"Florence of Arabia"

By Christopher Buckley. Read it. It is pretty dang funny. Kind of like if Kinky Freidman and Carl Hiassen decided to have an earnest protagonist and set a novel in the diplomatic jungle of the Middle East instead of Texas or Florida, two places that are maybe marginally less packed with crazies than that region.

Am now on "Den of Thieves," about the S&L and insider trading scandals of the 80s. Man, these guys think they're so smart, but the only way they made any money is by cheating the system. So you're not that smart, jerkos.

The book goes into really, way too much, almost pornographic, detail about the particular trades that Milken and Boesky were undertaking — along with Levine, Siegel, and all the rest of the bunch. Aye. So far there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the fallout that the sort of high-stakes, winner-take-all banking wreaked. I mean, there has to be a reason beyond the impropriety of it all that insider trading is illegal; companies were destroyed and broken apart and spun off and people lost their jobs and competition was diminished across literally hundreds of industries in the 80s. What it meant to be a company changed in the 80s because suddenly, you weren't just a maker of cookies, you had a publishing wing, a cigarette wing, a series of interests in weapons manufacturing and a string of home furnishing labels. It can't be called a vertical or horizontal trust because it is almost too random and across too many industries.

Although mergers and acquisitions was a way to make big money in the 80s if you were a financial biz, the way Boesky and Milken made their money was by buying positions on margin when they heard about mergers in the works. However, they gamed the markets and actually made it so companies were pressured to make leveraged buyouts! It's crazy!

Anyway, with all that gaming going on there have to be real losers. Regular joes like me, seniors with pensions invested in these companies and junk bonds that Milken would buy and sell at prices so favorable to himself he could easily make $10 million come and go in a wash of paper. I just think there's a big, complicated story out there that can mark the ripples that these greedy bastards caused to wash over the rest of us.

Also, James B. Stewart, nicely played with the New Testament reference for your title. Not only were they moneychangers, these captains of crookedness, but, as we find out, they were all of semitic extraction (like the dudes in the temple) minus a couple of minor players. To me, the biggest sense of indignation I got was at how the big players apparently were feeling like outsiders as non-WASPs, I mean, please, don't write this off on their heritage when clearly the only God they worship is Mammon! Or am I being too touchy there?