Moral Hazard Read Free

corporate henchmen are all smiles: upbeat, encouraging, patient. And no doubt sigh with relief once we are out of sight. One can never be too careful.
    Mike was unusual in another respect: he didn’t use jargon or clichés. Agent Orange words. “Liquidity” and “transparency,” yes, but not “going forward,” “proactive,” “paradigm,” “incentivize,” “added value,” “comfort level,” “outside the box,” “a rising tide lifts all boats.” He didn’t even use “fungible,” a word that was enjoying a big vogue. So I ventured a last, offhand question. “What do you
really
think of derivatives?” Worth a try.
    He quickened. “The mathematics can be awesome. You have to
admire
the mathematics. And they
can
be an excellent risk-management tool…” He trailed off, obviously wondering whether he should continue. “Well, it helps to look at derivatives like atoms. Split them one way and you have heat and energy—useful stuff. Split them another way, and you have a bomb. You have to understand the subtleties.”
    Understand the subtleties. God is in the details. Cracks me up.

3
    Cath. That’s my name. At the time of the events I am recounting, I was in my forties: bedrock feminist, unreconstructed left-winger, with literary tastes that ran to recherché writers like Charlotte Mew and Ivy Compton-Burnett. You will perhaps know of Charlotte Mew: a melancholic Georgian poet who, beset by financial problems and bouts of insanity, drank a bottle of lysol. Dame Ivy—peer of Henry Green, Sylvia Townsend-Warner, and Molly Keane, immediate ancestor of Muriel Spark—wrote abrupt, conversational novels about small cruelties and how power, even in minute amounts, can be abused.
    Ivy, Henry, Sylvia, Molly, Muriel: they assumed intelligence—emotional as well as intellectual—on the part of the reader. I shouldn’t write of Muriel Spark in the past tense, but she is no different from the others, grievously neglected, well on her way to being reduced to marginalia, cult status.
    I digress, although it amuses me to see an old passion flicker to life. I was attempting to describe myself. Not my physical appearance—you can imagine that for yourself—but my beliefs. Opinions. Prejudices. These, formed by the politics of the sixties and firmly held, were not so much unexamined as untested.
    You can guess them: affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose, a judicious redistribution of wealth, parity for everyone in all things. I was against the obvious: capital punishment, egregious pollution, trickle-down economics. Absurd exercise, I know. I might as well say I am for ice cream and against monogrammed hand towels.
You
write down your beliefs without sounding pompous.
    Another try. I was for civility and a sense of humor, against anyone who had stopped listening, receiving, changing. People who had no
give.
Of course, I disapproved of bankers, on principle. Not that I knew any. Until this job, I had worked and made friends with people who shared my views. Mostly moral, mostly kind.
    An unlikely candidate, then, for the job of executive speechwriter, to be putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables. “ SAT word!” “$10 word!” they would write in the margins of draft speeches. There were some inexplicable exceptions, such as the aforementioned “fungible” or, a more recent example, “granular,” which, having gained acceptance against all odds, were clutched as tenaciously as a child might a favorite toy.
    An unlikely candidate, too, to be working for a firm whose culture had been shaped by the kind of drive required to shave dimes off dollars without actually making something useful or entertaining, something that could be touched or enjoyed. A firm whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas. A firm where women were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag.
    But you are meeting me at a