Denby, a man of “the arts”, came into his obsession
with the market after his wife left him, right as internet-bubble stock prices
were going through the roof. As a means to buy out his wife’s portion of their
Manhattan residence during the divorce, he hatches a plan to make $1 million on
technology stocks during the year 2000, which, given the irrational exuberance
of the day, really wasn’t as hare-brained as it sounds today. That’s around the
time I started actively buying stocks as well, and though I’m exceptionally
risk-averse and did nothing to truly harm the tiny, tiny amount of money I had,
I bought into a lot of smoke & mirrors as well (“Dow 30,000”; “a new
economy”, “Lucent Technologies” and so on).
His account of his inner struggles as he times the
market badly are quite recognizable, and he layers on much of the same
universal soul-searching that anyone does when they try to make sense of the
market. I don’t mean the market writ
large; the timeless fundamentals of supply and demand, and of specialization
and trade, are sound and in no need of any admonishment. I mean Wall Street. "AMERICAN SUCKER", and the
others I’ve read on this topic during recent years, have me eminently
distrustful and skeptical of much of the entire infrastructure of Wall Street:
the analysts, the brokerage houses, the trading mechanisms, the ratings
agencies, the consultants and so on. Denby does an admirable job trying to
deconstruct greed – his own, and that of man in general. I’m not sure he truly
hits upon its good and its reprehensible qualities in a way that sent
lightbulbs popping above me, but I admire his effort in trying.
He befriends and follows two characters recognizable
from that gilded era: the Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodgett, who famously
touted internet stocks during their rise up and even as they were crashing (and
was later prosecuted for his role in maintaining “buy” ratings on stocks in
order to bring more underwriting business from these same companies to
Merrill), and Sam Waksal, the ImClone CEO with the promising cancer drug who
was prosecuted for insider trading and other crimes, bringing his friend Martha
Stewart down with him. Denby describes the captivating hold these charlatans
had on him, and we’re lucky he chose to pursue strong access to these two
important players in the Wall Street psychodrama long before their dastardly
deeds were revealed.
What makes it all such a ripping yarn is its
universality. These feelings of envy and greed are part of the human condition,
and they can be exacerbated by life events like divorce – or by a constant
party of wealth accumulation going on around you. The evenhanded writing
qualities I’ve admired in Denby’s reviews of film are on display here, and
while he’s hardest on himself, he also understands that even he is mere flesh
and blood, and that it truly takes real mental and emotional work to transcend our
many inborn weaknesses.
