Miss Fish vs.... the Calendar

It’s Friday, and though I’m not Catholic, it seems as good a day as any to take a quick peek to see how Miss Fish is getting on. (Getting it on, of course, being some people’s assessment of how Miss Fish was hired at BigAnonymous in the first place.)

Several months ago, Miss Fish and her boyfriend* were preparing to go on a trip – in this case, on safari in Africa. “How long are you going for?” I asked as she gathered up her suitcase and purse. To her credit, Miss Fish came into work the day she left, leaving the office at 4pm and heading straight for JFK.

“Uh….” She said. “Well, we come back on Sunday.” It was Thursday afternoon. “I mean, not this Sunday, next Sunday. So it’s this weekend and then next week until Sunday. It’s however many days that is.”

Check plus, Miss Fish. At least we knew you had someone with you out there.
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*Fun fact: Miss Fish’s boyfriend’s last name is Husband. Literally. Me, I’m convinced that this is nature's little way of making sure that if they get married, she’ll always be clear on exactly who that guy in her house is.

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And now, a vintage Beatles cartoon video even more inexplicable than Miss Fish's losing battle with the days of the week:

Money as Debt: An Animated History

It's a rainy Tuesday.  Perfect day to catch a movie (or five)!   There is clearly a point of view in Paul Grignon's Money As Debt.  It is a very well thought out, clearly articulated point of view. I happen to agree with it, but if you don't, don't just grouse about it.  Say why -- just be as articulate and well thought out as he is, please. 

Part One


 Part Two


Part Three


Part Four


Part Five



(videos via the Mailman)

Cherchez la Polenta

I’ve written plenty about Cashland, but so far there’s been nothing from No Cashland. Until now, that is. Hello! Welcome to my shiny home office; take off your tie or kick off your pumps (or both, perhaps), won’t you? No business clothes here. And yes, these are pajamas I’m wearing. I know, the comfiness is almost unbearable.*   (Oh, but…**)

There’s a lot to say about the absurdity of No Cashland, about the mountains of paperwork that has to be filled out when you’re laid off, or the number of FedExes I got from BigAnonymous in the first two weeks (especially FedExes of documents in which one sentence was updated - if they’d sent just those pages via regular mail and then sent me the cash they saved I could have eaten off the difference for a month). And there are the times, once or twice a day even, when the panic beast rears up its head and starts feeding on my brain, sucking out all the reason and replacing it with the kind of lurking hysteria that triggers a crying jag when I run out of shampoo. (Yep, shampoo. I told you it was hysteria.)

But I have also seen things that I didn’t see before. Before you go all, “Here comes the speech about how blind I was until something got taken away from me, and now I’m just grateful for what I have,” – which is true, by the way, and no less potent for being so (not to mention an indicator of how lucky I am that my crying jags are about shampoo rather than say, having to find space in a shelter, a fact of which I am acutely aware) – you should know I mean this literally. The first week I was laid off I would look through the kitchen cabinets and think, “I have nothing to eat.” And then I would actually pick up food – box of polenta, bag of rice, can of tomato paste – and move it aside, all the while thinking, “How can I have nothing to eat? My, I wish there was something to eat in this cabinet. Here, let me move this random thing that seems to be labeled with a picture of corn/tomatoes/rice on it, not that I can imagine what that is, and perhaps behind one of these things I will find something to eat, like a tuna melt.”

But I managed to come to my senses each day and cook, and as I used up my cabinet food supply I had to use my imagination more and more to figure out what to make. It’s one thing to throw some pasta in a pot, but it’s another, if your cooking muscle has atrophied like many New Yorkers, to look at a box of polenta and a half tub of cream cheese, and maybe a scallion and a dash of cayenne pepper and think, “Dinner!” (Mess around with those ingredients, by the way; that one was a win.) Each meal becomes a kind of puzzle to solve, either by looking through cookbooks and riffing on what’s there or just by trying things out—literally, following your nose. You exercise your brain and your senses, and at the end you get a delicious (probably) meal. Remember when I said earlier that Cashland has a knack for making people dumber? Turns out one of the best-kept secrets of No Cashland is that cooking is more than just tasty and economical; it actually makes you smarter.  Cherchez la polenta, and pass the wine.

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*I was wearing pajamas when I started this entry this morning, but I was interrupted by the discovery that a van leaves from my corner every other Monday to go the 125th Street Fairway. Free ride! 10% discount on your grocery bill! I am bold in some ways, but I am not bold enough to go to the Fairway in my pajamas.

**… I am in jeans and a tank top. Don’t bother suiting back up on my account.

The Ball Player and the Dark Pool

It’s October!  Baseball playoff season!  Which means that in Cashland, it’s time to harvest a fresh crop of those old chestnuts of a complaint: Why is it okay for baseball players to make outrageous salaries, but not okay for the Streeties?  People love this one. Remember my friend who thought 287 = 300?  He said it to me once, and I heard it again this very morning from a radio show caller responding to whether or not it was okay for the government to institute a cap on the top executive salaries at the seven companies which received bailouts (they didn’t think so).

The difference is dark pools. 

Dark pools started getting popular with traders a couple of years ago. As the name suggests, they are trading venues that exist outside traditional exchanges.  They operate via crossing networks, systems that troll around electronically looking for matches between buyers and sellers and then execute those trades, all without ever seeing the light of a public trading floor.  Some, for instance, are set up to automatically execute a trade at the midpoint between the bid and the ask – in other words, if you have a pair of shoes you want to sell for $100 bucks and I’m willing to buy them for $50, the crossing network would execute the trade automatically at $75.  (I would like them to be these shoes, by the way; if I could get these shoes for 75 bucks I’d move into the dark pool like it was Atlantis.)

Dark pools are popular because they allow investors to buy large amounts of stock without letting anyone know they’re doing it, and therefore without impacting stock price.  One way the buy and sell sides find each other – and there are probably more ways than this – is by “indication of interest” messages (remember, these are all electronic and automatic).  Here’s a quotation from a May 2009 post on the awesome Zero Hedge about co-acting director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets James Brigagliano announcing that IOI’s were becoming a “concern.”  (Zero Hedge is quoting an article from TradersMagazine.com, which has since been cached.)

"...these automated IOI messages, which usually are executable and for small size, are sent to seek liquidity from other dark pools to increase the original pool's executions. The widespread use of these 'actionable order messages could create the potential for significant private markets to develop that exclude public investors,' Brigagliano said."

In other words, while you and I and other average investors are shopping in the light and doing our best to play by the rules, crossing networks are running around in the shadows waving their IOIs at each other and making below-the-radar trades in dark pools in pretty much the same way black marketeers troll back alleys whispering “Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?” and opening their coats to flash a slew of hot Rolexes.  The streeters can split descriptive hairs all they want, but from over here the dark pool is nothing more than a black market with a good lawyer.

Which is why the comparison to baseball salaries is completely off base. Yes, star ball players make tons of money.  I’m not even arguing that they deserve that money. But Derek Jeter doesn’t take his money – and he definitely doesn’t take your money -- and disappear behind closed doors writing algorithms designed to disguise how he’s going to play the game.  He stands in the middle of a brightly lit field in full view of tens of thousands of people and does – or doesn’t do – exactly what he is paid for.  When he succeeds we know it, and when he fails we know that too.  There is not a single hidden thing about how baseball players do what they do, unless they’re using performance-enhancing drugs.  And when they get busted doing that they are vilified, their records are stripped, and they are threatened with jail time.  And after all, if that's okay for ball players, why isn't it okay for Wall Street? 


If things go well, maybe it soon will be.

Enter Miss Fish

Way back in the beginning of Cashland, I promised you characters.  And you’ve met some, certainly – you’re practically old friends with Ivy and the Mailman, and know to stay far, far away from Hapless and TWAG.  But there’s someone I’ve been wanting you to meet for a while now, because she is so completely entertaining.  Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Miss Fish.

 

Miss Fish worked across the hall from me at BigAnonymous handling something called Separately Managed Accounts.  Separately Managed Accounts are targeted at wealthier investors who want more specialized attention than they’d get if they just put their money in a mutual fund with the rest of the rabble.  With Separately Managed Accounts, you get to tell an investment professional what you want done with your money in general terms, like your portfolio’s ratio of stocks to bonds and sectors you might or might not want to invest in – you tell them no tech stocks, they don’t put you in tech stocks – and then they do the actual investing for you.  Personal attention is clearly a big part of the payoff here, and that is where Miss Fish comes in.


Because Miss Fish is hot.  In one way that’s irrelevant – it’s not as if she went around servicing the clients directly.  (What? “Servicing the clients” is an actual financial services term.)  But Miss Fish was hired about five years ago by a middle-aged male middle manager, and while she was adequate—mostly—at what she did, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was not how she filled out her application that got her the job.  She had long runner’s legs and a cascade of shiny brown hair and sashayed around the hallways in patent leather stilettos, and no one really minded because she could be fun to hang around with and wasn’t completely terrible at her job.  Mostly, though,  it was because she didn’t mind asking idiotic questions, and didn’t mind getting busted when she did.  So here, in her honor and for your entertainment, is the first installment in the occasional series Miss Fish vs…., in which Miss Fish is flummoxed by items ranging from professional credential exams to the days of the week.

Miss Fish vs….. the Color Printer

“So, the color printer… it prints in color, right?”

That’s a direct quote.  Separately Managed Accounts clients, you had no idea how lucky you were.

Let X = X: A Rant.

Today, a discussion of what I like to call Wealth Creep, the shift in perspective that can lead a person to understand the value of money less and less, the more and more of it they have. Please note that I said, “can lead,” not “leads.” I am not against money (I am all for it, in fact. Bring it ON!) and I do not think that all people who have a lot of money are heartless greedy bastards. I personally know quite a few people who are both lovely and wealthy; some are even healthy and wise. But I spent long enough in places where fantastic amounts of money were being handled to see a consistent shifting of the frame when it came to what those who handled those sums thought counted when things were counted, and I’m perfectly comfortable saying that the atmosphere on Wall Street is more than a little conducive to destroying people’s ability to do the simplest of math problems. Basically, Wall Street has a knack for making smart people dumb.

First, a personal anecdote:

Several years ago, after I finished writing school and before I started working at BigAnonymous, I was going over my personal finances with someone who worked at an extremely lucrative job in a (different) financial services firm.

“How much is your transportation?” he said. “81 bucks a month,” I said. “Food?” “$200 a month.” “Dog bills?” “$630 a year.” And so on, until we got to my student loan payment, which was $287 dollars a month. “$300,” he said.

“$287,” I said.

“Same thing,” he said.

Okay, break. While you ponder what reality it is in which 287 = 300, let me explain in very broad terms the kind of money BigAnonymous deals with.

Clients come in three main categories:

Institutional: Union pension funds, company 401(k)s, philanthropic funds, things like that – large entities’ bulk amounts of money. (Though often it’s not their money; it’s your money.) In 2007, when BigAnonymous hired sales managers for retirement products in the East and West Coast regions, the press release noted that they would “focus on accounts of $500 million or more.” In other words, what constitutes a vast amount of money in the outside world is the bare minimum inside the walls of BigAnonymous. I often heard phrases like, “it’s only a fifty million dollar account, so who cares?” The “who cares” wasn’t an expression of the speaker’s personal attitude, it was an explanation of the institutional investment division’s point of view.

Retail: The average investor. This group has the largest number of members with the smallest amount of invested money per capita. It is the broadest segment of the investment client world. It also has the shallowest pockets, but even then you don’t rate a thought from BigAnonymous unless you have at least $50,000 to invest. To me, and perhaps to you, $50,000 sounds like a lot, but according to BigAnonymous you barely rate their time at that level; better off heading to your local bank and opening a savings account or a CD. Which would be fine, except that all of the marketing literature I worked on talked about how much better it was to invest your money in the markets than to keep it in a savings account. I once wrote a blurb that explained how keeping your money in the bank was a silly, silly thing and almost guaranteed you’d wind up in the poorhouse in your dotage. Do the math, and there is a whole swath of people – specifically people who don’t have $50,000 to invest -- whose existence BigAnonymous doesn’t even bother to acknowledge. In other words their average investor, isn’t.

Private Wealth Management: Rich people. Also referred to in the industry as “Global Wealth Management,” “Private Client,” things like that. The ante for entry at BigAnonymous is $500,000. There were people in this division, quite wealthy themselves, whose job included making the actual bank deposits for these clients.

The amounts of money are so staggering you’re bound to have a shift in perspective. It would be practically impossible not to. And that’s fine. It would be idiotic, and probably criminally negligent, to run a half billion dollar institutional account as if it were a fifty-thousand dollar retail account, and vice versa; you have to understand and acknowledge the scale you’re working in to provide the best service to your clients.

What bothers me is that the shift in perspective seems to only go one way. As you start dealing with bigger and bigger numbers, the smaller numbers don’t just slide down to the low end of the scale, where they can still be referenced. They fall off entirely; they are simply not included in the equation, ever. And when numbers disappear from any equation, judgments are made using inaccurate information. Using only the bigger numbers on any scale describes an incomplete reality—and an incomplete reality isn’t reality at all.

The problem is that we make moral judgments based on financial realities all the time. Financial services firms create investment vehicles and entire marketing strategies around helping the average person (see Retail, above) do the “right” thing: save for their retirement, save for their kids’ college, save to buy a house, all the usual components of what we’ve decided in this culture is a successful life. But there is something fundamentally out of place when the people who are making judgments about what the right thing is don’t even think you exist unless you have $50,000 to spend with them. If you don’t think someone exists, by definition you can’t see things from their perspective, and if you can’t see things from their perspective, it’s hard to see how you can make an accurate judgment about them at all. It may be beating a dead horse to point out once again the amount of vitriol that was thrown, at the beginning of the housing crisis, at people who got stuck in impossible mortgages. Some of them were taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders, some lied to themselves and some were probably just plain greedy. But it leaves a bad, bad taste in my mouth when the people doing the judging can afford things that the people they’re judging can’t, and that was a lot of what I heard in the halls of BigAnonymous.

So, what about the original equation, the one in which 287 equals 300?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. $287 isn’t the same as $300. I should point out here that my friend wasn’t judging me; he was simply helping me go through some numbers. But it was disconcerting to hear someone whose job is to tell people how to manage their money – even more, whose job is to manage people’s money for them – insist that $287 equals $300 without batting an eyelash. Aside from the raw fact that it just isn’t equal, the difference between $287 and $300 dollars a month is, for example, the difference between being able to go to a movie or not. Even without the popcorn, a movie a month versus no movies at all is a significant difference in quality of life, and it’s one that my friend didn’t see. It’s not because he’s a bad guy. It’s because he got so used to dropping numbers off the low end of the scale that he literally could no longer see what difference $13 a month could make. He was able to scale up, but not to scale back down. He was a victim of wealth creep.

You know who had it right? Spiky-haired avant-gardie and NASA artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson. She wrote, “Let X = X.”

Cashland Redefined

The news: on Tuesday, September 22, I was exiled from Cashland. I am laid off!

A couple of things about this:

1) It was not entirely unexpected. Partly because if you keep your eyes open in the halls of BigAnonymous you can always tell when things are brewing, as there are enough whispers and closing doors to fill a festival of French farces; and partly because my now former boss is fundamentally insane and was unable to keep from saying things a boss shouldn’t say to an employee - things like, “So have you heard anything about more layoffs coming?”

But you shouldn’t take my word for it that she’s insane (I mean, I’m a potentially disgruntled and bitter former employee, right?) I submit the following, actual conversation into evidence. It’s not about layoffs, but it is a shining example of the spinning insanity that characterized my days at BigAnonymous.


Boss Lady:
We need to find a way to distinguish when we’re talking about design process from when we’re talking about the design resources. Process and resources are two different things, so we need a way to identify when we’re talking about which thing. We need different words so we know when we mean process and when we mean resources.

Me:
How about “process” and “resources?”

Boss Lady:
I don't think you understand.

Sometimes I am convinced that my entire tenure at BigAnonymous was scripted by Groucho Marx.



1a) For the record, I’m not a disgruntled and bitter former employee. I’ve talked to friends of mine who are still on the inside, and I can tell you that they are in a position as difficult or worse than mine. They are being asked to do exponentially more work with far fewer people (I was one of eight let go that Tuesday, and I know of three more since then), and no matter how much lip service is given to understanding that that’s the case, mostly the attitude of the managers is “Yeah, well, I paid my dues, so you can too.” (Also a direct quote, by the way, though not from my boss.) Which is patently absurd, as “paying your dues” is quite different from “being required to do the work of four people who were your friends and who you watched get tossed out onto the street in the middle of the worst economic climate since the Depression while you sit and wonder a) why it wasn’t you, and b) when it will be."

I may not always feel this way, especially when the money starts getting even tighter, which it will fairly quickly – but I will say this for now: there is a lot of upside to not wanting to kill yourself five mornings a week.


2) Obviously, “Cashland” will have to be reimagined. Introducing… No Cashland! From here on in, this blog will switch between recent-historical tales of Cashland and dispatches from No Cashland, my new home. Often these will intersect, especially as the amount of paperwork BigAnonymous has sent me since laying me off is enough to have gained me citizenship in another country.


So that’s where we go from here. There are many, many tales of Cashland waiting in the wings! No Cashland is turning out to be pretty fertile ground as well.

And we haven’t even begun to discuss Tom’s Town. You’re gonna love Tom’s Town.

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The Dogs of Bore, Part Three: Is That A Dog?

Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war – JULIUS CAESAR

Hello again! Recaps are here:
Part One
Part Two


I let the Mailman in on the scheme from the start. When he couldn't find the silhouette among the others even though he knew what it looked like, I wondered how long it would take for the uninitiated to spot it. I didn’t have long to wait.

Or rather, I did. I watched through the glass wall as meeting after meeting took place in the conference room. No one noticed a thing. After nearly two weeks, a dozen meetings, and no results, I decided it was time to step up the game.
How could anyone miss it? The answer is they couldn’t. Again I waited.

Meanwhile, Hapless and TWAG had not been idle. After leaving my cube, they installed an identical set of 48 black blobs in an identical glass-walled conference room at the opposite end of the hallway. (That’s right, TWO sets of expensive, custom-framed black blobs in one hallway. One hallway in one financial services firm with a bottom line sinking so fast that not long after all this happened, the two other people who did exactly the same job I did were laid off. But that’s for another post. Let’s stick to the tale at hand, shall we?)

The next day’s first meeting passed uneventfully, and then Ivy showed up. In addition to her penchant for wisecracking, Ivy is an extremely observant person. About twenty minutes into a meeting in which the group’s senior management team ran through a mind-numbing series of quarter end numbers, she suddenly pushed back her chair, stood up, pointed at the wall of blobs, and, cutting the Mountie off mid-statistic, said, “Wait - is that a dog?”

Heads whipped around. I frantically dialed the Mailman. “They found it!” I shriek-whispered. “You’ve got to get over here, the whole meeting’s tanked, it’s chaos!”

It was true. The meeting had crashed to a halt. Ivy pulled the rogue frame off the shelf and yanked the backing out of it. “It’s a printout!” she yelled. “It’s a computer printout, someone did this from their desk.”

“Where’s the original?” someone else said. Ivy started opening the drawers in the gray credenzas lining the room. It didn’t take her long to find the signed, numbered original blob in the first credenza drawer below the shelves, where I’d laid it. Carefully. I was more than willing to subvert BigAnonymous’s artistic sensibility, but I wasn’t about to pay the price for destroying its art.

“Holy shit, there’s another one!” A meeting in shambles! Shrieks of laughter! Real live cursing! This was going even better than I’d hoped.

Clearly, this was the point at which innocent me would have noticed the ruckus. “What’s going on?” I asked, walking in as casually as I could. And as Ivy told me someone was replacing the blobs with homegrown silhouettes of a dog, I realized I’d made a potentially critical mistake: I had no idea how to gauge what an innocent person’s ratio of bafflement to laughter to excitement was likely to be. It’s true, I’m an actor, but being a trained actor does not necessarily make you a good bluffer.

“Ha!” I said, possibly a shade too loudly. “Wow, that’s – ha! Awesome!” From behind Ivy, the tallest of the senior managers gave me a look that said, “I’m onto you.” It took everything I had to resist the urge to wink at him.

After a few more wonderings about how long this had been going on, things settled down a bit, though the meeting never fully recovered. People were still buzzing as they left the conference room. I realized if I was going to strike again, it should be that night. And it should be the final hurrah, the doggiest of the dog silhouettes:

The next day, after the third silhouette had been discovered and the last meeting had broken up, leaving the imposters on the shelf mingling with their legitimate cousins while the team wondered aloud who the culprit was, a pair of security guards walked down the hall accompanied by none other than my old friends Hapless and TWAG. They marched straight into the now-empty conference room. TWAG’s nose was twitchier than ever. She stared at the shelves, took a step backward, started counting, stopped, took a step forward, and then looked at the security guards, shaking her head. My heart stopped. Are you kidding? Someone called security? Wait - was TWAG going to win the final battle after all? Could I lose my job over this? It couldn’t be. It could not be.

They came out of the conference room. TWAG, decked out in a shiny black dress and hair pulled back so tight it gave her a temporary facelift, had an angry-whispery conference with one of the guards, who was valiantly trying to dodge her spit. The other guard hovered by my cube.

“Um…” I said to the hoverer. “So, ah… what’s going on?” Trying again to look innocent. “Ah, nothing much,” he said. “It looks like someone’s been stealing those picture things out of the conference rooms. The uh, I don’t know what you call ‘em, those black shape pictures.” For a flash I was even more confused – how could anyone consider what I’d done stealing? I’d taken steps to make sure the real blobs were unharmed. And granted, the paper they’d been printed on was probably acid-free archival quality as opposed to 20-lb white bond, but it’s not like it was gold leaf, so I couldn’t imagine what damage might have been done.

And then I remembered the identical conference room down the hall, with the identical 48 black blobs. Someone down there, in another group entirely, had literally been stealing the blobs. Not just turning them around to face the wall, not replacing them with silhouettes of their dog, but actually picking them up and taking them home.

“You are kidding,” I said to the guard.

“Nah, can you believe people’d steal those things?” He looked at me with a little roll of his eyes, and I knew we were on the same side. “It wasn’t you, was it?” I laughed, partly out of relief, and partly because you just cannot make this stuff up.

“Nope,” I said. “It sure wasn’t. It was decidedly not me.” A few feet away, TWAG was still haranguing the other security guard about the stolen blobs.

She never noticed the dogs.

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