November 22nd, 2011 / 12:34 pm
 Behind the Scenes

Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 2 of 5: Hedge Fund

Hedge Fund

It’s ten AM, do you know where your money is? Who touches your credit? Who makes it feel safe? Touching candy, scraping paper skin over the fires of the market, these are the goals of the new new Downtown set. These are the men and women who give your money value, who quantify your life growth. They deal your commodity. They are the men and women who take your life and make it fabulous.

She whispers to money before she dreams, in her loft Downtown. Money takes her to bed. She kisses her own power like an empty vase

On the other side of the world, in New Jersey, money begins to seek power. It begins to roll in the direction of Wall St. It divests itself from your retirement plan. Money wants to be in Manhattan. Money wants to be strong with sexy friends, cigars, power boats. A vacation for money would be a week on the beach at Battery Park, in the 1980s, during the bond market boom. Your money wants to merge, to kill. Your kids go off to college, your money goes off to war.

And now your moeny has gone digital – just like your love life. Your money is dating your iPhone. Your money is fucking your second wife in the back of a Towncar. Every morning at 9:30 AM Eastern, your money sits at a Bloomberg terminal and watches itself breathe.

You can’t have your money now. It belongs to math and it belongs to disappearing mental real estate – the headline market, the gold hedge, the metals sector. Your money is bored by you. Your money is long gone – blowing lines of coke in some Russian death bar with the twin daughters of a brand new oil baron. Say goodbye to your money.

Previously: Happy Hour

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9 Comments

  1. November 22nd, 2011 / 1:43 pm DieDieDie—

      Protip(s): unless you’re very wealthy, your money isn’t hiding in a hedge fund, if there’s any at all it’s probably been spoken for already by your alma mater

  2. November 22nd, 2011 / 1:56 pm Erik Stinson—

      money from all parts of the market ends up in hedge funds – this is the liquid nature of modern american wealth

  3. November 22nd, 2011 / 3:39 pm DieDieDie—

      “It’s ten AM, do you know where your money is? Who touches your credit? Who makes it feel safe?” Unless you are very wealthy, it’s unlikely to have been in a hedge fund. Maybe abstracted a couple of levels… or as a sliver of your TIAA-CREF fund. Don’t hate the hedge funds, swell your networth and let your money be math

  4. November 22nd, 2011 / 5:22 pm c2k—

      I think you’re thinking of mutual funds, which are entirely different.

  5. November 22nd, 2011 / 5:25 pm c2k—

      [This was meant to be in reply to Erik Stinson not DieDieDie]

  6. November 22nd, 2011 / 5:29 pm c2k—

      Personally I liked the Happy Hour entry in this series better but I look forward to the next episode (“Lunch Hour”).

  7. November 22nd, 2011 / 5:33 pm c2k—

      Do a quick find/replace “mutual” for “hedge”; it’ll work.

  8. November 22nd, 2011 / 6:25 pm c2k—

      Somewhat apropos:

      The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold
      them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who
      bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and
      bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation
      opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously
      rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state
      could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.

      The
      collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or
      less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for
      anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to
      mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public
      astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money,
      most of us, most of the time, don’t know what we’re doing.

      http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/how-we-were-all-misled/

  9. November 23rd, 2011 / 8:10 am Anonymous—