To the Editor:

When I lived in New York I spent a lot of time with people who worked on Wall Street.

I was the recipient of invitations to their lavish black-tie events, and four-star restaurants where numerous bottles of wine with a price tag that could feed a family for a year were served.

I loved it when they sent a car to pick me up at my modest apartment.

I won’t lie when I say how thrilled I was to be sitting at the table across from Billy Joel while he tapped out the music to Elton John’s live performance on stage.

Numerous other celebrities came over to our table that night, no doubt because someone told them we were from a major Wall Street firm that paid a great deal of money for the privilege.

You Wall Street people know how to live, I thought, since the publishing industry I am closely connected to never showed me this kind of experience.

My friends were partners in major firms, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages and created very complicated securities from them.

I learned that some of the securities were created by MIT mathematicians, and when I had a conversation with one of the math “geniuses,” telling them that I considered myself to be a fairly intelligent person, but I could not understand these securities, the reply was, that’s o.k., people selling them don’t understand them either. Continue reading →