Kyle Rittenhouse's "Acquitted" - a review

Kyle Rittenhouse's book "Acquitted" is, obviously, a Rorschach test. You look in to it, and you read what you want to take from it. There are those who call him a "white supremacist killer", and others who call him a vigilante - sometimes approvingly, sometimes not.

The book itself is apparently self-published, with author and journalist Michael Quinn Sullivan being the co-author; in this kind of collaboration, the risk is always that the voice of the author is lost, or alternatively the co-author doesn't supply enough direction and the book wanders everywhere. Thankfully, the book avoids that trap. It's not a doorstop (only 118 pages), and the line formatting is, frankly, terrible, but it's very readable and packs a lot in.

The first nine chapters - leading up to chapter ten which starts the events of August 25th, 2020 - are an interesting, and at times sad, view into Kyle's childhood and teenage years. His family was quite dysfunctional, with a drugs-and-women depedent father, whom he has subsequently cut out of his life, and a loving mother who nevertheless was terrible with money. Kyle and his two sisters moved around houses a lot, didn't do very well at school given all the disruption, and he recognizes that he was well on the way to delinquency. It was the police cadets at school, and in particular the male role models he found there, which brought him back (mostly) to the straight and narrow, with a new determination to train as an EMT/firefighter. He qualified as a lifeguard, and was working that job in Kenosha when "Saint" George Floyd expired in Minneapolis and the BLM riots started, eventually spreading to that town in August.

Of the riots themselves, he describes being in town the day after the first riot, and seeing both the destruction wrought, and the way that white and black citizens got together in determination to clean up and repair that destruction. He and his friend lent their efforts to the clean-up, but everyone was aware that the riots might well restart that night, so he volunteered to stand guard at a car shop, equipped both with his rifle (legally held) and his EMT kit.

Then the riots kicked off, violent thugs ran around burning and breaking the city, and at some point Kyle was chased into a dead end by Rosenbaum, who grabbed for his rifle...

There's a joke going around Twitter that "Kyle Rittenhouse fired at three random liberals, and two of them were pedophiles." The truth is a bit more nuanced, but Rosenbaum certainly had a record of sex offending against minors, along with a lot of violence, and Huber was a repeat domestic abuser, also with violence. Grosskreutz, the sole survivor, had a list of lower-level offences. Certainly, it seems clear that the two fatalities from Kyle's shooting were not individuals for whom society should particularly mourn.

Nevertheless, Kyle's reflections on his actions that night were interesting. He certainly doesn't celebrate them - he says that he wishes that night had never happened, and with everything that followed it's hard to be sceptical about that wish. In more detail, he wishes he hadn't chosen to go to Kenosha that night - but given that he did, he doesn't regret bringing the rifle. He points out that given the level of violence threatened and demonstrated towards him and others that night, the rifle likely saved his life - from Rosenbaum's likely violence with him cornered, by stopping Huber from beating him any more around the head with his skateboard, leading to head injury and long-term headaches, and probably Grosskreutz by preventing him from firing the (illegally conceal-carried) pistol he pointed at Kyle.

Interestingly, he also regrets a number of the things he said and did after being released from jail on bail, during trial prep and during the trial itself. Some he details, some he alludes to, but in particular he reflects on his naivety with regards to all the grifting that happened around his case, and how his situation was presented in wildly different ways across the media. In particular, he strongly resents Joe Biden whose PR campaign adverts presented Kyle's case in a very different way to the actual facts.

A few people and organizations come out with a lot of credit. The juvenile detention organization, which held him for just short of 10 weeks, bent over backwards to support him, give good advice and guidance, and keep him safe. Things started to get dangerous when inmates came in who had heard about Kyle's case, and the threats started. By the time he was transferred to adult jail in Kenosha, there were already outside organizations briefing inbound prisoners on Kyle, with the clear implication to cause him physical harm. An additional three weeks in effective solitary confinement in the Kenosha jail was even less fun, though again the guards were professional and kept him safe.

Mark Richards, the lead defense counsel in Kyle's case, seems to be a remarkable man, and one of the few lawyers whom I think I could respect. He agreed to write the foreword in Kyle's book, and unlike many other forewords, this is very worth reading. In particular, he notes:

Kyle is 1 of only 3 clients I have represented in a murder case where I personally believed the individual was truly not guilty of what he was charged. [my italics]

Kyle clearly admires Richards, describing him as an incredibly focused man, unafraid to be blunt with his client, a hard taskmaster in trial preparation, and frequently calling out Kyle on his bad judgements. Corey Chirafisi, co-counsel, was also greatly valued by Kyle; as a former prosecutor, his practice court sessions quickly showed Kyle how to present himself in court, how to avoid being tripped up too often, and warn him about different strategies the prosecution could use to elicit damaging testimony from him. Crucially, Kyle described the subsequent trial as holding "no surprises".

The defense team was not pro bono; Kyle was fortunate that his case had caught enough media attention, and that the available facts e.g. from the videos that night, seemed to corroborate his case. A substantial defense fund was raised, and spent, in addition to the $2 million in bail that Kyle was required to raise before being released. Donors from all across the country effectively prevented Kyle from being railroaded into a multi-decade jail sentence. One wonders how many others without such support have not been so lucky.

The prosecution lead, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, no doubt wishes he'd never taken this case to prosecute. I didn't realize at the time, but Kyle (presumably from Mark Richards' observations) noted that the District Attorney had passed on the case - and likely because it quickly became clear that there was a lot of photographic, video and then forensic evidence on Kyle's side. Binger is infamous in the trial coverage as having a strip torn off him by the judge when he repeatedly tried to introduce Kyle's use of his right to silence - which is a big no-no. Kyle clearly doesn't like Binger, which is no surprise, and takes some relish in pointing out that none of the prosecution witnesses helped Binger's case, and some actively helped Kyle.

The rest is history. Kyle did okay on the stand, Richards and Chirafisi did a rock-solid presentation of the defense facts and argument, the jury came back after four long days with unanimous "not guilty" verdicts.

The ending is fairly bittersweet. Kyle has won his case, and has his freedom, but is unable to take up his desired career (EMS/firefighter) for the forseeable future, until his notoriety reduces. There are still civil cases pending from the families of the people he shot, so the remaining money his case raised will probably be eaten up by defending those. He still has panic attacks from the night, but has a support dog Milo who helps him with this. He has started a job as a entry-level political consultant, which I guess isn't a bad choice given the experience he has had with politics - on both sides.

"Acquitted" is available on Kindle from Amazon, and from rittenhousebook.com in paperback. If you care about the American justice system, and the truth, it's worth your time to read.

"Chaos Monkeys" and how it got Antonio Martinez fired from Apple

Dedicated readers of this blog (all 1 of them) may recall last month's post about author Antonio Garcia Martinez being fired by Apple because a bunch of neurotic employees didn't like what he'd written in a book five years ago. I promised a review of that book: "Chaos Monkeys - Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and, dear readers, this is that review.

It's a great book. Is it the "Liar's Poker of Silicon Valley"? Maybe, maybe not, but they have a lot in common. Martinez takes you through his career at Goldman Sachs in New York, joining a dying Silicon Valley startup (Adchemy), fleeing to do his own startup (AdGrok), dancing through lawsuits and VC funding, and finally playing Twitter for an acquisition before skipping to join Facebook as an ads product manager. His stint in Silicon Valley is 2008 to 2016 and, to the best of my knowledge, accurately represents the people, companies and society there at the time.

Most importantly, like Michael Lewis of "Liar's Poker", Martinez is a compelling writer. He is opinionated, informed, funny and - unlike Lewis - cheerfully portrays himself as an averagely terrible human being. He fathers two children out of wedlock, kind of screws over his startup partners - though there's a twist at the end - gets away with drunk driving and outrageous speeding, has a torrid all-over grope with a busty fellow product manager in a Facebook janitor's cupboard, and plays off Twitter against Facebook with misleading information to boost the acquisition value of his start-up. He's contemptuous of the CEO Murthy Nukala, although to be fair Mr Nukala does not sound like a pleasant human being himself, and of the ass-kissing divisional leadership of Facebook.

Martinez is a really interesting and colorful guy. I would totally buy him lunch to hear a few of his stories. I would probably not want him dating my girlfriends though.

The full list of grievances of the Apple employees is given in the petition that was leaked to The Verge. Zoe Schiffer's byline there is no surprise, she is the leak-destination-of-choice for Big Tech. The top grievance was of course about Martinez's portrayal of women in Silicon Valley:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague [my emphasis] or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

I've encountered a good number of Silicon Valley women in tech in the past year, and I have to say that Martinez hits the nail on the head here. The pandemic has demonstrated in spades the neuroticism of many of these women. There has been very little get-up-and-go demonstrated, instead just a whinyness and cowering that makes one despair for the future of the human race. If there is any criticism of Martinez here, it's that he omitted that many men in tech exhibit the same characteristics, which is maybe even less excusable. Interestingly, you don't see the same weakness in most of the Bay Area natives, nor in tech immigrants from Central / Latin America or the former Soviet states - India too, to a lesser degree. It is mostly a white-women-in-and-around-tech thing.

It's notable that Martinez contrasts this with the self-determinism of a number of interesting women he encountered and dated / screwed during his time in the Valley. He clearly isn't a misogynist in this respect - he just doesn't like a bunch of people.

The aforementioned janitor cupboard fondling also upset the Apple whiners, especially the description of his facilitator:

PMMess, as we’ll call her, was composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.
...[and later, when he's about to be let go]...
There were few women one would call conventionally attractive at Facebook. The few there were rarely if ever dressed for work with their femininity on display in the form of dresses and heels. A fully turned out member of the deuxième sexe in a conference room was as clear an angel of death as a short-barreled .38 Special revolver. Gokul [the manager firing Martinez] gave an awkward smile, and bolted out the door the moment I sat down. I looked across the table. If her look was supposed to disarm me, she needed either more cleavage or more charm.

Two things about this stand out: a) boy, Martinez knows how to write, and b) he is an astute observer of the unsayable. Techies have never been famed for their dress sense, and most women (and men) in a tech role do not really try to dress up. There's a principled thing here where they want to let their work speak for itself and not be judged by conventional metrics of attractiveness - but you can't then turn around and get annoyed when someone observes, correctly, that you aren't attractive. I'd imagine that it would be a very different experience in banking where how you dress can be the line between success and mockery.

He also observes:

It occurred to me that perhaps this most recent experiment in fertility—and the first—had been planned on British Trader’s part, her back up against the menopause wall, a professional woman with every means at her disposal except a willing male partner—in which case I had been snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book.

Would the Apple employees like to content that this is not, in fact, one of the oldest tricks in the book? Is it unacceptable to say precisely because it is the truth?

Go and read "Chaos Monkeys". It is a highly enjoyable book, it gives great if biased insights into Silicon Valley for both startups and Big Tech, and more importantly does so for the companies, the technology, and the humans involved. You won't regret it. And despite being fired because of it, I expect Martinez does not regret writing it.

As for the prissy Apple employees who signed the petition: I'd hire one Martinez over ten of them, any day.

Apple used to say "Think different." I guess those days are long gone.

Update: Garcia himself speaks without specificity on the firing. I'm guessing he got paid very well for signing that non-disclosure agreement, unlike the one he was offered (and declined) at Facebook. If it was less than six figures, I'd be very surprised.

A really ballsy move would be for Google, Oracle or even Twitter to hire him, to stick two fingers up at the pusillanimous HR skirts at Apple - and at their own self-important neurotic engineers. Won't happen, of course, but if you happened to have a division that you wanted shot of, and it was infested by this kind of person, hiring Martinez into it - and standing behind him - would be nothing short of hilarious.

Ellipses

Binge watching the 2008 "classic" 'Lost in Austen', I find myself drawn to Mr. "Hugh Bonneville" Bennett's observation, addressing the linguistic and cultural shift between the early 1800's and early 2000's:

You do make the most refreshingly elliptic conversation, Miss Price.

Henceforth I resolve to use this idiom whenever I have no idea what my interlocutor is talking about. Unless they're addressing the topic of ECDH when the conversation would be elliptic, refreshing, yet still prone to make one's eyes cross.

I also appreciated the reference to the "otter-strewn thoroughfares of Hammersmith"; if ever I discovered an otter in Hammersmith, I'd expect it to be draped around the neck of a Russian lady resident of the area.

Sow the wind of femininity, reap the whirlwind of violence

Annalisa Barbieri in the Guardian is properly concerned about the proliferation of abusive relationships and wonders what can be done to stop it:

We can teach our children about the correct way to deal with emotions such as anger and frustration, and that it's never OK to hit another person. Currently, where do our children learn about this? The top source is from soap operas, where the information may or may not be accurate. Only 13% had learned about it at school. The logical place would be in Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), but even in schools where PSHE is taught, (it is not compulsory although the sex education element is) domestic abuse is rarely covered.

PSHE is taught in the age group 10-16. Children (and I use the word advisedly) of that age do not in general have the emotional or social maturity to appreciate the implications of what they are being told. I can't see this making much of a difference to the problem, no matter how good the intentions.

If you want to know why modern young men are so prone to violence in relationships, look at the environment in which they grew up. The usual outlets of the violent impulses that arise naturally in young men (play wrestling with other boys, playing soldiers, physical playground games) have been systematically suppressed. Where else are these violent impulses - strengthening with age - going to be channelled? As Annalisa herself writes "it's never OK to hit another person" - but punching and grappling is what boys thrive on. What they need to learn, and indeed learn as they grow up, is the difference between a moderate punch to the arm or torso to score a metaphorical point, and a punch to the head aiming to cause injury or worse. Remove the opportunity to play fight, and you remove the place where they learn those lessons - where a playful punch grazes your buddy's nose, causes it to bleed profusely and generates remorse and moderate recriminations.

Rory Miller's Meditations on Violence made clear the distinction between playground violence, confrontations for territory / status, and then the third tier of violence intended to injure or kill. This third tier can be seen in UK cities when alcohol or aggression have young men throwing kicks at the heads of innocent victims. A kick at the head has only one purpose - to injure severely or kill. This is bottled-up violence finding an outlet that ruins the lives of people - the injured party, their family, and then the aggressor himself as he is sent down for a number of years.

Barbieri quotes Refuge's CEO Sandra Horley:

If the abuse is physical, she advises, "Never ignore that first push, that first shove."

She's right enough; that's the sign of a man (or woman) who has not learned control over their violent impulses and found an appropriate channel for them. If you're the inappropriate channel, pack your bags and leave. But we want this to be a rare occurrence, we need to restore the time-honoured ways in which young men can relieve the pressure of their violence urges harmlessly. Feminising them is not helping.

Why I Left Goldman Sachs - a review

Finally, dear readers, I can bring you my thoughts on Greg Smith's Why I Left Goldman Sachs (currently number 1 bestseller on Amazon in Finance.) Having followed the Greg Smith saga since his NYT op-ed, and having read a wide range of other Wall Street and City books from the sublime Liar's Poker to the ridiculous Cityboy - Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, I will endeavour to tell you how Greg's book stacks up against the competition, whether it's worth a read and how it may be seen in the context of Goldman Sachs, the 2008 financial crisis and today's battle against the 1%.

Overview

The book plots the path of Jewish South African table-tennis star Greg Smith, joining Goldman Sachs as an intern in June 2000 then being accepted as a graduate into equity sales. It is mostly told in the first person.

Comparisons with "Liar's Poker" are inevitable, and indeed apposite. Both Michael Lewis and Greg Smith entered their banks as fresh graduates, survived their gruelling graduate induction and steadily rose in the ranks of sales - Lewis in bonds, Smith in equities - to relative fame and fortune within the company. I would say that Smith has the edge in timeline; Lewis's book ends with Salomon Brothers undergoing upheaval and a hostile takeover battle even as he collects a large end-of-year bonus and decides to leave, whereas Smith takes us through the tumnult of 9/11, across the 2006 surge and through the 2008 financial crisis, then leaves in 2011 as the firm is still thriving but his doubts about the direction of the firm make him unable to continue in his role.

Lewis spends about half the book on charting the fortunes of and anecdotes about the mortgage department of Salomon; Smith spends very little of his time talking about matters other than him and the fortunes of those around and immediately above him, which may be less engaging than the characters described by Lewis (Lewie Ranieri, Mike Mortara, the Human Piranha, John Gutfreund) but makes one more willing to trust Smith's recounting.

Should Goldman Sachs be worried?

If I were Goldman PR, and had access to a draft of this book, I would be mostly positive about it. After all, although towards the end it is critical of Goldman Sachs' current direction (and of the culture in the London office in particular), Smith is very positive about the way the firm trained him, taught him to be a culture carrier, demonstrated concern for clients even at trading partner level -- see the anecdotes about Michael Daffey -- and how ex-Goldmanites like Hank Paulson more or less saved the American financial system in 2008.

Where Smith does nail Goldman to the wall is in its changing culture and reaction to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, when he sees the long-term concern for clients' welfare thrown out of the window in pursuit of fees. He is particularly critical of the fetish for selling structured products to clients with a lot of money but relatively little sophistication, such as firefighter and police pension fund managers; the more opaque the product, the higher the fees and margin for Goldman, and the greater the likelihood that the customer will get screwed down the line.

Smith identifies four main categories of Goldman clients, mirroring the tale in the Haggadah about the Four Sons:

1. The Wise Client: sophisticated investors with a lot of money and experience in dealing with Wall Street, such as many hedge funds. These guys get good rates out of Goldman.
2. The Wicked Client: smart clients who sail a little too close to the wind, and sometimes end up paying very large fines or even jail time.
3. The Simple Client: unsophisticated people in charge of a lot of money, "perfect prey for Wall Street." Can be obnoxious, often part of bureaucratic organisations like pension funds.
4. The Client Who Doesn't Know How To Ask Questions: like the Simple Client, but worse because they're trusting. Often get exotic products offloaded on them, pay through the nose for it and then get blown up further down the line.

Not terribly edifying for the Goldman Sachs client relations folks - or the clients, come to that - but educational.

Smith doesn't pull his punches on the regulators either. On the subject of the 2010 SEC lawsuit:

My immediate reaction: this must be a witch hunt. The SEC has been asleep at the wheel for the last two years and now it needs to show the public that it's doing something?

The famed "muppet" quote, when given context, explains why Goldman Sachs' email search for the term yielded nothing. Smith is talking about early 2011, when he moved to London to take on the equity derivatives business there, and finding any number of hapless (and moderately clueless) clients referred to as "muppets". But note that this is less than a year after the SEC prosecution where "Fabulous" Fabrice Tourre had his (personal) email displayed to all and sundry. Any banker with the sense that the good Lord gave gravel would know not to write anything even slightly demeaning in email. All major banks by now were using email snooping products like Orchestria to spot emails that contained confidential, suspicious, illegal or otherwise undesirable material.

Summary

It would be a lot to compare Greg Smith and "Why I Left Goldman Sachs" to the seminal Michael Lewis and "Liar's Poker". And yet, Smith does not fall as far short in the comparison as I had expected. The book is compelling, reasonably well-written, describes crucial times in the life of the author, the financial system and Goldman Sachs, and does so with good lucid explanations of the issues involved. An example is the 2007 August blow-up of quant trading algorithms:

The problems were twofold, and they were massive: First, the out-of-the-way securities that the computer models had chosen to unwind were illiquid. Second ,since everybody's model was saying the same thing, there were few buyers.
It was as though somebody had yelled, "Fire!" in a crowded theater and the exits were blocked.

Smith is very clear on the modern attitudes at Goldman Sachs which eventually caused him to leave. The focus on large profitable trades, with little regard for the way they would benefit clients; transitioning from the traditional Goldman "long-term greedy" to "let me just get this year's bonus"; the firm promoting the big money pullers rather than the culture carriers. He's not keen on Lloyd Blankfein, or London co-heads Michael "Woody" Sherwood and Richard Gnodde whom he regards as being asleep at the wheel as Goldman veered off course, and his criticisms are well-argued even if you may not agree with some of the details.

If you want to know more about how modern banks work, how we got into the mess of 2008, and the problems that still exist in the banking system today, you could do a lot worse than "Why I Left Goldman Sachs". If you enjoyed "Liar's Poker", you should read this book as well.

But, dear Lord, couldn't Grand Central Publishing have come up with a snappier title?

Greg Smith on 60 Minutes

I just watched young Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs being grilled by Anderson Cooper on CBS's "60 Minutes". It was an entertaining 10 minute piece; I think Anderson Cooper was reasonably probing on Greg's motives. For my readers' entertainment, I present below my notes on the interview. Errors and omissions excepted, do not trade on the basis of these scribblings, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Goldman Sachs was characterised as "the smartest, most profitable place on Wall Street; the toughest place to get a job." So why did Greg end up leaving? He wanted to hit the board of directors round the head, and hoped that his NYT op-ed would be a wake-up call to them; forcing them to change the direction of the bank by saying something publicly.

Greg was 33 years old, had been at the firm for 12 years (in Securities). He was recruited as a summer intern from Economics major at Stanford. He was earning about $500K when he left, and he claimed "I loved the place, I put a lot of my heart and soul into it". Yes, bankers have souls. Apparently.

The idea of the NYT op-ed was apparently not to be destructive or a betrayal. Greg liked the Goldman Sachs Business Principles, particularly the one about reputation:

OUR ASSETS ARE OUR PEOPLE, CAPITAL AND REPUTATION.
If any of these is ever diminished, the last is the most difficult to restore. We are dedicated to complying fully with the letter and spirit of the laws, rules and ethical principles that govern us. Our continued success depends upon unswerving adherence to this standard.

So where did it all go wrong? "Goldman Sachs started to learn how to use information which they got from clients to bet with their own money, and sometimes against their own clients." That's going to be a pivotal point in the book, I'd bet. This won't be specific violation of the Chinese wall between buy-side and sell-side; rather, a more general picture of what clients are doing and what overpriced products Goldman might be able to sell to them (or their rivals) if they're in a tight spot.

Greg sold pretty vanilla derivatives, but the promotions and big money went to people selling complex products with big fees. They were selling these to pension funds, educational institutions who weren't well suited for the products, or indeed well enough educated to understand how steep the GS fees were. Within the firm, an unsophisticated client was the golden product; they aimed to sell them the most sophisticated product and "kerching!". An example quoted was Abacus which generated an SEC case, Senate subcommittee hearing and record fine in 2010.

Greg seems to be making the conjecture that many institutional investors are not as sophisticated as the customer suitability guidelines think they are. So what about the bank's ethics? An economics + Law professor opined "I think Goldman Sachs is one of the most ethical banks out there - not sure that says much though." Talk about damning with faint praise.

Anderson Cooper wanted to know why haven't we heard from Goldman Sachs leavers before. "People who work at GS don't talk about working at GS" - the inevitable comparisons to Fight Club, Mafia arose, and the point was made that people making the money don't want to kill the golden goose.

Greg recounted a discussion with a major Asian investor who said "We don't trust you at all; but that's OK, we're going to keep doing business with you as you're one of the biggest banks out there." Greg was shocked but the senior partner he was with was jubilant after the meeting, and didn't seem at all concerned at the lack of trust displayed. Now I'm not surprised by this attitude of the major investor - you don't get rich by trusting people - but I'd bet this causes a few ulcers in the GS ethics committee.

Muppets had to feature in the interview, and sure enough Greg confirmed that London co-workers repeatedly refer to clients as muppets. (The first time I saw the term in a non-Kermit sense was in a dictionary of prison slang, and sure enough the Muppet Wiki confirms this use.) He gave an example of junior guy (24 years old) selling a product to a client who was a muppet and getting them to pay GS $1mm over the odds; his managing director just laughed at the news. If true, I'd imagine that such behaviour would cause another round of antacids for the ethics committee.

Anderson Cooper pressed Greg: why not raise the issues confidentially internally, rather than publicly? Greg says that he talked to 9 senior partners at the firm so it shouldn't be a surprise - he wasn't specific about the timeline, I have no idea whether this was before or after his resignation, but I suspect it was after submitting the resignation but before the op-ed. Goldman Sachs said he wanted $1mm and promotion - so Anderson asked "if you had got those, would you still have quit?" "Absolutely," he claims, "I didn't go to Wall Street purely to make money. I definitely wanted to make money but I left because things had veered so far from what I think is right." Well, to be honest, the money he's likely to make from the book would only cover 3-4 more years at Goldman Sachs, so if he wanted money he should have kept his mouth shut.

According to the professor, there are no significant allegations of fraud are in the book; I'm not surprised, as they'd have to be cast-iron to get past the lawyers. What he does note is that the current environment of very low interest rates cause pension funds, educational institutions to call up banks and ask for riskier products to make better returns, so that they're vulnerable to the predations of banks. So there's another reason why prolonged low interest rates are a bad idea - Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King please take note.

It will be interesting to see the balance in the book between criticism of Goldman Sachs' external actions (client dealings) and internal (promoting psychopaths). I await my copy with eagerness...

Goldman Sachs really is worried about Greg Smith's book

In advance of Greg Smith's "60 Minutes" interview on CBS this Sunday, Goldman Sachs has been circulating a briefing note putting their side of the story:

However, to better understand Greg's criticisms, we examined his performance reviews for 2009-2011 to determine if we had failed to appropriately address issues which he may have raised about the conduct of his colleagues, and, more generally, about our culture. Our review showed that Greg did not provide any negative feedback on any of his reviewees in any of those years. In fact, he scored all of his colleagues’ performance at the top of the range, including in the areas of Culture and Values, Leadership and People Management, Client Focus and Reputational Excellence.

It sounds like young Greg understood very well that a prerequisite to getting ahead is to avoid rocking the boat...

Goldman Sachs' PR people are clearly taking this adverse publicity seriously, although I do wonder whether the best approach would be to shrug, let it wash over them and drain away, making use of the chronic short attention span of the global media. But hey, it's a fruitful source of blogging for all and sundry.

The first few rocks of the Greg Smith avalanche approach GS

After a sterling set of Q3 results, it must seem a little unfair to the Goldman Sachs executive team that former London salesman Greg Smith is about to ruin their October with his book detailing salacious and embarrassing parts of Goldman Sachs' life over the past 10 years:

The following afternoon the group were all hungover so they partied in the hot tub at the Mandalay Bay - with the topless woman they called 'Ms Silicone.'

Well, at least they scrupulously observed the neutral form of address; I'm sure the HR department would have leapt on them had they called her 'Miss' Silicone.

My copy of Mr. Smith's book is on order and due early next week; I shall share my thoughts on it with you, dear readers, as soon as I have perused it. So far at least, from the carefully managed leaks, it sounds like quite entertaining reading...

Update: it seems that Goldman Sachs is trying to fight back with a release of emails, which to me indicates that it's rather worried about the book:

According to a summary of Goldman Sachs’s investigation, Mr Smith had an overly high opinion of himself, frequently giving himself evaluation scores that were "significantly above" those he received from his peers.

You know, I would be fascinated, fascinated to learn how common this mismatch is among VPs in the Fixed Income and Equities divisions. Do you think Goldman might deign to tell us?

A railway story worth telling

The recent death of Eric Lomax, a Signals officer captured by the Japanese in Singapore and tortured at Kanchanaburi camp in Thailand, comes shortly before the release of The Railway Man, a film based on the extraordinary story of what happened to Lomax and the Japanese associated with his abuse after the war:

A fellow former-prisoner then gave him a cutting from the Japan Times about a ex-Japanese soldier who had been helping the Allies to find the graves of their dead and claimed that he had earned their forgiveness. The accompanying photograph showed Takashi Nagase, the interpreter during Lomax's interrogation, and the man with whom he most associated his ordeal.

Nagase and Lomax finally met in 1994 and there was peace and forgiveness between them. The knowledge of what he had facilitated, including the deaths of several colleagues of Lomax, had haunted Nagase and receiving forgiveness from Lomax meant much to him.

But Nagase was not the only Japanese with a connection to Lomax. Osamu Komai was the son of the 2ic of Lomax's camp; that man, Mitsuo Komai, was tried by the British after the war, found guilty of war crimes and hanged. Osamu Komai grew up with the stigma of being the child of a war criminal; it would have been easy to resent this, and to resent the British who had hanged his father. Instead he took it upon himself to make apology for what his father had done:

Since I could not read English, I asked my acquaintance to translate the record. I found out that of those who my father beat severely, Lieutenant Lomax was seriously injured and Lieutenants Hawley and Armitage died as a result. Knowing the actual names of these British soldiers after 55 years profoundly affected me. Without realizing, I was bowing and apologizing from bottom of my heart. I forwarded the entire record to Mr. Nagase.
I learned from the reply from Mr.Nagase that Mr. Lomax was now a friend of his and was well in England. I wrote to Mr. Nagase, "I would like to meet Mr. Lomax and apologize on behalf of my father."

In 2007 Osamu Komai travelled to Berwick-on-Tweed to meet Lomax and the two men became friends.

"Continuing to hate gets you nowhere," says Eric. "It just damages you as an individual. At some point, the hating has to stop."

It has been 67 years since the end of the fighting in the Pacific, and some of the wounds inflicted in that fighting have taken many decades to heal. But if people like Nagase, Komai and Lomax can apologise for and forgive what happened, it shows hope for the human race.

Lomax's book "The Railway Man: A True Story of War, Remembrance and Forgiveness" on which the forthcoming film is based sounds like quite the read; I look forward to both book and film.

Greg Smith finally re-emerges

Ex-Goldman salesman Greg Smith has finally completed his book about life in Goldman Sach and publisher Grand Central is releasing it on 22nd October:

"Many people on Main Street distrust Wall Street right now, yet few can put their finger on why," Jamie Raab, publisher of Grand Central, said in a statement. "Greg Smith’s candid account of his years at Goldman Sachs does just that."

It has taken 6 months to write; either Greg is a two-finger typist, or (I suspect more likely) the Grand Central lawyers have been through the proofs with a fine tooth comb and a stack of red ink...

They're certainly not short on hype;

Grand Central considers the book a potential successor to "Liar's Poker"

I bet they do... I look forward to ordering my copy, and will endeavour to provide you, dear readers, with my thoughts on Greg Smith and whether he can hold a candle to Michael Lewis.

"No Easy Day" - behind the hype

My copy of "No Easy Day" by former SEAL "Mark Owen" arrived yesterday. I was very curious to know exactly what he'd been saying and why all the controversy, so spent the evening working through the book.

First of all, it's a good read. I'm assuming that Owen's co-author Kevin Maurer did the first-pass editing and structuring from Owen's account, but he did a good job. It reads very well, short on verbiage and striking the right balance between detail and action. The book doesn't touch much on Owen's initial SEAL training and operations; it's his time in DEVGRU (Naval Special Warfare Development Group aka "SEAL Team Six") that takes up most of the book. It's not even ops-ops-ops; a few ops such as the Maersk Alabama hijacking and some strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan are covered, but a good portion of the book simply talks about daily life as a SEAL, the camaraderie, the nitty-gritty of prepping for deployments and managing the (tiny) amount of time at home or with family.

There was inevitable concern in the Spec-ops community about classified operational and training information leaking from a book like this that was not explicitly reviewed and censored by the Pentagon. I think these concerns are overblown. The information that was new to me was, in the main, not technical and not detailed. An example is that he refutes the common perception that SEALs assault in a wham-bam-gotcha style; rather, it's relatively slow and quiet, aiming to let the enemy show themselves. There's no technical information about the Abbottabad raid itself that I hadn't seen from leaks before. Indeed, Owen makes the point that within a couple of days of the raid everyone in the Pentagon or administration who had information had leaked it.

The planning and raid itself takes up maybe the last third of the book. There are some great diagrams in the second collection of image plates showing how the assault progressed step-by-step, giving a much clearer picture of how the bin Laden house was constructed and where the actions took place. Contrary to much speculation, the actual assault onto the third floor and shooting of bin Laden is not that much different from the main White House account; the chief difference is that Owen asserts that the point man actually hit bin Laden in the head when he poked his head out onto the stairway, and that by the time they entered his room he was already on the ground and on his way out. This seems plausible; the point main knew bin Laden was almost certainly on that floor, was prepared for him to show himself, was at close range and had his weapon up and pointing forwards. He would have been the source of endless ribbing if he'd actually missed.

Owen and his fellow SEALs clearly aren't pleased with the politics of the post-raid leaks, but on the other hand they weren't surprised - after all, this is what politicians do. He seems pretty neutral about Obama, probably not a Democratic voter, but respectful of his position as Commander-in-Chief. The only top brass whom they admire is, unsurprisingly, Admiral McRaven who was a 3-star commanding JSOC at the time of the raid, and was subsequently (shocker) bumped to four stars. Owen also shines a little light on the personalities of the CIA analysts who worked with the SEALs in the planning of the raid.

Overall I enjoyed the book. It was a compelling read, packed with interesting information and vignettes of day-to-day life in the special ops community. Recommended.

Atlas Shrugged - the film(s)

I happened across the trailer for Atlas Shrugged part 2 yesterday, which made me remember that I actually hadn't seen Atlas Shrugged part 1; it came out before I read the book. So I ordered the DVD of part 1 from Amazon and watched it via Amazon streaming (thank you, Amazon, for letting me immediately stream a film that I'd just bought, a fantastic idea).

It may be an unpopular perspective, but I think the film was an excellent adaptation of the book. The casting was inspired, with Taylor Schilling nailing Dagny Taggart. Grant Bowler was a more likeable Hank Rearden than the book character, but I was Just Fine with that. Even the smaller characters (Wyatt, Rearden's wife, Willers) were well portrayed and written. The visual effects were OK, though you could tell they weren't the same grade as a George Lucas masterpiece; that's what a smaller budget does for you. The dialogue was well tweaked to feel current with the 2011 political and labour scene; the world of Rearden, Mouch and the Taggarts didn't feel a million miles away from today's America.

Unlike the book, the 96 minutes of film really packed in the story; the main criticism I have is that so much was happening so quickly that if you hadn't read the book you'd be sunk; it would need maybe 2-3 viewings to appreciate it fully. Overall though it kept me on the edge of my seat, and the sudden jarring end (or "stop" as some critics had it, which was fair) was well-timed. Recommended to anyone who's read at least some of the book and is more interested in the story than the philosophy.

I'm not sure about part 2. The complete recasting is going to be rather jarring. It opens in US cinemas in October so hopefully will be available on DVD before the end of the year. We'll see how they do.

Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs

While passing through an airport recently I picked up a copy of Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Military and have been enjoying it immensely. It caught my eye since I was familiar with the author, Lewis Page who writes for The Register on various matters military. Lewis, an ex-bomb disposal specialist, is not a gentleman shy of sharing his opinions and so I thought I'd give his book a shot.

If I were to sum up Lewis's top five hates as portrayed in the book, in descending order, they would have to be:

1. The UK Ministry of Defence bureaucracy;
2. BAE Systems, prime financial beneficiary of that bureaucracy;
3. The Navy's choice of ships;
4. Senior brass (brigadier level and up) in the Armed Services;
5. The RAF's choice of planes.

The thesis that runs through the book is that BAE can't find its arse with its elbow, can't design a weapon system that a) works or b) addresses an actual need, and yet gets truckloads of cash shovelled in its direction in order to maintain a "domestic aircraft/ship/missile building ability". Looking at its track record with Nimrod MRA.4 where they redesigned a perfectly good aircraft with wings that couldn't lift it, and Tornado ADV where they turned a very good low-level fighter-bomber into an expensive inadequate air-to-air missile platform, that contention seems hard to deny.

A lot of what Lewis says makes good sense, even if you don't always agree with him. I disagree with his position on artillery and shore bombardment; he thinks that close air support is almost always the way to go compared to artillery because it's an easier logistical problem to get bombs to airfields rather than shells towards the front line, and because aircraft can strike deeper into enemy territory. However, the Israeli army was light on field artillery in 1973 because of that thinking and the Israeli air force who were supposed to be dropping the bombs hit an unexpected SAM barrier; aircraft are generally more vulnerable than mobile artillery.

Lewis contends that we'd be much better off dropping a lot of our domestic military production and buying off the shelf from the Americans; even when we do buy foreign, we insist on doing things ourselves and screwing it up. As an example he cites the UK Apache procurement where we actually went with an American design but insisted on building it ourselves (and changing the engines while we were at it). It was certainly an expensive way of keeping British jobs - by his calculations we could have given £1 million to each worker whose job was saved, bought Apaches off the shelf and still come out way ahead financially. The Chinook Mk.3 procurement fiasco is also mentioned; and, as Lewis points out, not a single person has lost their job because of it.

We clearly have way too many military top brass in the UK, compared to the actual fighting personnel that they command. Some form of cull seems way overdue. I'd go further than Lewis and insist that we evacuate MoD Abbey Wood from where military procurement is "run", bomb it to the ground and fire every single employee there, then restart from scratch.