Hello,
Thank you for subscribing to the Monkey Business newsletter!
I’d like to start this adventure by telling you a bit about myself. I’m a 58-year-old married father of 3. I came out of college wanting to be a banker. I really didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed pretty cool. I was fascinated with the waves of guys, dressed in their navy-blue suits who would get on the LIRR every morning and head into the city to make money come out of their telephones and then party at the South Street Seaport. I never really had a hankering for material things that money could buy. I think it had more to do with my 22-year-old insecurities. Money was a way of keeping score. It took quite a few years to realize that this was an idiotic way to live.
I started out working for the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, regulating Savings and Loans as an examiner. I had a couple of job offers from Wall Street firms, but the jobs seemed pretty limited and as it turned out, when stocks crashed in 1987, I would have been canned from both. In 1986 the Savings and Loan industry was in full blowup mode and if you had a pulse and any level of ambition they threw you into the breach. My appetite for knowledge was pretty voracious and I learned a lot. In 1989, I read Michael Lewis’s “Liars Poker” and decided I wanted a life of high stakes gambling with other people’s money on a trading floor. I finally got to Wall Street in 1992 and over the next 15 years I steadily climbed my way up to that goal I set for myself, a player on a major Wall Street bank trading desk. At the end of 2007 “the dream” ended as I lost my job. I could have gotten a job at another bank pretty quickly, but I was burned out and I really thought that the whole Wall Street game was over.
I started writing a blog with a buddy of mine, also a Wall Street veteran, called The Monkey Business Blog. We were aiming to create a TV show similar to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, that would highlight the dark comedy of our business. Also, as the world began to blow up in 2008 my partner and I had a pretty good vantage point to tell the public what was going on and more importantly, make fun of it. We actually got pretty high up at Comedy Central in so far as getting a show, but they dinged us in the end. The execs told us we were “Business first and funny second” which was probably true. So, we stuck to the blog which got pretty popular in 2008-2009, but we never could quite breakthrough. If podcasts and YouTube were then what they are now we probably would have had a shot, but they weren’t so we didn’t.
A lot of good things came from the blog though, maybe the best was meeting Matt Taibbi. Becoming friends with him and working together on occasion is really one of the joys of my life. My dad died in 1999. He was perhaps a less cranky Bernie Sanders, and he was my best friend. I think he would have really liked reading Matt and knowing that I was doing some work with him.
That is a little about me. I hope to write a post or two a week pointing out absurdity in the financial market place, as well as highlighting risks and hopefully generating a few laughs.
Thanks, we’ll talk soon.
I am really looking forward to reading your stuff. I'm a few years younger (50), but also from NY (Bronx), and my buddies went into finance, and would invite me to hang at South Street Seaport. I'm a public school english teacher in the Bad Neighborhood, so I had the time go get there around 5 or 6 and hang out with the banker guys. It was fun.
I enjoy finance and the markets, have read all the Lewis stuff, am currently into the oil / gas / coal / uranium Great Rotation that's going on.
Can't wait to hear from a long time insider.