STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 30 May 2013

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16. making a million an hour means never having to say you're sorry

http://www.nationofchange.org/making-million-hour-means-never-having-say-you-re-sorry-1369801992

(Note: A version of this book review featured on Truthdig last week.) Les Leopold’s latest book, “How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America’s Wealth,” is necessary, alarming and really funny. His talent for deconstructing complex financial terms and topics constitutes a public service. What he reveals in a sardonic and appropriately irreverent tone, is more ominous. We exist in a political-economic system that allows people who manufacture nothing and bet on everything to control the financial destinies of the rest of the population with impunity, and make stupendous amounts of money doing it. Because, as Leopold writes, “Making a million an hour means never having to say you’re sorry.”

That inanity is what makes Leopold’s book so timely, especially now, when the powers-that-be are pretending we’re back to our pre-2008-financial-crisis status—and that’s a good thing. Hey, the stock market's hitting all-time highs—that’s never happened ahead of a major catastrophe before!

His “handbook” approach to a pretty arcane topic is hilarious and horrifying. His lively chapters are divided so that they read like a twelve-step Capitalists Anonymous program on how to achieve wealth nirvana. There’s Step 2, “Take, Don’t Make,” which asks how can these hedge fund managers who create absolutely nothing tangible be rewarded so outrageously for it? There’s Step 7, “Don’t Say Anything Remotely Truthful”—well, that speaks for itself. And Step 9, “Bet on the Race After You Know Who Wins,” gets to the heart of how these managers, who inspire a plethora of reverential business magazine profiles and books, aren’t doing anything particularly daring or even smart. Hell, it’s not hard to find the bodies if you’re the one burying them.

Leopold opens with comparisons of wealthy categories of humans from top entertainers to sports legends to CEOs (including bank CEOs). Only then does he reveal the ones who warrant the book’s title—the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent elite hedge fund managers who bag billions of dollars per year, and millions of dollars per hour, making 100 times more than the top bank and insurance CEOs. Some even approach $2 million an hour such as David Tepper did in 2009, or John Paulson did in 2010 (well, $2.4 million an hour).