Skip to content

The Wolf of Wall Street, Print Version

green light

Let us assume, for the sake of kindness rather than on any available evidence, that an editor at the New York Times had a bad morning. Maybe there was a hangover, or a new baby who cried all night, and the editor to whom we’ve decided to grant our narrative charity went to work without having slept. Because otherwise, what the fuck?

“For the Love of Money,” a beyond-parody opinion piece by a Wall Street escapee named Sam Polk, rings nearly every bell in the Chorus of Mandatory References, missing only the Maserati and summers in the Hamptons. Did our greed-obsessed young trader dine at Per Se and Le Bernardin? Did he often sit in the “second row at the Knicks-Lakers game,” courtesy of someone in the business who wanted to kiss his ass? Was he driven by the psychological emptiness caused by a childhood with a father who was “a modern-day Willie Loman,” endlessly broke but full of big talk? Does he feel that he is “making a real contribution” since he quit the finance industry, has “taught a writing class to girls in the foster system,” and started the inevitable nonprofit? Reader, he does.

Beyond all of the cut-and-paste, all the bastard echoes of a blurry picture of a faded photocopy of someone’s handwritten notes on Bonfire of the Vanities, the details get . . . fuzzy. Polk writes, for example, that he was inspired to work on Wall Street “after reading in the book ‘Liar’s Poker’ how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor.”

But then this person who supposedly read Liar’s Poker—the whole thing, not just that single sentence about the bonus—announces his great surprise that he ever made it to the trading floor. Why? Because, while he was “competitive and ambitious,” he was also obsessive, addictive, not overly committed to telling the truth, and driven by rage. “It was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all,” he concludes.

Did you just say that you had read Liar’s Poker? Because my copy has a chapter titled, “The Fat Men and Their Marvelous Money Machine,” and it describes—precisely—a set of dishonest, obsessive people who are driven by their rage and their appetite. On one early page, Michael Lewis walks into the office at Salomon Brothers, reporting for his first day at work; he’s greeted by this sight:

A fat young man lay spread-eagled on the floor. He was, as far as I could determine, asleep. His shirt was untucked and badly wrinkled; his white belly pushed through like a whale’s hump where the buttons had come undone.

Meanwhile, just prior to that, a new colleague greets Lewis by trying to sell him a set of new suits from her sweatshop connection:

Thus the first words spoken to me by a fellow trainee were by someone trying to sell me something. It was a fitting welcome to Salomon Brothers.

Or try later on, when mortgage traders make a show of “Food Frenzy” Fridays, ordering hundreds of dollars worth of Mexican food—including “guacamole in five-gallon drums”—for the calculated sake of excessive public consumption.

So our young hero reads a book about Thorstein Veblen’s drug-induced nightmare, a raging nest of dick-measuring, theatrically gluttonous, deafeningly profane, utterly dishonest sociopaths who make a living gleefully running the pump-and-dump on their idiot clients . . . and he worries that he won’t make it on Wall Street because his personality is driven by anger and addiction. Did I get a different copy of Liar’s Poker than the rest of the country?

Aggressively pursuing his disconnection from the thing he purports to describe, Polk never quite gets around to explaining what he did. A relentlessly internal narrative never manages much in the way of the external, of the world outside the writer’s feelings about his personality and what his personal failures of character meant to him. He “got a job at Bank of America,” doing nothing that he ever explains. Then he “became a bond and credit default swap trader,” but we never learn a thing about whose bonds and swaps he traded. Might any of it ever have been useful? Could he ever have sold bonds that funded something of value to the rest of the world? Beats me—beats anyone who read the whole piece—because greed. If we’re going to evaluate the depth of this person’s (and this industry’s) soulless avariciousness, it would help to know the depth of the economic emptiness at its center. I don’t actually believe that no bond trader on earth has ever justified his bonus with valuable work. Maybe I could be convinced of the premise, if someone cared to try telling the full story. Start with client names.

Finally, inventing a bizarre Wall Street narrative that veils its missed targets behind a scrim of nonstop vagueness, Polk describes “the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash.” He doesn’t mention or hint, at all, that the government had leverage to do this bonus-limiting because it poured free money into banks. He doesn’t mention how anyone around him felt about bailouts, payments at par to AIG counterparties, or the money banks make operating as the New York Fed’s primary dealers. He doesn’t mention much of anything; an industry that runs in such close connection with government that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins is just viscerally hostile to “regulation.” They don’t want government to interfere with their business, but government is their business. That paradox deserves some discussion, even from the New York Times.

Maybe it’s fitting that Polk ends up offering nothing much in the way of solutions to the problems he purports to identify. How do you deliver prescriptions when you can barely see the thing you wish to describe as being sick?

And, really, how thick does bullshit have to be before the editors at the New York Times can spot it?