Blogger "Chew your grouse" has a gimlet
eye for finance types:
The publisher of Trader and DealMaker magazines stands at the podium with
the "Top 100 Traders of 2006" issue, including the guy from Centaurus
in Houston on the other side of the Amaranth trade who made $2 billion for
the year. "Can you imagine what that feels like?" she asks, awestruck.
It was pretty pathetic to see a grown human — who herself made surely reasonable
money — get excited like this, and the mostly guy crowd tittered a little
as well at the mere thought of it.
The problem is that his attitude isn’t going to make him a gazillionaire. Indeed,
the very fact that he’s not pulling down the megabucks already is pretty
much enough to disqualify
him from the kind of job which will make him squillions in the future. Here
he is talking to a headhunter:
The guy is like, "so how much did you make last year," and I tell
him, and he’s like "ummmm, errrr. Well, that’s a problem, cuz they’re
gonna look at that and say: if he likes money, why hasn’t he figured out a
way to earn more? This is a job that offers the potential to earn seven figures
eventually, and they want people who want that." And I’m like "I’m
a friggin Slavist already, gimme a break." And he’s like "They look
at money as a proxy for aggression."
There is a certain beauty to the logic, it must be said. To get rich, you have
to be aggressive. If you’re aggressive, you’ll be rich. So if you’re not rich,
you can’t be aggressive. Ergo, to get rich, you have to be rich.
Which at least means the rest of us can stop worrying, I guess.