economics

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

Behind the Scenes / 9 Comments
November 22nd, 2011 / 12:34 pm

“I can eat a cookie in front of a kid and the kid won’t know.”

Walter J. Wood — also known as Santa Woody — is a Phoenix-area Kris Kringle who looks like something out of a holiday Coca-Cola ad. The $100 an hour he charges “really doesn’t recoup the costs,” he said, especially when you take into account gas, travel time and the expense of miscellaneous items like beard glue.

“I glue my beard on — no one else does that,” said Wood, whose other job as a painting contractor also hasn’t had much success this year. “I can eat a cookie in front of a kid and the kid won’t know.”

Random / 1 Comment
December 20th, 2010 / 3:08 pm