OMG Ponies! Wall Street edition

A little background before you read this article excerpt.

It was taken from The Battery Park City Broadsheet - specifically their September 29th - October 14th, 2008 issue - linked here to the original PDF.

Battery Park City is a (our) Lower Manhattan neighborhood, right next door to the World Trade Center site and a very short walk to Wall Street. Needless to say there have been a lot of busy neighbors around of late, and certainly folks who have lost jobs.

Despite all the honest suffering going on, the guy in this article floors me. I'm quite convinced he lives in an alternate reality. Read on...

             The Party's Over

 

The face of the future—complete

with stunned expression and glassy,

thousand-yard-stare—was on view

in the lobby of Two World Financial

Center on the evening of a

September 15. That morning, Lehman

Brothers had imploded and

Merrill Lynch, which is headquartered

in World Financial Center and

has an employee gym in the lobby,

had announced that it was being

bought by Bank of America. Many of

the Merrill staffers exiting the gym

that night appeared defeated and

deflated by the announcement that

the firm, six years shy of its 100th

birthday, would soon cease to exist as

an independent company.

“Dave,” a trader who asked that

his real name not be used, emerged

with a dazed and weary look on his

face. “I guess it could have been

worse,” he said. “I once interviewed

for a job for Lehman Brothers. If I

was there, I’d be cleaning out my

desk right now.” Still, Dave sees

much to worry about.

“I’ve got two small children,”

he said. “This time last year, I was

thinking it would be nice to buy

them both horses when they got a

little older. My wife and I have also

been looking at private schools for

both kids.”

“Now,” he reflected, “I’m

thinking about the payments on my

condo and the mortgage on the

country house we bought back in

2006. Both have gone down in value,

but my payments haven’t. I don’t

know how much longer I’m going to

have a job at Merrill. And most of

my savings was in stock that has

dropped in value over the last two

years. So if I’m unemployed for even

a few months, we could lose one

home, or both.” About the horses

and the private schools he was considering

for his children, Dave simply

said, “forget it.”

Etc..........

* * *

The use of bold is my doing, but everything else is taken direct from the article. Follow the link and check it out for yourself.

Now that said, I'm a little bit suspicious that there was no author listed for the article AND "Dave" isn't his real name. I've seen enough The Wire episodes to question such fishy journalism.

If it is true then I risk karma retribution by invoking the term schadenfreude. 

Now please excuse me while I go polish our second set of silverware (the one we never liked anyway) as I think we might need to pawn it in order to pay our next loan installment on the Mercedes.