No matter what the French are talking about, it sounds so delightful.
Like Fabrice Tourre, testifying before Congress about how he and his Goldman Sachs buddies screwed – oops, made love to – just about everyone they came in contact with.
Fabrice helped to come up with a financial instrument that enabled some people to make a killing while people defaulted on their mortgages and our investment banking system went down the toilet. Or as the French say, toilette.
Like most French men, Fabrice has a way with words, combining high finance with pillow talk. Here, he confides to one of his two girlfriends, Marine:
“Darling … the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me, just kindness, altruism and deep love for some gorgeous and super smart French girl in London), standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstruosities !!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the US consumer will more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself …
“Sweetheart … I feel blessed to be with you, to be able to learn and share special things with you, I love when you advise me on books I should be reading. I feel like we share a lot of things in common, a lot of values, topics we are interested in and intrigued by … I just love you !!!”
You have to love the French. Seducing her even as he admits that he didn’t really, truly understand what it was he was selling his clients, or the disastrous consequences of his action. C’est la vie!
I’m incredibly thankful to Fabrice because I never quite understood this Abacus thing that Goldman Sachs was selling. They called it a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) backed by subprime mortgage securities. It’s good to know Fabrice didn’t really know either.
It seems Fabrice and Goldman Sachs let a customer pick out the absolutely worst packages of real estate mortgages. All the mortgages no sane banker should ever have written. Then the customer, Paulson & Company, could bet that these dogs – Abacus – would go down in value, maybe even die.
At the same time Goldman has different customers betting that the value of Abacus will go up. Some say Fabrice didn’t actually tell those investors that the whole package was assembled by someone betting it would go down. Sort of like using crooked dice or a marked deck.
Goldman and Fabrice knew Abacus was going down the tubes.
In March 2007, Fabrice wrote Marine: “According to Sparks, that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!”
But my Fabrice is a lover, not a hater. A tad bit concerned and looking for “her soft and feminine intervention,” he sent this email to his other love, Fatiha:
“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’)”
How many of us wish we had the guts to create a thing, which has no purpose, and nobody knows the value of, yet it makes us a fortune when we sell it? And to have two loving, sympathetic girlfriends as we make a killing.
In June 2007, Fabrice was still spreading the love:
“Just made it to the country of your favorite clients!!! I’m managed (sic) to sell a few abacus bonds to widow and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic abs cdo2.”
I love capitalism. And, to the widows and orphans: a very simple “suck it up!!!” I love you, Fabrice. Or, as the French say, “Je vous aime, Fabrice.”
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Mickey Friedman is hard at work creating the board game, “Winners and Widows!!!”
The Berkshire Record, Thursday May 6, 2010. © Mickey Friedman. All rights reserved.