not today’s after you clean it up.  The HISTORICAL list.  Names and dates.

LIBOR

It strikes us that recent reports of interbank rate rigging in London are akin to the occasional falderal over prime rate changes on our shores when inflation heats up, as both rates become base numbers used in calculating arrays of other important interest rates.  Here, each bank sets its own prime rate, even though that percentage always ends up being the same for all the institutions at any one point in time.  When this number changes, who goes first in announcing their update has always been a big deal, and how that’s done, kind of ceremonial.  We remember an era when Fallutin National had the honor all to itself, and also times when Sillybank alternated with them.  God knows what the boys in London have been doing.


Our prime rate, interest banks charge on their safest commercial loans, is set arbitrarily by humans, however the number has to be tied to at least one public market - what those same high-quality corporate bank customers would have to pay if issuing paper to investors instead of borrowing from a financial institution.  When we worked at Fallutin National, the bank’s Senior Lending Committee came up with Fallutin’s prime based on quantitative analysis, and we knew the quant who cranked out the analysis.  We asked him how he went about it inside his actual quantitative analysis think tank one day.


           Didn't seem like much of a think tank, if you want our opinion.  Looked just like the cubicle we sat in, to be honest with you.


Guy was fresh out of the University of Chicago, this shiny new PhD thing propped up atop the quantitative analysis file cabinet, and his job, though a great honor, had turned out to be disappointingly simplistic.  The bank gave him what were basically forms to fill out, pre-printed spreadsheets and graph paper they’d been using for years, and for starters, U of Chicago just tagged current entries onto the historical record running down his columned sheets.  His analysis consisted mostly of spreads – the difference you get subtracting one figure, say the yield on 90 day US Treasury Bills, from another, like the return on a 90 day Fallutin National Certificate of Deposit, as well as spreads of those spreads, and to finish up the quantitative analysis, U of Chicago extended historical charts of spreads by penciling in dots on his bank graph paper.  Each committee member seemed to have a pet stat, and the pack of them drove the harried PhD nuts when everybody had to know what his number was – and right now - in the middle of a trading day.


There were economic entries to be made too, but those things came out weekly, monthly, or quarterly, maybe one or two at a time, so posting them was no big deal, and he took that stuff to be more of a relevant sideline as his market stats were fluid, changing by the minute sometimes, and demanded rapt attention.


U of Chicago followed mostly shorter and intermediate term interest rates over matching maturities on things like treasury bills, commercial paper, banker’s acceptances, certificates of deposit, as well as some longer rates tied to core issues.  It wasn’t all that sophisticated really, just thorough.  Whenever the numbers spoke to him inside his little quantitative analysis think tank, U of Chicago would dash down the corridor with his quantitative analysis briefcases to tell his VP, and VP and him would dash to the corner office to tell their Senior VP, and Senior VP, VP, and him would elevate up many levels to tell their Executive VP to call a committee meeting, which was kind of cool as those committee jocks were the CEO and them, hotshots all.  Otherwise, the committee got together at scheduled intervals to discuss the general interest rate environment and such, and U of Chicago schlepped his quantitative analysis briefcases along for discussion and personal harassment whenever bank politics broke out, which was always.


Occasionally, committee jocks would have to meet several times a day, or even more often than that, staying met all day too sometimes, kind of on permanent conference call alert, when they wanted to pull the trigger but couldn’t quite get up the stones to just go ahead and do it.


Near as we can tell, the main difference between that process and whatever was going on with this Libor thing points us toward the central banker.  That would be the dickhead ringing each financial institution up on the telly, letting everybody know what everybody else was doing, and chasing strays back into the herd.


Why?


That’s the question we’d like answered, and we haven’t run across anything that would help us enlighten you on the matter.  We’ll go out on a limb here, though, and guess it’s the derivatives.  There weren’t any back in the day.  Not in play anyway when we were enwageslaved at Fallutin National and chatting up U of Chicago.


Derivatives.  Stuff’s pure gambling for at least one side of each and every transaction, and both sides of most, though they tell us laying off your bets here somehow isn’t at all like laying off your bets in acknowledged casino bookmaking.


Derivatives.  Tiny little moves get leveraged into great big humongously gigantic winnings.


Derivatives.  It’s the onliest thing we can come up with that explains the need for that darn telly.


Derivatives.  If Libor really was just another derivatives crapshoot, we all know who got ripped off – you, me, and the Icelanders of the world.  So you, me, and the rest of the suckers have got to hope that somebody takes a real close look at the credit default swaps, or whatever that table was called in this one, because …


We gotta be there when that somebody fingers the winning highrollers.

Bags O’Booty

Few people outside international banking’s notorious money-laundering circle know that Bags O’Booty is Mitt’s choice for Director of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving if the laugh-a-minute cop impersonator wins the presidency this November.  Here at The MacDougal Post, most of our staff wanted to find out why.


The rest of us are on suicide watch over the upcoming election, and don’t care one way or another about much of anything anymore.


Bags is a hard man to get ahold of.  We tracked O’Booty down at an undisclosed international airport the other day, big black bag in each hand, two more tucked under his arms.  He’d donned an off-black belly/fanny combo pack, and sported this tall and really lumpy ebony thing kind of strapped across his shoulders.  Bags was running harder than us, but nowhere near as fast.  Something was slowing him down.


We caught up as Bags stopped under the “To Geneva” sign.  He’d appeared underneath the “From George Town” sign, so we had a pretty good idea what O’Booty was up to.


“You’re taking Mitt’s tax evasion money over to that Swiss bank account, aren’t you, Bags?”


“Who?  What?  When?’


“From that Cayman Islands bank account, huh, Bags?”


“Where?  Why?  Who?  What?  How?”


“It’s in those bags, isn’t it, Bags?  Mitt’s tax evasion money.”


“Here, want one?”  Bags dangled one of his big black bags in front of us - to be grabbed.


“This wouldn’t be hush money, now would it, Bags?”


“Only if you take it.  Still tax evasion money right now.”


That was the first thing coming out of the Carried Interest Hisself and the Two Cadillacs Missus Camp all summer that made any sense to us.  We undangled, uncuffed, unzipped, unbuttoned, unsnapped, unlocked, and unstrapped the bag, and asked Bags for a thumbprint, and he keyed in the seven digital combinations.  Then Bags opened the final lid with a retina scan.  There were 1,370 one million dollar bills inside.  We didn’t know they even made one million dollar bills.


“THERE’S ONE BILLION THREE HUNDRED SEVENTY MILLION DOLLARS IN HERE!!!!!”


“Well, don’t grab it all, for goodness sakes.  Just what it’s gonna take to hush you up.”


“Take what we want.  IN MILLION DOLLAR DEMNOMONATIONS!!!!!


“Christ, MacDougal, would you like me to get you some change?”


I must’ve been giving him a funny look.  You could tell the bag man was started to feel uncomfortable about the interview.


“Anybody got change for a million?” Bags raised his voice, but only a little, and maybe 600 guys stood up.  It looked like a hedge fund manager’s bag man convention, only it was just a bunch of hedge fun managers’ bag men waiting to take their bags onto the next flight to Geneva at an undisclosed international airport.  Anyway, the other bag men had bags too, and pretty soon everybody was undangling, uncuffing, unzipping, unbuttoning, unsnapping unlocking, unstrapping, thumbing, keying, and …..


“WAIT JUST A MINUTE HERE.  I DON”T WANT ANY OF MITT’S HUSH MONEY.  I’M MACDOUGAL IRVING OF THE MACDOUGAL POST.”


Boy, you should've seen how fast those guys rekeyed, unthumbed, restrapped, relocked, resnapped, rebuttoned, rezipped, recuffed, and redangled those bags of theirs.  Subscribers, we made all of you proud.


“Well, what DO you want, MacDougal?”


“Just give me something to write about, O’Booty.  Whatever you’ve got.”


“ANYBODY GOT ANYTHING FOR THE MACDOUGAL POST TO WRITE ABOUT?”


Hedge fund managers’ bag men are not a talkative lot.  It’s probably one of the job requirements that you don’t let members of the blogging media interview you flying bags from an undisclosed international airport to Geneva.  Nobody offered a word.


“Okay,” we continued, not to be discouraged, “tell us about the million dollar bills.  We didn’t know they printed million dollar bills.”


“You don’t know a lot of things.”


“We didn’t know they printed bills in denominations higher than one hundred dollars anymore.”


“They don’t.”


“’They don’t?’  Well, what are you carrying them around for?”


“Look close.”


I did.


“Look closer.”


“Holy Wow.”  IN GOLDBERG STYX WE TRUST.  “This isn’t US currency at all.  It’s Goldberg, Styx currency.”


“Well, somebody had to print it.”


“What do you need million dollar bills for anyway?”


“You try carrying billions around the other way.”


“Oh.”


“They also print six hundred and eighty-three million dollar bills too.”


“What?  Why a six hundred and eighty-three million dollar denomination?”


“Goldberg has six hundred and eighty-three customers in their Outsized Wealth Management Division.  Screw them for a million each, and you’ve got six hundred and eighty-three million dollars to lug overseas.  Two million each, and its one billion three hundred and sixty-six million dollars; three million each and its two billion and forty-nine million bucks, and so on, and it starts to get crazy real fast.  Goldberg’s bag man just can’t tote that kind of mazoolah over the ocean without a six hundred and eighty-three million dollar denomination.”


“And the rest of you?”


“We’re sick of it.  Some banks have four hundred and thirty-two customers in their Outsized Wealth Management Divisions, or three hundred and sixteen, or whatever.  That’s why Mitt wants me at the Bureau in January.”


“The Bureau of Printing and Engraving?”


“Yes.”


Let me guess.  His hedge funds have one thousand three hundred and seventy customers in their Outsized Wealth Management Divisions.”


“Something like that.”


“We understand,” we finally understood.


“It’s a cool job.  I get to print and engrave and date Washington interns, while these guys ….”  O’Booty was getting all kinds of funny looks now.  Mean ones too … “don’t.”


Bag men are a surly lot.  We got out of there fast.  You’ve got to figure it was the part about dating the Washington interns that put the other bag men over the top.  We found ourselves kind of hoping that the laugh-a-minute cop impersonator would win the election for Bags sake.  O’Booty was getting beat up pretty bad.  Anyway, we’d finally found at least some reason to vote for somebody now, and that almost made us feel good about November.


Look, at least it‘s a start.  You gotta grab whatever life gives you inside this political nuthouse.  And if voting for old Carried Interest Hisself and the 2 Cadillacs Missus on account of Bags O’Booty is the only reason we’ve got to go with anybody in this one, we’re gonna cast our ballot for old Carried Interest Hisself and the Two Cadillacs Missus.


And probably convince some of you to come along with us too.

Election Update

         Okay, hedge fund managers lie, cheat, and steal for a living, and now we’re told this one has all kinds of offshore accounts.  As you already know unless, and we hope more and more of you are beginning to fall into this category, you live under a rock, people here generally use offshore accounts to avoid detection when breaking the laws of the United States relating to stuff like drug trafficking and income tax evasion.  If there are any Republicans out there who still want to vote for this guy, get counseling or something.

         You’re as sick as he is.

         But beyond that, we’ve got to wonder if any White people in this country are going to vote for a person for President.  You can see some casting ballots for the Republican Party while others flip levers, or whatever, for the Democratic Party, but our political analyst doesn’t expect to see any White votes going to either Romney or Obama.  None.  That part of the count is forecast to be zero to zero this year.

         Come election night, the tally is going to look something like this:  90% of the Black vote will go to the Muslim, while the White vote gets split within a few percentage points of half for the Republican Party and half for the Democratic Party, giving the nod to whichever party comes up with the highest count, plus or minus the Muslim handicap.

         For at least the next four years we’re really not going to have a human POTUS at all.

Market Gut Shot Alert

           Farmers here have never seen anything like this weather.  Mildest Winter they ever had, strangest rainfall for some time, and now hottest June 27, 28, 29, 30 ..... ever, or whatever the string of days was, together with the worst growing season drought anybody can remember.  Drove to Alabama for the 4th, finding the corn and bean crops either destroyed or all but, though the cotton fields were a robust deep green and the former farmer driving had no idea what was going on with that.  Early corn and early beans here look equally messed up, but a bean crop on our road planted maybe 2 weeks ago is still in that very early sprouting stage where it survives well for a while under almost any conditions.  All we grow commercially down here is beans (what soybeans are called) and corn, so its ruination time again.  Didn't see a single farmer at the rodeo, whatever that specifically means, and the crowd was mighty thin for the only thing to do on a Friday night in Logano, Tennessee, at least by what are now our personal historical standards. 

           Lawns, including ours, look mostly brown, and up close you can see it's really some brown and some green everywhere, only the patches that look kind of green have a higher proportion of green, is all, and they're loaded with brown too.  Fescue is hay color out in our pastures, the first time that's ever happened, though still green around the septic system, which is the only grass we've got that needs mowing, only it isn't getting any out of our not wanting to hurt the other grass's feelings any worse than the weatherman's already done to the poor little brown and green things.

           Neighbor diagonally across the street added a new herd of paints, so we're probably at the point where owners are forced to give horses away because everyone anticipates not being able to buy hay for them next winter and the big ranchers have already had to take steps that will cut off everyone else's supply.  Situation got there a few years ago, and hay had to be trucked in from states like Indiana, we think it was, which must end up being really, really expensive as none of these large farm animals ever seem to stop eating, 24/7 near as we can tell.  Sandy, the golden, kind of, palomino in our pasture, only stops eating to crap or gallop, according to actual observation.  Silly creature eats while it walks for goodness sakes.  Strolling to its next meal from its last one, shamelessly chomping on munchies while it gets there.


           Who can afford to pay for that kind of lifestyle if all them vittles ain't gonna be popping up out of the ground on some kind of regular basis?  Seriously.

           Manager at our gym reports cattle standing in empty lakes up north of town, trying to figure out where to get a refreshing drink, and the TVA flood control people warned on Channel 4 that they're about to lose it due to abnormally high water temperatures, and expect to sideline two nuclear power facilities if conditions don't get better because the water spurting down from their great big dammed lake can't cool off the reactors when the lake's water temperature gets higher than some number it's about to hit.


           Thing is, the agricultural ruination is being repeated in states all over the country as well as, we're told by those same Channel 4 people, Central America and some other continent, Africa maybe.  There aren't all that many continents out there, so you could probably look the right one up, if you wanted to.


           Whole thing's got us and everybody else looking for a massive spike in food prices, ergo overall inflation, ergo another market gut shot whenever the Crime Families figure out how to best screw their customers over with the agricultural ruination scenario.

           GET US OUT OF THIS STEPHEN KING NOVEL, SOMEBODY.


           PLEEEEASE.