Urban Trade Breakdowns

On one level, banking is a simple business. People give the banks free money in exchange for no-fee ATM access and a government guarantee they will get at least some of it back. The banks then pay people slightly above minimum wage to lend this money back to our debt-loving asses to fund low margin businesses and buy shit we cannot afford, all at an interest rate inversely proportionate to one’s social class. But if a bank wants in on this FDIC-guaranteed free money hustle, they gotta follow a few rules. For example, they can’t threaten to put a cap in your sister’s ass if you can’t pay them back, and this results in the occasional loan-loss. Additionally, the FDIC has an image to protect, and so as much as possible they try and limit the lending of any of this free money to white people who qualify for credit cards and TSA-pre. But there are only so many borrowers like this left in America, so the government created another free money system with no real restrictions on who gets t...

If you are of American or European decent, your great grandparents lived through some crazy-ass shit. From 1914 to 1918, 16m of those fuckers died over a bunch of old-school European bullshit. Then Spanish flu hits (it’s like the flu, but you die) and another 50–150m people bounce. But when all that ended, shit got really good.  We Americans had all these factories and roads and harbors that we used to build shit for the war, the US was owed shitloads of money from the countries that did the killing and they now needed our shit to rebuild their shit. With everyone working, the money started pouring in, which we used to buy cars, phonographs, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and all the shit Americans need to survive. And the stock market went parabolic. The DJIA went up over 600% in about 8 years and being the greedy motherfuckers we are, we went all-in on the shit, investing our life savings, mortgaging our houses, selling our parents silverware, pimping our sisters, and just dum...

Urban Dictionary defines “Cluster Fuck” as follows: A completely unorganized gathering of people, usually involving a task that all the people must complete. Here’s a good example of a Cluster Fuck: “Existing law provides for the furnishing of utility services, including residential electrical, gas, heat, and water services, by privately owned public utilities subject to the jurisdiction and control of the Public Utilities Commission and similar services by publicly owned public utilities including municipal corporations subject to their governing bodies and municipal utility districts and public utility districts subject to their boards and directors. The bill would amend the Public Utilities Act to require that the commission undertake various actions, including the facilitation of the efforts of the state’s electrical corporations to develop and obtain authorization of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for…” Don’t read that. It will make your fucking head hurt. Here’s the tra...

In early 2010, people started to realize that Europe was hella strange, People worked 30 hours a week, if they bothered working at all. This was not something the hard working folk in the US and Asia had thought about since for years they could lend money to their speedo wearing asses at payday loan interest rates, which was a fucking good-ass hustle. But at some point, someone thought, hmmm can they pay us back? I mean, Germany sells cars and books and shit and so they might be good for it but what the fuck does Greece or Spain sell? I mean, even if the Fed gives us money for free if they don’t pay us back, well that would suck ‘cus what good is free money if you can’t make money selling it? Meanwhile, back in the land of 7 month winters and taxis, some genius discovered cheap computers and was like, fuck yelling at some dickhead in a tie everyday, let’s let the computers just trade shit and we can chill in Connecticut. Which was awesome until one spring afternoon, some old-sc...

Most of you know that America revolted from the British and became an independent country in ‪1776. We Americans celebrate this with fireworks and parades and shit. Because, despite our differences, after the American Revolution we generally agree that something resembling a democratic system of government was formed and then for a long-ass time, shit worked itself out under the rules of that system. But in France, shit wasn’t quite so democratic after their revolution. In 1799, shit was a little crazy. And into this craziness stepped Napoleon, who seized control of the government and pretty much ran shit for 15 years. Napoleon was a general and generals like to fight battles and seize shit, so Napoleon did just that during his reign, expanding the French empire throughout Europe while vying to stay in control of France. And all this shit came to a head at the Battle of Waterloo (in what is now Belgium). But what made this battle interesting in the history of finance, was that glo...

On a cold and gray February in 1992, about a dozen men quietly moved into a non-descript office park in Norfolk, VA and begin unpacking and carefully sorting reams of laser-printed paper slips they had shipped in from Melbourne, Australia a few days earlier. And when that was done, they withdrew $7m from the local Crestar bank branch (which was also transferred from Melbourne) and used the funds to buy stacks of cashier’s checks in small amounts.   This was February of 1992, and the Virginia Lottery was a big thing back then. And as the Lottery pot grew past $20m (which was a lot at the time), the locals were getting excited. The men in the office were also watching the lottery grow, but they were cool. They had a plan. And ‪on February 13th, with the pot at $27m, they divided up the paper slips and money orders and assigned each man a carefully mapped route to dozens (or hundreds) of local gas stations and convenience stores. There they planned to spend $7m buying $1 Virginia lott...

I love all kinds of crazy-ass money stories, even the straight-to-Netflix foreign art-house shit. But everyone loves a fucking blockbuster, which is what we got in 2007. It was the financial movie event of a fucking lifetime and it swept the fucking bubble awards, with A-list financial villains walking the congressional red carpet, all kinds of flashy CGI CDO special effects, and a drooling gaga press trampling over each other to cover the shit. Even though no one really understood the plot. But other cool shit happened back then too. It was just upstaged by all that housing collapse and global bank failure shit. Too bad. Because B-list money stories are also kinda cool. Here’s an example: did you know that the Mexican’s are probably the greatest traders of oil options in modern history (and proved it big-time in 2008)? Or that in 2009, one trader got black-out drunk and traded 69% of the global oil volume in one night? Or that Goldman was totally hedged and financially safe in th...

1978 was fucking crazy. Like here’s just some of the shit that happened that year: Ted Bundy was caught, Roman Polanski fled the US after pleading guilty to screwing a minor, the founder of Hustler Magazine, Larry Flint, is shot and paralyzed, CBS airs the first episode of “Dallas”, the US gives back the Panama Canal, Pete Rose hits 3000 home runs, the first Unibomber bomb is sent to Northwestern University, the movie “Grease” debuts, President Jimmy Carter legalized home-brewing, and Hilary Clinton develops in interest in options, and with only $1000 in her account, she is somehow allowed to buy $12,000 in cattle futures contracts which returned $6,300 overnight and just shy of $100,000 ($352k in todays money) in less than 10 months for a return rate with odds estimated to be roughly 1 in 31,000,000,000,000 making her the most successful commodities trader of all time. But that’s not my point, that’s just some shit I read on the Internet. The point is, one winter evening in 1978, on a...