Deconstructing Alan

Deconstructing Alan Some readers of this will think I am being brutal but it isn’t about whether or not I support R Regan thinking –Hey I like Sarah Palin OK: Read her book- ‘Going Rogue’ and her husband Todd is amazing! From what Alan has told us it is clear as to why he is trusted from Regan onwards to becoming the world’s top banker. Firstly he is fatherless and lost, but lead by his four year older cousin, his alienated father brilliant he is spending up to 30 hours a week making music with his Jewishness secularized and no background in Torah which other Jewish bankers have. A submissive homosexual but intelligent enough to negotiate that; strongly feminist he follows other peoples systems and is not a destructive economist always expecting as does happen resource bases to decline disappear or be replaced. Rather as a conformist he has that touching made in USA sentimental romantic approach unreal for a disaster prone world. But critically he hasn’t as he admits here got a clue about Economic theory as to the big picture of USA in the world but as a details person brilliant without seeing necessarily where all that economic activity is going or that it could be in fact highly destructive… OK Maybe I’m just pushing ideas here and Allan isn’t like that and certainly any serious judgment belongs to the Eternal Jew on the Day. So I will give you some more and we will see where this going in real Empire State New York History “During my time with the band, we followed a routine dictated by union rules: Forty minutes on the band stand and twenty minutes off. I loved the forty minutes on- the experience of playing in a good band… I was known as the Band’s intellectual. I got along well with the other musicians but my style was different . Between sets many would disappear to the so called Green room which would quickly fill up with the smell of tobacco and pot. I could spend those twenty minutes reading books. In the course of a night I could get maybe and hour of reading. The books I borrowed from the New York Public Library weren’t necessarily what you would expect. Maybe it was because my father was from Wall Street or maybe it was my affinity for numbers, but what aroused my curiosity was business and finance. One of the first books I read was about the British stock market. I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edward Lefevre about Jess Livermore the famous 1920s speculator whose nick name was Boy Plunger of Wall Street. Legend had it that he made $100 million in short selling (Borrowing other people’s shares in the belief that the price will go down- and when it does- buying the shares back at a lower price to replace the ones borrowed- It gets expensive it the price continues to go up…) on the eve of the 1929 crash. He got rich and went broke three times before finally committing suicide in 1940. He was a great student of human nature; Lefevre’s book is a font of investing wisdom with Livermore saying- ‘Bulls and bears make money but pigs are slaughtered’ I also read every book I could find about JP Morgan. He not only financed the formation of US Steel, consolidated the railroads, and had a hand in assembling General Electric but also was the main stabilizing force in the US financial system before the creation of the Federal Reserve. (Like Joseph in the bible as Egyptians or his brothers from Israel you either hate and despise the man or see the brilliance in what he has done to Egypt-Ed) I marveled at his wealth- in breaking up the Morgan trusts just before World War 1 Congress heard the testimony that Morgan controlled more than 20 billion. And I was more impressed by Morgan’s character (Youtube- a tale of Morgan being seen in the Lower Manhattan church he patronized down on his knees weeping in prayer - Biographical stories like this are gold. When Nixon at their final trip to Camp David fired his two key men he told them the identical romantic story about being down on his knees praying for them before he went to bed… which is why we need Our Chief judge to verify that in His Final Judgment-Ed) Famously J.P, Morgan’s word was his bond, and in 1907 it was his personal influence on the other bankers that helped stem the financial panic that could have thrown the country into depression. These stories spoke to me in much the same way that railroad timetables had. Wall St was an exciting place. It wasn’t long before I decided. This is where I want to go next. With the war nearing the end, the future was beginning to open up… I was beginning to believe that I had a future. (The extremely high death rate in the world at this time had an effect on how people view life) the tuberculosis doctor had been checking the lung periodically and was certain that the spot was dormant. I wasn’t confident that I would succeed in finance when I enrolled in the School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance at New York University for the fall of 1945… I was exposed to an interesting curriculum of liberal arts and of course accounting basic economics business management banking, finance but I felt a pull towards the subjects that involved logic and data and I loaded up courses in advanced maths. Economics appealed to me right from the start… Economics was a hot topic in those first years after WW2. Everyone appreciated that the US economy under the direction of our government planners had been the industrial engine behind the allied victory. What is more new economic institutions were being created and a new economic order was taking place before our eyes. The leaders of the Western world gathered at New Hampshire’s Bretton Woods to set up the IMF- International Monetary Fund and the World Bank… the theoretical basis of this was laid down by the economist John Maynard Keynes… Though Bob and most of my classmates were ardent Keynesians I wasn’t. I’d read General Theory twice- it is an extraordinary book but Keynes’s mathematical innovations and structural analyses were what fascinated me, not his ideas on economic policy. I still had the sideman Psychology- I preferred to focus on technical challenges and did not have a macro (Big) view. Economic policy didn’t interest me’ p27-30 Alan Greenspan 2007.