On the cover of this month’s Atlantic: “Why I Fired My Broker,” a meandering and highly entertaining personal essay that concludes that the brokers don’t know anything anyhow and if they did they wouldn’t care about helping Jeffrey Godlberg or the rest of us monetary mortals. From a scene at a Fifth Avenue soiree, the party of a friend, the friend being a multi-millionaire and his friends also being multi-millionaires, all of whom had gathered in these times of economic distress to talk about charity:
…I thought, This is Bill Ackman standing before me. He’s a great investor. Maybe he can give me some advice.
So this is what came out of my mouth: “What do you tell the ordinary mortal—say, the person who works in the press that you talked about—what do you say to the person who has $20,000, $50,000, $100,000, or $200,000, maybe, parked somewhere doing nothing? What is your advice right now for that person?”
I looked around. The wizards in the room were having difficulty calculating figures of such humble size. I had thought $200,000 sounded like a large and unembarrassing number. But the room reacted as if I had asked, “Bill, I have 75 cents in my pocket. Do you think I should buy Twizzlers or a big red gumball?
Then comes the more important question:
“What’s the percentage chance we’re going to move to a barter economy?” I asked.
“I think it’s small,” Ackman said.
“Small”? I had been hoping for “Zero.” “Zero” would have been a fine answer, and not because I have nothing to barter except for a stack of old SmartMoney magazines, but “Zero” because, by the time my 12-year-old turns 18, I would like to be able to use my portfolio of stocks and bonds as a flotation device, and not as kindling.
Turns out the best advice Goldberg gets is from a sentimental survivalist:
THE WAY I SEE IT, it’s all a con game,” Cody Lundin was saying. “What I mean is that Wall Street has always been an illusion. Now it’s an illusion that’s crumbling. Wall Street is like someone who’s having heart trouble. It’s in constant need of resuscitation, but after a while, it just doesn’t work anymore. People think that Bernard Madoff was unique, that he was an illusion, but he’s just an extension of the same illusion, the same con game. This is one of the reasons I don’t like to have any debt. When you have debt, you become part of this illusion, and sometimes you get trapped by it.”
We were standing outside in a foot of snow in the mountains above Prescott, Arizona. Lundin was arguing so cogently against the American culture of easy credit, in tones far more thoughtful than one hears on cable television, that I forgot for a moment that he wasn’t wearing shoes, or socks. He was standing in the snow barefoot. Also, in shorts.
“It’s all about regulating core body temperature.” For long hikes in the snow, he wears three pairs of socks, without shoes. He suggested I try this.
Other things Lundin asked me to try include making fire with sticks, eating mice—“a free source of protein in survival scenarios”—and living without electricity for a week to “see where it hurts.” Lundin himself eats mice and rats he traps at his off-the-grid passive-solar house in the wilderness, because “why waste free protein?”
Lundin is a freak; twin blond braids fall from his bandanna-covered head, giving him the appearance of a stoner Viking.
Zing! Lundin’s doesn’t just tee up some funny turns of phrase but also provides more perspective on finances, as a veil of illusion, which winds up having a deeper effect on Goldberg than you might imagine.
Ultimately, that’s the point of the piece, which could have also been called The Tao of the Dow. If you don’t worry about getting Fifth Avenue rich, you don’t need to worry about financial advice. And if you don’t have to worry about financial advice, you’ll be happier. It makes the same point you might find in a business-minded story on individual investiong, but through storytelling. Nice work. More please.
