Money That's What I Want

The Protestant Ethic emphasizes grace. Thus, Max Weber wrote his famous tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. There are the saved and the damned, but grace is less the product of deeds than predestination. Of course, the paradox is that everyone works hard to join the elect, and so the cart is inadvertently put before the horse. Fortune in our society is often predicated on the notion of deferred pleasure, of thrift and probity. To this extent, the failure of the stimulus package can be looked at as an extension of the Protestant Ethic. As the Times recently reported, large corporations like Microsoft are able to borrow enormous amounts of money at extraordinarily low interest rates, but the extra borrowing is not creating jobs (“Cheap Debt for Corporations Fails to Spur Economy,” NYT, 10/3/10). The rich are getting richer, with many firms stockpiling cash and taking a wait-and-see attitude, while the have-nots who once financed the sub-prime mortgage boom are caught up in a catch-22 situation in which stimulus-supported banks are stockpiling cash while paying negligible interest rates to depositors. It’s a vicious cycle, with rumors of Stimulus II following the original much the way Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps takes up where the first film left off—in both cases with a similar cast lead characters. Stimulus II, if it comes to pass, would begin just as TARP, the troubled asset relief program that was enacted at the height of the meltdown, comes to an end. Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door to protest the selling of indulgences, whereby those who sinned could purchase relief. But perhaps the authors of a new stimulus package should consider the pardon model. For instance, some sinners whose homes had been foreclosed are about to receive relief because of the widespread impropriety of much of the paperwork that accompanied foreclosure notices, including improper notarization (“The Gathering Storm Over Foreclosures,” NYT, l0/4/10). The result is that the housing market may finally find a bottom from which the only direction is up. The belief in reason is also another characteristic of the Protestant Ethic, but sometimes, good things come in unlikely and ultimately irrational-seeming packages.

Trading Places

“The Tradeworx computers get price quotes from the exchanges, decide how to trade, complete a risk analysis and generate a buy or sell order—in 20 microseconds,” reported the Times in a piece about the new phenomenon of high speed trading (“Speedy New Traders Make Waves Far From Wall St,” NYT, May 16, 2010). Whether you follow Warren Buffett’s notion of the equity based trade or the Soros model based on reflexivity, everything is a little faster these days. It’s like running on a waxed kitchen floor. At some point you’re going to slip and fall. That’s what happened to the market on May 6, when it fell l000 points in a matter of minutes. Of course, everything’s relative in a multiverse where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider recreates Higgs Bosons and other particles that sprang to life a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The whole structure of the financial world has changed. Blue-blood families, who might have held stocks in companies like Union Carbide, Exxon or IBM for generations, now pride themselves on holding portfolios for over five seconds. Whether you study a company’s spread sheet and involve yourself in a firm’s business, like Buffett did when he purchased his preferred position in Goldman Sachs, or you deal with currency fluctuations and market forces as Soros has done, in the brave new world of finance your relationship with management will be considered long term if you hold a stock for over thirty seconds. But as seasoned high-speed traders learn in their relatively short half-lives, much can happen in a short period of time, a premise that comes to high finance from pornography, where the short loop in which the beginning, middle and end of a sex act are condensed into a single action long ago replaced the more leisurely story lines of Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat. Yes, the old Newtonian trading, where investors purchased stock and actually received certificates that they put in their vaults, is a vestige of an age when people read books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses.