Liars poke her

Cities ngmi

This week, following leadings of the Holy Spirit, I’ve watched “Margin Call” and “The Big Short.” Watching these films on the 3x5 note card screen on the phone that has served me for almost a year convinces me that civilisation actually is collapsing from a paucity of decency.

Freedom, justice, truth, these are no longer fundamental values in America’s big cities. Nobody in New York City (Orthanc on Hudson), in the San Francisco/Arrakis (complete with rampant sandworm Salesforce tower) bay area, in Hollywood, in the District of Corruption (aka, Mordor-on-the-Potomac, thanks Skip), in the City of London, nor anyone in Vatican City has any decency. Therefore, these cities will all collapse, and the world will be shed of their evil, soon.

Here is Dezeen’s great image of Salesforce tower looking like an Arrakis sandworm surging up over the city. Link to their site if you want by clicking the image or here.

Once there was a dream that was America. It was based on the intention of a small group of men keen to set brushfires in the minds of the rest, to paraphrase Sam Adams. Yes, there really was a man named Sam Adams, somewhat before the beer brand took his name and urinated on his heritage with approximately the same disdain as the people of Taxachusetts spit on the struggle to keep weapons and weapons stores from the British redcoats. Lexington and Concord are examples of how Americans no longer bother with decency. When their police go door to door to confiscate weapons, do you suppose they’ll find a dozen rifles, or only half a dozen? Hard to tell, some people have hidden depths. So do some basements.

Arrakis, Mordor, Orthanc, Hollyweird, London, Vatican, these are freemason temples to evil. They are Babylon and they are falling.

Spoiler Alert

What are these films about? Well, “Margin Call” is about terrible people with disgusting personal habits treating each other like garbage. They connive to “lay off” a large part of their office full of asset traders. And what kind of assets do these jerks trade? They are shown trading mortgage backed securities. Not only are they the shifty sort who would buy, swap, and sell these things, but also they bought huge “tranches” of mortgages which (after thirty days of massaging the numbers, lying about the underlying securities, and getting liars at ratings agencies like Standard & Poors and Moodys to take fees for AAA ratings) they then turn out onto the street for buys, swaps, and sells. Whee.

Demi Moore plays the plucky female lead who makes important managerial decisions while overseeing an office full of men who aren’t fit to shine her shoes. Yeah, thanks early wokesters at Hollyweird. At least they don’t have her portrayed as an overseer with a bull whip, in the version I saw. She actually fires the head of risk management who was just on the verge of discovering the trading house’s high risk portfolio is deeply underwater. I assume this trading house portrayed in the film is meant to be one of the survivors of the 2007-9 financial collapse. So, it’s probably a bank, which under the Clinton-era evisceration of Glass Steagall was pretty much able to invest depositor funds in garbage, lie about it, sell it to other disgusting trading houses, and pay huge bonuses to everyone involved. And if depositors and 401Ks and pension funds were wiped out and grandma was forced to work a double shift as a big box store greeter, hey, nobody in Orthanc on Hudson cares.

Kevin Spacey plays a head of trading who is meant to be a sympathetic character. Sorry, Kev, not your best work. Stick with the murderous psychopaths in shiny outfits, it’s where you belong. You know he’s supposed to be worthy of your trust and sympathy because his dog is dying and he’s big sad. Toward the end of the film he is busy burying the dog’s body in the side yard of the home he used to own with his estranged wife, who hears the digging and comes to announce she’s called the cops. Angst and drang follow. Yay.

There’s some Corbin Bernsen look-alike who plays the local head of the company and some Euro-trash accented actor who plays the top dog. I’m sure these actors have names, but, sorry guys, your careers peaked before my interest was piqued. Not-Corbin plays a character named Cohen, because, let’s face it, the film is set in New York City and Hollyweird was still allowed to acknowledge that some people with Jewish names are involved in finance. Don’t mention it to the communists at the Southern Poverty Law Centre or they’ll say bad things about you. They might even add you to a “watch list.” I’ve been on those lists, and they never gave me a watch, so I don’t get it. jk lol

It turns out that risk-analyst-with-Anglo-Saxon-name has discovered that all of the risk positions are untenable. Gosh. But he’s been fired by plucky female lead Demi, so he’s being escorted by security out of the building. Remember these were the days when Ed Snowden would smuggle thumb drives past Pentagon-level security (which means highly trained and thoroughly bored) by hiding a thumb drive in his Rubik’s cube, tossing that to the guard, and walking through the metal detector, then getting back the toy with its purloined data. Or so we’re told.

Storm Saxon is big mad because he’s been fired, but was always very loyal. The first half of the movie is all about how cut-throat finance is, how nobody cares at all about anyone else, how they would each happily force their grandparents into indentured servitude for the price of a cup of coffee, and how that’s just how things have to be. Meanwhile, he has an enormous prop with him, in the elevator, holding his two boxes of office desk junk, accompanied by what has to be the dimmest wit in company security, and a fellow risk analyst played by some young guy we’d call an ingenu if we were in France, sees him getting in the elevator to be frog marched out of the office. Loyalty is a traditional American value that nobody on Wall Street wants to hear from ever again.

They talk for half a minute, and security guy does nothing while the largest prop thumb drive in cinematic history gets handed by fired Storm Saxon to dorky-looking ingenu. Well, as long as the company databases being smuggled out of the building are actually handed over at the last minute, I guess that’s okay. No cavity search ensues, which strikes me as unlikely in today’s corporate environment, but it was a more innocent era. I guess. Or cynical in other ways anyhow. “Be careful,” says Storm Saxon, while the ship that sailed has hit an offshore reef and sunk.

Dorky nerd ingenu works late and figures out that the entire bank is about to go bankrupt unless they unload all their worthless securities, including the unboxed mortgages not yet wrapped in pretty ribbons and lies about bespoke tranche opportunities. His remaining colleagues have gone off to drink away their sorrows because they’ll probably never again encounter half the men and women who were fired that day. So he calls them on their company-provided cell phones and convinces them to come back to the office.

They proceed to come to grips with the really sad data and kick the problem upstairs. Plucky female lead and not-Corbin return to the office to get a sense of just how big the disaster is, and who to blame. Sales guy with dying dog is going to be needed in later scenes, so plucky female is thrown under the bus. (We used to say “thrown to the dogs” but I guess Jezebel is being repurposed as some sort of heroine to the demon worshippers, so we’re not supposed to remind people of the Old Testament prophecies of God through Elijah. Meh.) The not-Corbin can’t take responsibility for the size of cluster-fornication involved, so a helicopter lands with Euro-trash alpha male.

We get to laugh about the dorky ingenu because his character turns out to have actually been a rocket scientist. But he gave up his dreams of space travel because finance pays big, and, numbers are all alike. (Mathematics, though, isn’t, and that isn’t mentioned because Hollywood. None of the really tasty mathematics are in finance, but screen writers never know anything.) So after this is mentioned in some tense board room gatherings filmed in pre-dawn lighting (because who in finance wants to be able see inside a board room? idgi) everyone believes they are in trouble.

Then not-Corbin convinces dying dog guy to go against all his moral certitude and agree to completely screw over the other side of every transaction, for an entire trading day, so they can be out ahead of the toilet flush. We actually get a few minutes of the dying dog guy trying to assert the kind of rectitude that nobody at any Wall Street bank has ever had. Yeah, Kev, not your best work. I can see where you tried to sell it, but you yourself hadn’t bought it, so it fell flat.

Euro-trash organises the big bonuses for all the traders and the dying dog guy, holds plucky female lead and Storm Saxon captive to a million bucks for Storm and 69% of that for Demi for the trading day in a green room with ugly lounge chairs so “word doesn’t leak out” and all is well. The bank survives and Euro-trash has the unsatisfying denouement scene at the end of the film enjoying a nice meal in the executive dining room, to which dorky ingenu is now given access. Millions of Americans are financially destroyed and millions of Americans are foreclosed upon but the robo-signing scandal and its eventual cover-up by congress and Obomber get zero screen time. It’s a happy ending, folks. The banking scum survive to defraud another day.

“The Big Short” is similar, but it at least takes some time to poke fun, play some death metal and other fun tunes, and mercilessly mock the filth in fine suits pretending that “society values” their work. Yeah, grifter, because grifting at scale must be valuable. Get bent.

Christian Bale, whose work in “American Psycho” makes Kevin Spacey look like the dad next door (or the BTK killer, idk) and whose Batman in “Dark Knight” and its reprise, “Dark Knight Rising,” were best in class, plays the moderately autistic one-eyed Michael Burry. Burry figures out that mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations are garbage. And to his enduring credit, takes a risk with about a billion dollars of assets under management and makes enormous returns for his investors by the end of the story.

Meanwhile, yeah, the world is full of blindness. “The Big Short” actually portrays the lady at the ratings agency (and all lying ratings agencies are alike to me, but I think she was with lack of Standards and Poor people) wearing paper eye doctor shades, nearly blind, and happy to confess that if her ratings agency didn’t give AAA ratings to garbage collections of dreck, the banks would go “just down the street” to Moody’s to, I guess, be a bit moodier.

It really is a metaphor. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, Michael Burry, is king. How nice. Erasmus got nothing. Seriously, you can apparently make an entire film on the basis of that saying from Erasmus and you don’t owe a cent in royalties. Well, until Google and Meta and Microsoft figure out a way to take everything in the public domain into their intellectual property, after which they’ll charge royalties and insist on digital rights management, and we’ll have to show you how to jail break your devices. Again. Still.

Of the two films, I would recommend watching “The Big Short,” so I’ll spend less time eviscerating it. Let’s just say that the heroes in the film spend time figuring out that there really is a housing market bubble, that was blown big by all the revised lending rules to comply with Clinton-era shenanigans so that poor people could rent houses from wealthy landlords who didn’t qualify for any of the mortgage loans, and then the heroes spend time positioning their money to pay off when it all comes unglued.

Bill Clinton really did ask Andrew Cuomo to pretend he knew anything about mortgage lending, and Cuomo really did make sure banks made lots more loans to people who couldn’t pay back the loans. But it’s all good because the banks had collateral in the form of homes the poor people couldn’t afford. And George W. Bush didn’t care, about anything, as long as his buddies in Carlyle Group got to sell electrocuting portable showers to the military and his buddies Cheney and Rumsfeld got to make huge profits. Cheney probably stole a couple of nuclear weapons when the opportunity arose, but then had to spend a few weeks with no actual heart while the Chinese government matched him to some Falun Gong prisoner or whatever is needed so very wealthy people get the organ transplants they crave.

So the genuine article global financial collapse took place under the blind oversight of the younger Bush administration. None of the people he had regulating the banks were worth a fart in the wind. “The Big Short” portrays an Insecurity and Exchange Commission regulator lounging at a pool at a Las Vegas super-hotel during some big conference of credit default swap profiteers. She’s not there to regulate the financial industry. SEC lawyers are portrayed, in this film, as whores. She is obviously having a hot romance with some banker who is going to hire her as soon as she leaves her position at the SEC. I object to this film’s portrayal of SEC bureau rats. Obviously they are not as decent or worthy of admiration as call girls, who actually work hard for the money. Oh, it’s fiction, but based on a true story. “Tell us what you really think” is a laugh line in the film. Not no more.

There’s another moment when one of the slightly less-autistic finance guys, played by Steve Carell who you’ll remember as the most important green screen war correspondent for The Daily Show (1999-2005), is having a conversation with a stripper in Miami. He’s in Miami to confirm his investment group’s suspicions that there is a housing market bubble. He’s talking to the stripper because the more mercenary of two mortgage brokers they interview is convinced that the big money in mortgage lending is with strippers who, as he claims, are always cash rich and concentration poor. And because the mortgage broker is mercenary, he knows he can skin them for higher interest rates and get a better deal when he sells their mortgages to be packaged up, slapped with a triple-A credit rating, and uses his bonus pay to live on a boat with, guess what, strippers and coke. Whee. Ho-caine, with a hat tip to Dan Sullivan. Steve’s character explains to the stripper how adjustable rate mortgages work, and what happens when the rate adjusts. It’s a fun moment.

Then, at last, there’s a scene where Brad Pitt, portraying a grizzled veteran of finance who has left the industry, but is called back in to help a friend qualify for big dog money to make these important short trades, says something meaningful. It’s probably due to the age difference between the two films how they portray the filthy scum who screwed the economy into the ground with an auger, that “The Big Short,” made in 2015, actually felt the need to put a few seconds of homeless camps on screen. “Margin Call” released in 2011 has no time for anyone who isn’t a millionaire. Screen time is focused entirely on the stories of finance people who must be important because they are compensated so highly to dance on the backs of the poor.

Brad’s character sees his two business associates dancing with joy in the lobby of some casino hotel and chastises them. “Every 1% increase in unemployment leads to 40,000 more people die” or some platitude is emitted by the Pitt, with all the verve and pose of perspicacity that he conveyed in his debut “12 Monkeys.” He actually gets two young finance hotshots with a garage band hedge fund to think on screen for ten seconds about how ugly it is that the housing market bubble is about to burst. Millions of homes are foreclosed thanks to the robo-signing cleverness of scum filth bankers. Millions of people lose their jobs. Millions of people lose their pensions. The big joke in 2011 was that your 401k had become a 201K because it lost half its value. Such much laughter.

Brad’s character insists that celebrating their financial victory is fine but “don’t dance.” I myself, however, am with Emma Goldman. If I am not allowed to dance, you can keep your revolution.

Above is a lovely view of the evil place designed by some freemason and paid for by taxes imposed by other freemasons. Hat tip to the Free Rifleman, Skip. Image from this site.

Personal

So, here we are. We have films about the people who grifted. We have films about people who bet short and made bank. We have films about the collapse of decency. They may not be widely perceived that way, but there they are.

Not all that long ago, a man named Josiah Stamp explained how the world of banking actually works. He was a cynical man who pointed out that the lies the government pumps out as statistics are based, at their core, on the local watchman who puts down in his watch logbook whatever it is he chooses. And here is what he said about banking:

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish
to remain the slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”

It would probably be useful to mention that Stamp was talking about fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve is banker-speak, by which I mean legalese, by which I mean lies, for making loans on the money on deposit in your bank while the depositors actually think their funds are “safe” in the bank. At the level of New York banks around 2007, you could lend over 98.75% of deposited funds. Today, bankers can lend 100%, because why not? It’s not like anyone in the regulatory world is concerned. They are all just like the redhead in “The Big Short” relaxing at poolside and canoodling with the banker from the big firm with the small firmness. She’ll get hired.

Of course, here in fly-over country, things are a bit different. See, decency has not entirely evaporated in states like Kansas, where I happened to be living while banks were failing in 2008. I was there to care for my very elderly parents. And they had funds in Douglas County State Bank, which I think has since been bought, sold, renamed, and given a shiny new logo. At the time, though, it was a state-regulated bank rather than a national bank, so it had to comply with reserve requirements of the state of Kansas banking regulators. And to be fair to them, the farmers and ranchers who made up the majority of Kansas legislators until recently were convinced that the Great Depression of the 1930s arose from insufficient watching of those finance people in banking. So there was about a 40% reserve ratio kept at many of the smaller banks in Kansas. Meaning that they lent out 60% of the funds on deposit. Very few of the banks with 40% or more in reserves failed during the banking crisis. So, of course, many of them were targetted for consolidation after the reprobates in the Bush and Obomber administrations gave away trillions of dollars to protect their buddies in big finance.

We could go on and on. I could spend some time here looking at a question that has been troubling me for some months. Is Joe Biden actually America’s most corrupt president, or does that title belong to Barack? But that seems to be grist for the mill on another day. Instead, I’m going to tell you a couple of stories.

One is a story I’ve told before, so I’ll keep it brief. It’s the story of my big brother who I used to admire. You can still choose to admire him if you wish, because he retired from Citigroup around the start of 2016, and he is almost certainly worth tens of millions of dollars. He wouldn’t have any interest in lending me funds in 2017 to fight false charges brought about when my neighbour across the street SWATted me, and who can blame him? I’m a nobody in his eyes, a worthless piece of filth that he’s had to endure since I showed up in Chicago back in 1983 and put butter in my coffee because I wasn’t willing to dump aluminium oxide “creamer” in my beverage. Butter, you might know, is actual cream.

The story is my recollection of a conversation that took place in the Summer of 2009 when our dad was celebrating his 85th birthday. See, I was in town in 2009 too, because my other brothers didn’t think our parents should enjoy their twilight years in the comfort of their own home. It had value. So they wanted to move mom and dad into a nursing home. And wealthy eldest brother wouldn’t pay for in-home nursing care, but boy he was ready to cash in the family home. I decided to run my business from a house two miles from the family home, and that worked until it didn’t.

He was on the back porch in a teleconference with Vikram Pandit and the other c-suite people of Citigroup. C-suite sounds weird, and I have a master’s in business administration from Rice University. I originally figured it must have to do with the class of office space because, yes, Virginia, there are c-class offices. But, no, it has to do with the titles. Chief executive, chief financial, chief marketing, chief compliance, chief information, chief technology, officers all. The chiefs dwell in a suite of offices for chiefs. The rest of you “Indians” can be braves or squaws and they won’t care. Remember that when the head of sales for your brokerage firm is burying his dog in the side yard of his ex-wife’s home.

Brother John was chief compliance officer for Citigroup. That means you can look up the public filings of Citigroup in the EDGAR filings web site, and find out his salary and bonus in 2015, which should show how much he was rewarded for making sure that Citi “complied” with whatever regulations the government bothered to impose. And one of those regulations prior to 2008 involved the matter of transferring mortgages from the company that the home owner had signed up with into one of these towering Jenga-blocks of A, BBB, and B grade mortgage backed “securities.”

I was reasonably patient, and when he was done with his call, I asked him about what I had read in the Financial Times to the effect that Citi had been involved in tens of thousands of robo-signed mortgages in Florida. And my brother would know how many in the rest of the country. I brought it up, and he said, “Citi didn’t have as many of those as Countrywide and B of A.” Or words to about that same effect. Hey, it’s all good, bro, the other people in my industry are much bigger scumbags than my company. Whee.

The other story is more recent, because we continue to see the economic effects of these terrible people masquerading as neighbours. The last two months I’ve watched people come and go from a truck stop which has a restaurant, store, showers for rent, and lots of fuel pumps for over the road trucks and a Shell station for gasoline. It also sells propane. Nice place. Especially in a state with no sales tax.

There’s a young lady who lives in a car there. She works double shifts. The car has no front crumple zone, no left headlight, no left brake light, but it runs. As far as I can tell, she’s among the kindest, most courteous, boldest, bravest, smartest, and most beautiful women I’ve ever met. She lives in her car. Because there’s no housing in the area, due to enormous forest fires that the national government and state forestry departments did nothing to prevent and which wiped out a lot of homes in the region.

But the good news is, there are some bankers who have a mortgage backed security that they can put into a bespoke tranche opportunity and securitise with a favourable rating from a pay-as-you-go ratings agency, and guess what? They’ll be fine. Until they aren’t.

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

² And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

³ For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

⁴ And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

⁵ For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

⁶ Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

⁷ How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

⁸ Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

⁹ And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

¹⁰ Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

¹¹ And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

¹² The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

¹³ And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

¹⁴ And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.

¹⁵ The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,

¹⁶ And saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

¹⁷ For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,

¹⁸ And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

¹⁹ And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

²⁰ Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.

²¹ And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.

²² And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee;

²³ And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

²⁴ And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

You’ll recognise Revelation 18 from the King James’s translation of God’s holy bible. It’s still in the public domain, until some deviant legislator changes the laws to favour Disney or Meta or some other demon-ridden corporation. And then we’ll have to jail break our devices. Again. Still.

There’s a book about a game called liar’s poker. The book is called Liar’s Poker. You can read about it, or actually read it. I played a game of liar’s poker in a bank in Midtown. But that was long ago, in what seems like another country, and besides the other players are, well, somewhere in the world or out of it.

Liar’s poker is a game you play by glancing at the digits of the serial number of a dollar. And if you have a dollar with a bunch of the same digit, like a dollar with the serial number L22222222B or similar, you’ll do really well in the game. The game is played by saying how many of a particular digit you think are amongst all the bills being held by the players in the game. So, let’s say you say, “There are at least four 2s.” Now, the 2 is the lowest digit on the bills, having a “value” less than the 1 which is called the “ace” and less than the 0 which is called the ten. There might be people who agree that there are four 2s, and so the next guess might be that there are four 3s or that there are five 2s around. Each guess has to be higher in either value or number (or both) than the last guess. Eventually someone challenges, calls you a liar, and you have to show how many of the digit is found on your bill and get a look at the others.

After that, of course, whoever won, the person who challenged or the person who guessed, gets all the bills from the players. Everyone picks out a bill from their wallet, glances at the numbers. And the game continues until people decide to stop playing - stop lying.

That’s where we are, folks. Liars are playing. Every once in a while they poke their sword into the lady. Liars poke her. Eventually either she dies or they stop playing.

NGMI or ngmi as I prefer to type it (because why make acronyms have all caps? we gotta shout ‘em? naw) means “not gonna make it.” And that’s going to happen to the people living in the cities. Lot and his family were saved, except his wife who looked back. Leave the cities folks. Don’t look back. Don’t get salty.