Moral Hazard
Kate Jennings
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0007154623
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Funny, liberal and left-leaning, she is an unlikely candidate to be writing speeches on derivatives in a Manhattan tower, 'putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables'. She finds herself on Wall Street because she needs serious money. After ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is suffering from Alzheimer's.So begins Cath's journey into two nightmare worlds. By day she deals with the topsy-turvy logic and ingrown personalities at work in high finance; by night she has to watch the slow disintegration of the man she loves. In between, she must stop herself from falling apart. As the money markets hurtle towards financial meltdown, Cath faces personal disaster and a moral hazard that she cannot ignore.Kate Jennings' prose is lean yet rich in unexpected, telling detail. Tense, taut and compulsively readable, Moral Hazard is peopled by extraordinary characters and informed by a mordant, witty intelligence.
infallible. At some point, they always blow up.” “Taking risks is hardly new to Wall Street.” I was beginning to bridle. “The problem is size. They’re not just muddier than the Mississippi—they could fill it. There are twenty-five trillion dollars of them out there—eighty trillion dollars by 2000, easy. Bets, not investments. Gaming contracts.” Now he was hectoring me. Well, not just me but an invisible audience that no doubt included the SEC, the Fed, Robert Rubin, everyone. “Someone has to
aimlessness, he would declare he’d done enough, and the return journey to the bed began. Friends visited, and he was cheerful, professing delight at seeing them, talking about future projects, important phone calls he’d received, a book in the works, a show at a gallery, filling in the gaps in his thoughts with orotund repetitions. Confabulating, as neurologists call it. He was careful not to leave his chair to show his infirmity. After they were gone, he invariably asked, “Who was that?” To my
/ And you’re dangerously near me / I get ideas, I get ideas… 14 “Did you know,” said Mike, “that Mussolini admired American corporations?” I hadn’t known. I had commented on the stifling, autocratic structure of corporations, ironic, at least for me, because I sprinkled speeches with references to a flat hierarchy and a collegiate, consensus-driven, meritocratic culture. Tra-la. That morning, to illustrate the suppleness of our corporate hierarchy, Niedecker’s CEO had turned to me and said,
attempt. “I don’t remember the rest of that piece of verse, except for this: ‘The way some people sing whiskily, / Bankers are singing fiscally.’ Terrible rhyme, no?” Not amused. “Look, if it bothers you so much, go and work for one of those watchdog groups that monitor the markets. Or a left-wing think-tank.” The financial world isn’t a monolith of laissez-faire-ism any more than every Japanese was in favor of entering the Second World War; voices of wisdom and moderation exist, as they do
After nearly two decades of Wall Street bonuses, he could’ve opened a Porsche dealership himself. 24 A Sunday morning. With the assistance of a male aide, I loaded Bailey into his wheelchair, a model named Everest by its manufacturers. “How about bagels at that nice café up the street? Best bagels in New York City,” I said, bending to make sure his feet were squarely placed on the fold-down footrests. Excellent bagels and wheelchair accessible. “We haven’t got any money,” Bailey said.