brain capacity gimme

--------------- [continuing:  "For the Love of Money" -- written by Sam Polk, Jan. 18, 2014 NYTimes] --------------- But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth.





I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations.  Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea.  "But isn't it better for the system as a whole?" I asked. 


The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look.  I remember his saying, "I don't have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole.  All I'm concerned with is how this affects our company."


I felt as if I'd been punched in the gut.  He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.


From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. 


I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash.  I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes.  These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses.  Ever see what a drug addict is like when he's used up his junk? 


He'll do anything -- walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma -- to get a fix.  Wall Street was like that. 


In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in "The Wire" when the heroin runs out.


I'd always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me.  I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life.  I knew that wasn't fair; that wasn't right.  Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers.  I had marketable talents.  But in the end I didn't really do anything.  I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist.  Not so nurse practitioners. 


What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.


I had recently finished Taylor Branch's three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind.












I'd told myself that if I'd been alive in the '60s, I would have been on that bus.


But I was lying to myself.





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