poetry Archives - Bankers Anonymous

November 25, 2016November 25, 2016

Giving Thanks for Parks Stars Boots and Duct Tape

I took my 11 year-old for two nights of backcountry camping in Zion National Park in Utah earlier this Fall. A few hours into our hike – still some ways away from our first campsite – the sole of my right boot began to rip. At first, the flip-flop-slap of the loosened rubber hitting the cardboard shoe-bottom was amusing to my daughter and annoying to me, but still workable.

The further we went into our canyon hike, however, the more panic started to creep in. Without a workable sole, hiking on the canyon rock and cactus scrub of Zion becomes impossible, exacerbated by the weight of a backcountry pack with three days of provisions, for two people. Worse, we couldn’t find the trail turnoff for our campsite at dusk, which started to freak out my daughter. We were out of cellphone range and had passed no one on the trail. Finally, with dark descending and still at least a mile from our un-findable site, the sole of my boot came completely off. We stopped right there, in the middle of the canyon trail, for the night.

Now, I’m an experienced camper, and I have put up our tent dozens of times. But likely flustered by my boot catastrophe, I spent the next ten minutes flailing in the dark, and failing to raise the tent. This made it worse for my daughter. She worried about our missing campsite and the lack of shelter. I worried that I’d have to end our trip early, walking out to the road in defeat on cardboard, doubled-up socks, and a bloody foot. At that moment, nothing was ok and I was the worst Dad ever.

But without a tent, we had a clear view of the stars that night.

In the morning, before the sun broke over the canyon walls, we woke up in our sleeping bags in the middle of the trail, a surprisingly soft and sandy spot. My daughter and I shared an apple. Things started to go well.

Sunset in Southwest Desert at #Zion. Survived!

A photo posted by Michael Taylor (@michael_taylor0331) on Oct 9, 2016 at 2:56pm PDT

My little MacGyver pulled out her roll of blue glitter princess duct tape and wrapped it round and around my boot. We couldn’t know if it would hold for two more days of hiking. For the moment, I could walk. By midday we found our campsite after a morning of retracing steps, wandering around and losing and finding the trail a few times. I told my daughter that the word “Zion” meant “Place that cannot be found” in the language of the native people of the area. She sort of believed me.

Would you believe that the duct tape held, only just barely, over the next two days? On the third morning, during the hike out of the canyon, my left boot began to fall apart, too. There was no more duct tape, and the tape on the right boot threatened to pull apart at any moment. But it held, and I’m very grateful.

Stars in Big Bend

If I’m being totally honest, cultivating gratefulness feels very difficult right now. I don’t know about your screens, but everything on my screens suggests W.B. Yeats’ Second Coming set to the freakish rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

To help us cultivate an attitude of gratefulness during this Thanksgiving week, my wife and both daughters and I travelled to Big Bend National Park in West Texas. Usually I’m a finance guy, but the out-of-doors puts money and materialism in its proper place.

Out hiking and camping, my material wants reduce to sturdy (new!) hiking boots, sufficient hydration and a starry cloudless sky.

In Big Bend, I am especially grateful for the stars. Is there a clearer place on the planet for stargazing?

Each time I go camping I recite Ralph Waldo Emerson from his book Nature:

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

What are my political worries compared to the timeline of the stars? I am grateful to be able to witness the city of God above. Each and every night, too!

Our National Parks

One other thing for which I’m extremely grateful: National Parks! Whether you prefer your government big or small, this is government at its finest. Park Rangers greet us in their pressed khakis and hats. You pay your affordable campsite fee by putting bills into a little envelope and grabbing a tag. Trusting. Retro. Peaceful.

Last month the San Antonio-based poet Naomi Shihab Nye published a poem about Big Bend, one of fifty works commissioned by the National Park Service to celebrate the parks in every state.

Midway through the poem she writes:

“Big bend in thinking – why did you dream you needed so much? Water, one small pack. Once I lay on my back on a concrete table the whole day and read a book. A whole book, and it was long. The day I continue to feast on.”

The poem ends,

“You will not find a prime minister in Big Bend, a president, or even a candidate, beyond the lion, the javelina, the eagle lighting on its nest.”

Thanksgiving is my favorite national holiday. I am grateful for my hiking boots, a starry sky, and the national parks.

Hiking boots again

Now then, we were speaking about the great things about our country. I mean, I’m sorry, my boots.

A photo posted by Michael Taylor (@michael_taylor0331) on Oct 9, 2016 at 2:50pm PDT

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Can you walk without your sole? Nothing like this has ever happened in all my years of hiking and camping. I’m especially grateful for a creative duct-tape solution from my unexpectedly resourceful kid.

What happened in Zion is all a metaphor, but also has the advantage of being one hundred percent true. We all need the humility and perspective gained by looking up, before going to sleep, at the city of God above. By the grace of blue glitter princess duct tape, barely holding everything together, I hope we’re going to be ok.

Please see related posts:

Thanksgiving message: Money Isn’t Everything, It’s Nothing

A Thanksgiving Plan for Christmas: Feeling Broke, Feeling Whole

Book Review: The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye

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September 19, 2016September 19, 2016

Wall Street Poems and Crimes

I recently participated in a poetry reading on the themes of money, “the market”, and values.[1] The reading inspired in me two things. First, a wistful musing on the value of words. Second, a deeply unpopular view of supposed Wall Street crimes that will make you hate me.

Wistful musing

One question occurred to me before and during the reading: What monetary value do words have?

Few poets, I assume, denigrate words by assigning a specific monetary value like we would to coins or currency. How base, to assign a financial measurement, a weight to these infinitely flexible materials of art!

And yet, what poet has not at some point lamented the lack of financial reward for her craft? Ever the contrarian, I decided to look for the most valuable word combinations on the planet.

At the reading, I recalled this semi-infamous piece of poetry from the year 2000.

“LFMN at $4. I can’t believe what a POS[2] that thing is. Shame on me/us for giving them any benefit of the doubt.

ATHM is such a piece of crap

No helpful news to relate [regarding ICGE], I’m afraid. This has been a disaster – There really is no floor to the stock”

Those lines were worth $104 million in 2002.

The author, Henry Blodget, personally paid $4 million and pled guilty to securities fraud and agreed to a lifetime ban from the industry. The other $100 million came from his former employer Merrill Lynch.

That proved to be a valuable word combination indeed.[3]

Here’s another centaur work, half-poetry, half-prose from 2007, written by Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, a Goldman VP who structured mortgage CDOs:

“More and more leverage in the system, the whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab…standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

And another from the same author:

“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight…it’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own inventor ;)”] [4]

Those words, coupled with a few others memorialized in emails and congressional exhibits, cost Goldman Sachs $550 million to settle a civil lawsuit in 2010.

Those are some of the most valuable word combinations ever, no?

Tourre himself paid $850,000 and later enrolled in an Economics PhD program at the University of Chicago.[5]

Prosecution by words

One of the tropes of our post-Great Recession era is how disappointingly few – ok, the number is zero – executives of major Wall Street were prosecuted or went to jail. Markets crashed, trillions in dollar value disappeared, hundred of billions of taxpayer money bailed out Too Big To Fail Banks, millions lost their jobs, and then: nobody went to jail.

You might have your explanation for that result. I might have mine.

You might see the lack of criminal prosecutions of financial executives as a sign that “the system is rigged” in favor of the rich and powerful.

I don’t disagree that the world favors the rich and powerful. This rigging includes aspects of our own modern criminal justice system. But I disagree that this explains the lack of Wall Street prosecutions.

Ok, now you’re going to hate me. The real reason no one went to jail is because Wall Street executives didn’t actually commit any crimes. The cases against Blodget and Tourre – the finance poets quoted above – were absurd. These were mid-level folks doing their job, which often meant selling products they weren’t fully enamored with. Every finance person I’ve ever known, myself included, has done this. I assume most salespeople, in any industry, have done this. I mean, have you tried to buy a car, ever? The mistake Blodget and Tourre made was two-fold: First, having independent thoughts about their products, and second, writing them down.

We have developed a regulatory tradition in the United States of punishing Wall Street through embarrassing email disclosure.

The pattern goes like this:

The market crashes in a particular sector. Like tech in 2000. Or mortgage CDOs in 2008
The public seeks a scapegoat for their losses
Prosecutors and regulators subpoena all emails of Wall Street professionals in that investment sector
Some 29-year-old Vice President at a major Wall Street firm is found to have written an unwise disparaging comment about an investment in that sector two years ago.
Wall Street firms’ lawyers humbly approach prosecutors and ask “how much?”
Wall Street firm pays hundreds of millions, maybe even a few billion, says sorry, VP is fired.
The public is mollified, Wall Street firm is relieved, the shares rally.

The fact that Fabulous Fab knew his CDOs were ridiculous derivatives doesn’t distinguish him from many other salespeople in many industries selling products they don’t have 100 percent confidence in. The fact that Henry Blodget knew the internet dogs his company touted were flawed makes him insightful rather than criminal, in my book.

The tradition of settlement-by-embarrassing-email leaves me dissatisfied. I’m embarrassed for the poor 29-year-old Vice President who didn’t heed the very clear order from training class to never write down anything that you don’t want to read in the headlines of a daily newspaper. I’m annoyed with the lawyers at the enforcement agency, who rely on a “gotcha” email to win a big financial settlement with Wall Street – in a way that often misses the bigger picture.

Gotcha emails distract from this bigger picture: It should not be a crime to express doubts about your product. Any intelligent person who spends time among risky investments constantly questions their investments, their own products included And yes, I understand this is a deeply unpopular view.

More importantly, gotcha emails lull us into thinking that regulators are doing their jobs. They keep us from asking important questions like how to shrink Too Big To Fail banks. Those who wrote the costly poems above no longer work on Wall Street, for example, but the sudden demise of those banks might still crash our system.

And finally, one more question: why aren’t ordinary poets paid more for their words?

I just also needed an excuse to post this video.

[1] If you’re curious, the main reading was from The Market Wonders by Susan Briante, which I reviewed on my site.

[2] “Piece of Slime?” Who knows?

[3] As a footnote to the story and in the interest of full disclosure, Blodget later became editor-in-chief of the successful finance tabloid Business Insider, which used to pick up my writing online.

[4] Another word crime: Fabulous Fab misuses the reference. C’mon man, Frankenstein is the name of the inventor, not the monster.

[5] In the interest of full disclosure, I worked at the same firm and tried my best to sell Mortgage CDOs a few years before that, but I never overlapped with Fabulous Fab.

A versions of this ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle

Please see related post:

Book Review of The Market Wonders by Susan Briante

Four Factors Favoring Fabulous Fab

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August 30, 2016

Book Review: The Market Wonders by Susan Briante

I met Susan Briante at a poetry reading recently. It was her reading, from her book of poems The Market Wonders, in particular. I had a sense that I could learn quite a bit from talking with her.

A poetry book about The Dow, and market values, and human values? How could I resist reading and reviewing it?

In the first poem “Toward The Poetics of the Dow,” Briante notes that “I wish more poets would write about money.” I agree. It seems fair to respond also that more finance people should write about poetry.

My own comfort with commenting on poetry fades fast, when we move above the A.A. Milne level. Milne specifically differentiates himself in the introduction to his first book of poetry from Wordsworth, by declining to explain the background to his poetry and what he was thinking about and where he was as he wrote certain lines. Briante, on the other hand, does include helpful notes and references in the back of her book. This proves useful for people like me, who will otherwise miss the reference.

In the notes, she explains her project of recording the daily closing level of the Dow throughout 2009. From there, armed with a number (more or less arbitrary) she sought inspiration from disparate sources online and offline. Twenty-five of the poems in this book take their title from the format of “Date, Closing Level and direction of the Dow.”

The first three like that are, in order, “October 1-The Dow Closes Down 9509,” “October 6-The Dow Closes Up 9731,” and “October 14-The Dow Closes Up 10015”. You get the idea. There are twenty-five of these.

Briante writes:

“Poems should evidence some degree of control, but poets should be a little volatile. The poem is a high-risk investment, a long-term commitment. Like a big dirty city, it should make you feel

a little uncomfortable.”

Briante writes of Buddhist meditation. Drone attacks from above, police batons from the side. The heat of Texas and Arizona. Pregnancy, miscarriage, and then her daughter’s tiny form, breast-feeding. The Market as a shambling, nostalgic grandfather. Numbers in the titles, mini-poems along the bottom page like a running ticker.

The Market, as an old man, worries in one poem about falling down below the continental shelf from his excessive weight, and in another remembers a more carefree time when people made real things and he traveled the streets of Mexico City, and in a third he surveys the strip-mined earth from an airplane, just after contemplating the awful phrase ‘survived by,’ as if in an airplane crash.

Maybe my favorite appears like one of these little ticker-tape poems, although actually it’s a footnote to another poem. It is sly and horrifying.

*Can you ~~imagine~~ smell the Market picking up ~~his~~ your daughter ~~from school~~ in its teeth dragging parts of her body across a ~~playground~~ landscape touching everything he it touches as if it were a screen? See how reflective the glass, how he is an it is a we.

One obvious thing to say is that the author and I probably disagree about where on the spectrum of good and evil the invisible hand of capitalism falls. I’m enough of an Adam Smithian to think the thoughtlessness of The Market, allocating both fairly and unfairly, regardless of the moral preference of many, is also a magical cornucopia of efficiency, innovation, waste reduction, and wealth creation. Briante, I gather, dwells more on the ambiguities inherent in the different meaning we assign to the word “Values.” She is more likely to point out the awful history of children’s insurance, the compromises we make with the military-industrial complex through banal bourgeois decisions about “security,” and remind us of hungry children at the border, as she does all three in the extended poem “Mother is Marxist.”

But even if we differ, I think we’re both interested in similar things. I’m an EX-banker for a reason, which is to say I appreciate The Market but do not want it to dominate my life, because it is a cruel master. It lacks, well, poetry.

Briante, I imagine, does not know about credit default swaps but wants to know more. She wants to meditate, and maybe guide other poetic types, to meditate on what it means to be immersed in a market economy, to hear – even unwillingly – about peripatetic fluctuations in the Dow and have a view on that. Is it all arcane numerology, as it may appear at first? Is there meaning? Or is it all – as I’m fairly convinced by this awesome Onion Article – mostly just noise?¹

Please see related posts:

All Bankers Anonymous Book Reviews In One Place!

Not Cheering a Record-Setting Dow

Dow Hits New Highs Part I – Inevitability

Dow Hits New Highs Part II – The Future

Dow Hits New Highs Part III – What To Do Next

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I always look for any chance I get to re-post this Onion Article, which is among my very most all-time favorites, and kind of sums up much of the news coverage from the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex. You should click on it if you haven’t seen it before. ↩

November 30, 2015

Feeling Broke Feeling Whole

As a rule, I prefer having more money rather than less. I share this preference with 99.97 percent of basically everybody.

Especially in this period between Thanksgiving and Christmas we feel the need for more money most acutely.

The American poet Marshall Mathers – in his well-known Cri de Coeur “Mockingbird” – aptly captured his shame at Christmas time – lacking enough money to pay for any present for his daughter Hailie. Mathers managed to escape poverty through the commercial success of his poetry – and a now-mythical timely visit to fellow-poet Andre Young in California – but he continues to mine the shame and anger of those early penniless years throughout his entire oeuvre.

My life diverges in important ways from Mathers’, but the theme of spiritual opportunity through financial struggle – especially at the holidays – is what I plan to talk about today.

What I am leading up to is the contrarian statement that occasionally a lack of money, even at Christmas, can be a blessing in disguise. We don’t want less money. We’re not seeking less money. But there can be a silver lining to less money.

Of course we’re all familiar with the idea that money isn’t everything. We even occasionally remember that concept during the holidays, despite the crush of commercialism between Black Friday and the post-Christmas sales. No doubt everyone recalls O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi. Which is cool.

But if you really want to feel better about the season, check out my idea below, inspired by my own lack of money.

College

In college I was, appropriately, broke.[1]

My money problems at the time, however, pushed me to devise a clever, self-serving proposal that I made to my entire family. My self-serving solution, in turn, inspired the best family Christmases ever.

eminem — Just a meta M and M joke picture

Perhaps if you’re feeling broke around the Holidays you’d like to try this at home as well.

My proposal

I wrote a letter to my family, around Thanksgiving-time 1994, requesting that we call a moratorium on purchasing presents for each other at Christmas.

In my letter, however, I emphasized that I didn’t want to leave my family with misery and emptiness on Christmas Day. Instead, I proposed we randomly pick one family member’s name out of a hat and each have the responsibility for making something by hand for that one person. For the rest of the family members – including between spouses – we were not to give any other gifts.

You see, my older brother and sister, already married at the time[2] and better established in the world, could afford to buy everyone in the family pretty good presents. That put me at a huge disadvantage. Even a nice pair of socks would have meant spending money I didn’t have, while expensive socks for everyone in the family would have broken my bank. I needed this moratorium.

The only stipulation for the one gift was that it must be primarily home-made. The essence of the gift could not be bought anywhere.

At first, since my main goal was to save myself from spending money I didn’t have, I didn’t think much of the ‘home-made’ gift thing. It just seemed thrifty and affordable, and therefore worthy of proposing.
I think my Mom came up with the beautiful internal-family marketing hook, however, that started to transform my self-serving idea into greatness.

The home-made gift would be called the ‘spiritual gift.’

See, ‘Spiritual Christmas’ is a genius idea. And, as it turned out, an apt description.

Spiritual Christmas

Would you like to cry happy tears on Christmas morning? How about, if you have kind of a WASP-y New England-y non-emotive family?

Try making something by hand, write a note about it, and then read that note out loud to your family member in front of everyone. Guaranteed instant waterworks.

More than twenty years later, I still remember the spiritual gifts in those early years.

Order extra tissues

My brother-in-law cooked a meal in tribute to my mom (the matriarch) and her usual role as chef extraordinaire to her entire brood.

My brother wrote an emotional letter to my father, comparing him to a high-end bottle of scotch. I know that sounds very WASPy, but believe me, it was awesome. He said all the things you’d typically hear in a eulogy, but my Dad was able to hear it. A distinct advantage, by the way.

Sometimes I misfired, like when I promised to build a website for my mom in 1996, but just couldn’t figure it out. Not so good at the coding here. Neither am I a crafts-y person, but I do like to write. In reading my gifts out loud during Spiritual Christmases inevitably I’d break down by the second line, and the rest of the room quickly followed my lead.

I mean, how often do you tell your family members exactly and directly and in detail how much you love them, and say it out loud for others to hear?

These days

I hope you’re not disappointed to read that when my nieces, nephews and then my own children came along, we reverted back to a good old-fashioned ‘Murican Christmas, full of American Girl dolls, action figures, and materialism. Still, I firmly believe Spiritual Christmas is the best Christmas.

If you feel broke, try this.

Or even better, if you’d like to feel whole again: Declare a moratorium on store-bought gifts, announce it’s spiritual gift time only. Let the happy weeping begin.

[1] Democrats and Republicans, old and young, North and South, I think we can all agree on one thing: rich college kids are the worst. Amirite? Just classic movie villains.

[2] not to each other, silly.

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May 15, 2014May 15, 2014

Time out for Poetry: Ithaka

The students in my Personal Finance course took their final exam yesterday, and many of them will graduate from college very shortly.

One of the themes of the course, of course, was ‘getting wealthy.’ In addition, that’s the theme of the book I’m trying to write. One of my friendly early readers of my book proposal draft mentioned a poem this week that seems apt: For college graduates starting on a journey, for people trying to get wealthy, and for anyone else.

Ithaka

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy –
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

When you set out for Ithaka

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don’t in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn’t anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn’t deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you’ll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

–Constantine P. Cavafy

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March 26, 2013December 7, 2013

Financial Time Out – For Poetry

In honor of the 4.5 years since Warren Buffett showed us all how its done, in the midst of the near-implosion of the financial universe, and in light of the announcement today about how he continues to reap the benefits of his investments, an oldy but goody, “If.”

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

By Rudyard Kipling, 1865–1936

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Tag: poetry