Prize

........... Recipient of the 2010 MacDougal Irving Prize for Truth in Market Manipulation ...........

February 15, 2013

The Bean Counter, the Mouthpiece, and the Structured Trust Advantaged Repackaged Securities Document


          “How do you spend your day?”

         The question was well considered, brandishing an implication that this is, after all, the full measure of a man.  The kind of opening serve Bookes Cooker had learned to expect from a fancy Wall Street mouthpiece.  Rocking the opponent back on his heels, eliciting information from him rather than you, and establishing dominant presence.  Hers was conversational tennis at the highest level of the sport.  Six words into the obligatory small-talk, Getsem Alloff proved herself to be everything Bookes Cooker had been fearing. 

         Cooker’s return was a little ditzy.  “I get charged out at …”, and Bookes gave Alloff his hourly rate.  What Bookes Cooker’s hourly rate happened to be had nothing to do with how he spent his day.  Why Cooker even offered it up, I can’t tell you.  Neither can Bookes.   Anyway he did, and it was game, set, match before Bookes Cooker ever got his generally effective two-handed ground stroke cranked up.

         Understand that Bookes Cooker had become quite the fancy professional himself, a Wall Street bean counter no less, and fancy Wall Street bean counters, like fancy Wall Street mouthpieces, mostly charge clients by the hour.  A professional firm gives its professional staff time sheets, and the professionals key in what they do all morning, or all afternoon, depending on where they are in the form, and also add in who they do it for and how long they take getting it done, by minutes if need be.  Software programs factor all this out for the payroll and billing departments to ponder.  Spending your day does go together with hourly rates in that way, Bookes supposed, when he started wondering why he came out with what he’d come out with just then.

         Now, your fancy professional’s hourly rate is a matter of considerable importance in the trenches, purported as it is to show how one stacks up against one’s peers, and a fancy mouthpiece charged out at, say, $3 godzillion an hour gets to flutter her feathers in the face of a fancy bean counter only hitting clients up for $2 Godzillion per, and usually does, which is where the Cooker v Alloff conversation would’ve normally gone had this been a normal conversation, which it emphatically was not.  Most conversations between consenting professionals start with feather fluttering in all the professions.

         Within the fancy pants professions, those two we’re talking about here, bean counting and mouthing-off, everybody knows what everybody’s hourly is anyway.  If it’s a lot, the stud across the conference table tells you.  If it isn’t, someone in his/her office can’t wait to.  The process of natural selection begins with hourly rates in the fancy pants professions, to be continued later over coffee somewhere if the numbers work out for the two of you.  This is Darwinism in its purest form.  Where transmutation of the species, otherwise known as networking to this crowd, begins.  And survival of the fittest.  The fittest bean counter and/or mouthpiece in the room is a totally big deal in the fancy pants professions.

         If Bookes had fingered Alloff as a feather flutterer, offering his own hourly might’ve made at least some sense.  But Getsem wasn’t a feather flutterer.   Getsem Alloff was Top Dog.  The Top Dog.  Top Dog in the only branch of mouthing-off that really mattered on Wall Street anymore:

         Getsem Alloff was Top Dog defending too-big-to-jail Wall Street bankers, Crime Lords so full of themselves they go out and charge by the year for their services.  Alloff was Top Dog defending criminal masterminds from the United States Securities and Excuses Commission (SEC).

         Top dog defending criminal masterminds doesn’t tell her hourly.  When you’ve got the highest hourly rate in financial racketeering, nobody cares what the actual number is.  Just that you’re the man/woman.  Once their conversation progressed a bit, Bookes Cooker came to figure this out.

         Raw power has a kind of terror to it, an awful, almost dehumanizing ubiety of its own that just seems to lurk around the persona wielding it.  The bean counter could feel that awfulness all but sucking the life out of him as he tried to grapple with his having a place in a Getsem Alloff scheme of things, waiting to see if Bookes Cooker was going to live or die in this brand new world of whatever it was Top Dog needed him for.

         Getsem had called the meeting.  Bookes had wanted to phone in sick.  He probably was by now anyway after gulping every med in the medicine cabinet past the parched lump in his parched throat, as he’d done earlier that AM. 

         Once the Wall Street Crime Families had taken down the global economy back in ’07-’09, their AAA-rated worthless bundled subprime paper derivatives squeezing the vitality, if not the very essence, out of everything that was prosperous across the entire scorched Earth, their Dons had come under heavy attack.  Voices everywhere (except in the media, of course, which they controlled) were calling for the jailing of too-big-to-jail bankers, and even worse, scaling back their lavish compensation packages.  A Wall Street Crime Lord’s deferred key employee stock option award is sacred ground.  Nobody, and by that I mean nobody, goes there.  You can send the Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin to jail, and he’ll accept that kind of punishment if he has to.  But take that Kingpin’s deferred key employee stock option award away?  No, sir.  The Families would rather blow up the scorched Earth first, and every wealth management account on it.

         That’s where Getsem Alloff stepped in.  Former SEC hotshot placed a few calls to Washington, took a couple more, and made what was now repackaged as some silly little misunderstanding go away.  There is no power, nor has there ever been any power, like the almighty power granted unto a regulatory hotshot/mob wise guy by that revolving door that spits out wise guy hotshots headed to and fro Wall Street and the SEC.  On both sides, wise guy hotshots are legion.

         In the here and now, Bookes Cooker was all but quivering in the presence of that almighty power and its terrible, dehumanizing ubiety.

         “Take this back to the office,” Getsem Alloff commanded, handing Cooker something rather attractively bound and not all that thick really, “and sign it.”  It was quite a moment, that.  A lot like some Arc of the Covenant thing.  If the Holy Document Alloff had quested Cooker with suddenly started to burn a hole in Bookes’s hand, it would not have surprised him at all.  “STARS”, the title read.  What in the world was that?  Navigating his way home to the bean counting firm, Cooker remembered paying a taxi driver some money on the leg across town.  STARS?  What was STARS?  Somehow he’d become pretty much oblivious to everything else as the bean counter all but flew back to his bean counting counter.  What?  What?  What?

         “Structured Trust Advantaged Repackaged Securities” the title read inside.  A few pages later it hadn’t gotten any clearer than that.  Holy Document wasn’t about accounting at all.  No number crunching Bookes had ever heard of anyway.  Opaque, complicated can of worms is what it turned out being to him.  Bookes couldn’t decipher a thing.  By the time the bean counter got done perusing every last page, where to sign was the only part Bookes understood.  So he did.

         There was a Getsem Alloff legal opinion in there somewhere.  It said everything would be all right.  That was all Bookes Cooker needed to know.  Only he did give the mouthpiece a shout first.  Just to cover his aft nethers.

         “This legal opinion gonna stand?” the bean counter wondered at the mouthpiece.

         “Like a rock,” the mouthpiece replied.  “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

         Four years later, some too-big-to-jail Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin got Bookes on the phone.  Pulled the bean counter clear out of this great big client hoedown.  Kingpin said Bookes’s signature was all over some structured trust advantaged repackaged securities deal his Crime Family had done, and the securities went bust, and now these regulatory hotshots were coming after his deferred key employee stock option award over it.

         Bookes put the too-big-to-jail Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin on hold, and switched over to speed dial.  Our bean counter had come a long way in those four years.  A real long way.  Cooker’s call went straight through to the Chairman of the United States Securities and Excuses Commission.  Madame Chairman picked up on the first ring.

         “Yo, Getsem,” Cooker greeted fondly.

         “Hey, Sweetie,” Alloff matched in kind.

         “Got something for you, Babe.”  Dehumanizing ubiety has been known to follow a powerful persona’s words across interexchange telecommunication lines from time to time.  An ever so slight mist of it was puffing over Cooker’s bean counting counter now, but raw power didn’t frighten him so much anymore.  Bookes was working both sides of The Street these days too.  Thing like that happens when you’ve got friends spitting out of a revolving door.

         ”Lemme guess.”  It was a game they liked to play.  After she got the appointment, Getsem Alloff turned out to be a regular girl.  Former mouthpiece wasn’t like a mouthpiece at all.  Servant, I suppose you could call her.  As in the public servant she’d become today behind the beveled Madame Chairman plate on her desk at the Securities and Excuses Commission.

         “Okay.”

         “STARS again.”

         “Hahahaha.”

         “Hahahaha.”

         “Hahahaha.”

         “I gotta call another investigation off.”

         “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

         “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

         “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

         “Guess that legal opinion stood.”

         “Like a rock.  See, you didn’t have to worry about a thing.

         “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

         “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

         They always had a good laugh over that one.



        ************** THE END **************


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