HOW I DID IT

[Ed Oscuro]

2009 Ultra Madoff Gridiron Edition

[Necronopticous]

Wow. That is nuts to read.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

Now catch the people who let this crook swindle billions of dollars and turned a blind eye for 20 years.

[Ganelon]

It's really just a microscopic mirror of the lending crisis: person comes in offering an entirely unrealistic plan and fools are too lazy to due diligence and refuse to trust common sense. Of course, the government is just sitting there wasting money doing nothing. Lots of blame to spread around...

[Ex-Cyber]

It's really just a microscopic mirror of the lending crisis: person comes in offering an entirely unrealistic plan and fools are too lazy to due diligence and refuse to trust common sense.

Common sense says that you should have to do some kind of worthwhile work to get paid; an unhealthy amount of Wall Street culture seems to be based on finding ways around that principle.

[Ed Oscuro]

Speaking of doing worthwhile work to get paid, I have something of a Madoff obsession and so I wrote a couple things about him. Today I wrote a really pretty crap pastiche of a Charles Simic poem, so feel free to laugh at it:

Jingle

Madoff's millions came rolling back to him
all week, tinkling in the gutters around him,
the rolling coins collectively saying

This ain't so bad. Once I was just a
coin-full hand in Pharaoh's streets,
and chasing a loaf of bread down the street
might send you under the wheels of Caesar's
chariot, him giggling at you
and throwing a coin to Gaspard.

Your fists slowly opening to
let slip a single marred coin:
who will execute you, now?

For the record I don't hate the guy and don't condone killing thieves.

And then, a character sketch I wrote on January 13th, back around the time the story broke (apologies about the lack of markers for shifts from in-character reflection to third-person narrative):

He was hungry, sure. Dodging sludge and city buses while turning onto 64th Street, he caught a savory scent; exotic oriental cuisine. Everywhere, the aroma of success and good business; it wrapped around his body, a pleasant film to wash off and discard later. For an instant, the whole world a buffet – and then, on inhaling, the black cinders of the bus’s diesel engine. An illusion; something out of nothing.

On reflection, the financier realized it was probably always this way, going back through the decades. Everybody in the business realized, and rationalized, that a lot of it was collective hope, snake oil, nothing else; his face drew receded like papers curling in a fire at the memory.

So some other guys out there screwed up, and they had done it in a piddling, insignificant way; selling financial instruments nobody could understand, and apparently least of all themselves. Plain damn carelessness when you thought about it, since the buck rebounded like a razor-edged boomerang. But this financier did things differently; sure, there’s a scam under it all, but a harmless one, if decades of experience count for anything, anymore.

They put families in houses; I put food in bellies in Israel. Gave people returns for decades so they could follow their dreams and not have to worry about their investments, big name actors and directors, writers and CEOs. The whole of the dream business, and the fantasies they sold you weren’t any more helpful than mine.

But now the financier only kibbutzes with the security guards the Fed stuck to his behind with a big cartoon tack. The Brooks Brother suits are replaced by a worn padded Carhartt and baseball cap (home team – proof that you could throw money into a black hole and still go places), cufflinks by an ankle bracelet. You’d think this enough to break the man’s image, but he knows he’s done that himself; for now, though, he puts on a brave taut smile for the world and figures I’m a suffering jester. Like Ponzi said, the show I put on was worth at least some of the money.

Whole damn world’s gone scandal crazy. It used to be there was room for a little inventive lie, but nobody’s thinking about that – everybody’s digging in figuring the end of the world’s around the corner. He’d snort but his regal nose is already arched in defiance. When did the world start to look different to people – why should it have? Money, he figured, was a harmless thing mostly – if things got too bad they’d all go back to digging up their backyard for gardens. It’d invigorate them a bit. A bit of rubber in the step to put the bounce back, and get the lazy artists out there back into doing for people.

For fun, he’d screened Astaire and Rogers in one of the musicals from old memory; now there was artists doing for people. Hell of a thing to call it a Depression when people knew how to have a good time at nobody’s expense. He wasn’t doing much writing at the moment, waiting as he was for the Fed to drop that other shoe.

Elsewhere, people smell blood in the air.