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Almost a dozen years ago, we sought to crowd-source a title for outgoing Morgan Stanley chief John Mack’s book. Alas, even with all of that time on his hands, the best he could come up with was Up Close and All In. And, according to one of his former underlings, it doesn’t get any better from there.
It has many of the elements that made the ultimate Wall Street book, Liar’s Poker, sparkle — rivalry, camaraderie, japes and high stakes — but sadly told without the style or irony of Michael Lewis.
Does it include that time he told New York Fed Chair and future Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to “get fucked” during the global financial crisis? Of course it does. How about the one where he got so drunk at the Waldorf that a future president of the United States had to carry him out “on his back”? Well, we haven’t read it, but we’re guessing probably not. Does it include any doubts about how he conducted himself leading up to and during said global financial crisis, which required an emergency $9 billion cash infusion from the Japanese to keep Morgan Stanley afloat? Definitely not.
Mack’s own account shows how his hunger to catch up with other firms meant that he missed the signals leading up to the financial crisis. He recounts how he didn’t realise Merrill Lynch was so vulnerable until the Sunday before Lehman failed. Moreover, Mack says that unlike Goldman he had not studied the benefits of becoming a bank to take advantage of the Fed being the lender of last resort…. friend and former Morgan Stanley colleague Steve Eisman — of Big Short fame — was literally shouting at top management that things were going down…. The Thursday before the weekend Lehman went bust, I met with hedge fund manager John Paulson in New York to discuss the best shorts among European financials. At the close of an intense hour he said thanks but then asked me why I wasn’t writing up my resume as Morgan Stanley would probably be bankrupt in a month or two. In my debrief later that day, I told Mack about the tone of my meetings and some investors’ conviction of Morgan Stanley’s imminent failure. Mack had absolutely zero doubts that his bank would somehow be fine….
“I have fucking killed it. I knocked the cover off the ball in the financial world,” Mack says in the epilogue.
In other words, don’t waste a valuable Christmas ask on Mack’s tome if you’re looking for anything approaching insight or introspection. But if you’re an afficionado of the finer points of Wall Street frivolity—and, dear reader, we know you are—then it’s worth every bit of the $28.99 cover price.
He is a self-confessed “incorrigible prankster”. One time he puts a piece of salmon sushi into the mouthpiece of a trader’s phone for several days so he and the floor could see the trader getting “worried sick” about halitosis. “Every desk is a place to hide under” he recounts.
Mack is all too aware of his non-Ivy League background…
Oh, the plight of the Duke scholarship boy!
…lacking the “Mayflower manners of previous hires” and delighted to put the fear of God into “frat-house charm balls who needed a motivated kick in the ass”.
Mack knifed [FT]
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