{"id":3282,"date":"2010-08-03T10:39:54","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T14:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=3282"},"modified":"2010-08-05T10:17:24","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T14:17:24","slug":"keith-gessen-and-diary-of-a-very-bad-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/08\/03\/keith-gessen-and-diary-of-a-very-bad-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Keith Gessen and Diary of a Very Bad Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Keith Gessen’s Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager<\/a><\/em> is a compilation of one-on-one interviews with a New York City hedge fund manager (HFM) that took place as the financial crisis unfolded, from September 2007 to August 2009. HFM guides Gessen, co-editor-in-chief of n+1<\/em>, through the inner-workings of the market and the hedge fund world, as the system collapses around them. Recently, Gessen took the time to answer my questions about the book.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the editor of n+1<\/a><\/em>, why a book about the financial crisis?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For me personally, I had a close friend whose mortgage was underwater and I wanted to get an expert opinion. On another level, I was interested in how a person with a real mastery of a field thinks about it, talks about it\u2014what that sounds like. I always find that interesting, when people talk about their work, and HFM was able to talk about his in a uniquely thoughtful way. But for n+1<\/em> as a magazine, we\u2019re increasingly turning into a group of autodidact economists, so I think this book makes sense. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been told that the Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager has appeared publicly at readings, which is not so anonymous.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He\u2019s still anonymous, in terms of his name not being out in public, which was and is the hope. Initially we thought we\u2019d do the readings with him in some kind of disguise, but when the time came it felt silly and we went ahead without it. In the end, you know, HFM was a partner at a very large fund, but it\u2019s not like he\u2019s been on CNBC or had his picture in the paper, so we figured no one would jump up in the middle of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and call out his name, and they didn\u2019t. If someone with a pretty good knowledge of the hedge fund world read this book, I think they\u2019d be able to identify him. He was able to talk more freely, less self-consciously, because his name wasn\u2019t on there\u2014and so far it still isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

What was the most shocking thing you learned?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gosh, a lot of things. But if you mean about the financial system, I guess I hadn\u2019t really realized what the \u201cfinancialization\u201d of our economy meant: What it meant is that we took some of our brightest young people and sat them down on Wall Street and asked them to come up with ways to trick people out of their money, and it didn\u2019t really matter who those people were. Some of them were from other countries, and some of them were from this country. And we did this under the banner of \u201cthe market.\u201d We blame it on the Bush Administration\u2014always a good bet\u2014but in large part this was also Clinton\u2019s doing. I knew all this in a vague way before. Now, I really know it; we all do. <\/p>\n

Was there anything HFM ever said that made you angry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I unfortunately find it hard to be angry at someone who\u2019s sitting right in front of me, but there were definitely some moments where HFM was very callous toward, for example, people who were losing their homes, and I kept those in the book. (And HFM, to his credit, didn\u2019t say, when he saw the text, \u201cHey, that makes me look bad, take that out.\u201d) HFM is a very charming, very intelligent person who bought into the general ideological defense of capitalism and high finance\u2014that it makes markets more efficient, that while it causes a lot of visible damage and in the short term increases inequality, it also in the long run increases overall wealth and spreads it around. And that kind of belief occasionally caused him to be very unfeeling.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a defense of the book that can be mounted from a left perspective as \u201cTalks with Hitler\u201d or whatever\u2014a portrait of the mind of the enemy. But if I\u2019m honest, that\u2019s not what interests me. I don\u2019t think reading this is really like reading Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s thoughts on the Iraq War and thinking \u201cYou arrogant fool! You criminal!\u201d For me the interest was much more in his thinking, his humor\u2014and also in the fact that, to my surprise, he underwent a kind of spiritual journey over the course of the crisis. And, I mean, this is the great thing about literature: For HFM to go through that journey, his fund had to lose many hundreds of millions of dollars. Whereas readers can experience it for just $14.95. <\/p>\n

Did you speak to other hedge fund managers? Is HFM a typical hedge fund manager?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s an interesting question. I didn\u2019t actually speak to other HFMs, so I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s certainly the case that before hedge funds became a big industry, which only happened really in the last ten to fifteen years, a fair number of hedge fund people came from non-financial backgrounds\u2014A. W. Jones, who invented the hedge fund business model in the 1940s, had a Ph.D. in
\nsociology. George Soros is another example\u2014he does in fact have a finance background, but he always had other interests, too. So it\u2019s a pretty heterodox world, or anyway it used to be.<\/p>\n

That said, there\u2019s an obvious problem to all the talk about how smart hedge fund people are, or finance people in general. And of course I am as guilty of this as anyone because I think HFM is so smart. But the point to keep in mind is that, well, we\u2019d feel silly talking about how smart poker players are. If we turned on ESPN and were like, \u201cLook at those smart guys playing
\npoker, they\u2019re so smart.\u201d I mean you would never do that, because those guys are just sitting there playing cards. But now what if you turned on ESPN and they were sitting there playing cards as usual but the guys were wearing jerseys, national jerseys\u2014Italy, Greece, Germany, Russia, USA, China, Brazil\u2014and then, whoever lost, the working people of that country would then have to undergo \u201causterity\u201d for the next decade. That\u2019s what high finance is.<\/p>\n

In my economics class at college, I was taught that one of the first assumptions that you have to make is that people act rationally. Did my professor lie to me?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I also took that class. And the short answer is yes, our professor lied to us. The theory of \u201crational markets\u201d ceased to be orthodox in academia several decades ago. That it continues to get taught in introductory econ classes is kind of amazing because when you get further into your training as an economist, you (usually) learn all the ways in which it\u2019s false. It\u2019s sort of how one learns American history\u2014the first time through, in elementary school, you\u2019re taught that the Civil War was over slavery. Then, in high school you’re taught that the Civil War was about \u201cthe economy,\u201d and also Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. By the time you\u2019re in college, you know that America is basically a proto-fascist state and it\u2019s amazing we\u2019re not all being rounded up in the middle of the night and shot. Only in old age, or alternately in graduate school, do you return to the verities of your youth, because in fact, the Civil War really was<\/em> about slavery, deep down. With the introductory econ class, it’s like you’re taught the elementary school stuff about rational markets and the supply and demand curve but you never go on to get the more skeptical high-school point of view. You can graduate from college convinced that from an economic perspective that the minimum wage is a bad idea.<\/p>\n

What kind of literature do you think will be born of the financial crisis?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know. Working on this book has caused me to read a lot of the books on the crisis, something I probably wouldn\u2019t have done otherwise, and it\u2019s been very interesting. Generically speaking they tend to alternate between descriptions of complex financial instruments and then various financial people swearing. So it\u2019s like:<\/p>\n

A credit default swap is an insurance policy taken out on a form of debt, whether a bond or other obligation to pay. \u201cFuckety fuck your mother fuck fuck fuck!\u201d said the hedge fund manager, throwing a shoe through his Bloomberg screen. \u201cFuck!!!\u201d He had $2 billion under management, half of it from the Yale Endowment. The pressure was getting to him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s been pretty fun. And I\u2019ve learned a lot<\/span>. One of the shocking things, when you look at all the books that have come out (and there have been a lot) is how many of them are about New York financiers and how few of them are about the people on the other side\u2014the people who are going to lose their homes, or have already lost them, or their jobs. There are a lot of reasons for this\u2014one is that people have been losing their jobs and their homes forever, though possibly not to this extent, whereas the particular mind-set of the people who perpetrated the subprime credit fraud is new, or somewhat new\u2014but it\u2019s still a little disturbing. And obviously our own book is a prime example of this. We’re starting a project right now to gather material from American cities affected by the crisis, which I hope will even the balance at least as far as n+1<\/em> is concerned. In the meantime I think it’s okay to think about who did this, why they did it, and why we let them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Keith Gessen’s Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is a compilation of one-on-one interviews with a New York City hedge fund manager (HFM) that took place as the financial crisis unfolded, from September 2007 to August 2009. HFM guides Gessen, co-editor-in-chief of n+1, through the inner-workings of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[590,592,588,589,587,591],"class_list":["post-3282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-diary-of-a-very-bad-year","tag-financial-crisis","tag-hedge-fund-manager","tag-hfm","tag-keith-gessen","tag-n1-magazine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKeith Gessen and Diary of a Very Bad Year by Sofia Groopman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 3, 2010 \u2013 Keith Gessen's Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is a compilation of one-on-one interviews with a New York City\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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