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By Michael M. Thomas , who figured out Wall Street was not all it was cracked up to be before most of you were born
I can’t recall which divine agency wafted me to the shores of Naked Capitalism, or when it was (I’m guessing late 2008, when I was writing occasional pieces for Forbes.com on aspects of the financial crisis that struck me as distinctly odd), but once ashore I stayed. Every morning now, the first thing I read is Yves Smith’s absolutely indispensable website. Without it, the way things have gone in the realms of postmodern, oligarchic fiancé capitalism, together with the noxious exhaust fumes produced by the caravansaries rumbling along the gold-paved highway to Hell that runs between Wall Street and Washington and back again, would have reduced me to a blithering idiot, seeing much, comprehending little, blinded by fury and deafened by cant.
I went to work on Wall Street in 1961, was a partner and co-head of corporate finance at Lehman at the turn of the 1970s, did the same at pre-Milken Burnham & Co. in the mid-1970s, consulted for a while and then started writing about Wall Street in 1980, a process that has produced eight published novels ( Hanover Place was deemed by Louis Auchincloss to be one of the ten best American novels about finance) and God knows how much journalism. I’m now working on a ninth