mutual funds, adopt a long-term horizon, don’t sweat the daily ups and downs of the market.”
She sneered at his advice. “Do you really believe that horseshit you’re peddling?”
He shook his head vigorously from side to side. “No, Janet, of course, I don’t, I’m not a total jackass. Investing in the stock market today is akin to gambling in a casino; speculators are driving wild swings in prices. Anything-goes and the little guy is at a big disadvantage. ”
“Correct.”
“There aren’t any long-term investments anymore, everything is a trade now. Long–term means hours -- you buy a stock in the morning and you sell it in the afternoon or the next day, at the very latest. We’re all dead in the long run.”
“So why don’t you be honest, Tuck, and tell your clients the truth?”
His eyes scrunched downward. “Because if I did, they’d pull their money out of the market and I wouldn’t earn any commissions.”
“I guess that makes you a hypocrite.”
“Yeah, Janet, but I’m a hypocrite who still has a fucking job and can make his fucking alimony payments.”
“Point taken.”
“In the old days, buy-and-hold was the strategy. We told our clients to purchase blue-chip names like GM, CIT, Pacific Gas & Electric, Texaco, or Eastman Kodak and then to forget about it for the next twenty-five years. When it came time to hang up the spurs, there’d be a pile of cash waiting for them.”
“All those companies have filed for bankruptcy.”
“Yeah, Janet, it only goes to show you how times have changed.”
“And change doesn’t happen gradually now, Tuck, it comes at the speed of light.”
He nodded. “I’m overwhelmed by it; the world is moving too fast and I feel as if I’m on a merry-go-round. I’m running scared and I don’t know where I’m supposed to be running to.”
“There are no safe havens anymore, everybody is scared.”
The tipsy man sighed. “Going to work for a major corporation after you graduated college used to be a sure ticket to a secure, prosperous life. That’s certainly not the case these days.”
“No, it isn’t,” Tuck agreed. My brother-in-law was let go by Citigroup and has been out of work for almost two years. A 99-weeker, he’s exhausted all his unemployment insurance benefits. Nobody will hire him and the guy’s got an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School of Business.”
“If your brother-in-law had a degree in a useful field such as engineering or computer science, Tuck, he’d have his choice of jobs at Google, Intel, or Oracle. An MBA means he was just another over-paid, paper-pusher packaging crappy mortgages like all the other scam artists at banks.”
“Hmm.”
“Tell him to burn his Brooks Brothers suits on the Barbecue grill and enroll in a vocational school to study plumbing or cesspool cleaning, a trade that’s practical.”
“Egad!”
“If he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, Tuck, he can go to Barber College.”
“Barber College!”
“That’s right. He’d make a fortune giving $5 haircuts to down-and-out Wall Street guys who have to look respectable for their next job interview but can’t afford the $160 cuts they used to get when they were flush.”
“My sister would get hysterical, Jocko, they’re members of the snooty Scarsdale Country Club.”
“All he’d require is a folding chair, a mirror, a comb, scissors and a nice smock. He could set up shop in the parking lot of the Scarsdale railroad station and clip the city-bound commuters before they boarded the train in the morning.”
“What the hell have you been smoking?”
“Duh! It’s called thinking-outside-the-box, Tuck.”
“You’re fucking nuts!”
A bartender interrupted. “Keep it civil, guys, or take it outside.”
“Sorry,” Tuck apologized, “we’ll tone down the rhetoric.”
Jocko shrugged as though he didn’t care whether they were tossed out of the bar or not. “My final suggestion is that your brother-in-law go to Bodyguard School. The gap between the rich and poor in this country is getting so wide that soon you’re going to see a rash of kidnappings for ransom like what goes on in Mexico and South America.”
“You’re depressing me, Jocko, let somebody else have a word.”
“I feel sorry the most for retired people,” Janet said, “they’re sitting on top of a ticking financial time bomb. Many of them behaved responsibly -- they worked hard; didn’t overextend themselves by buying fancy houses, boats, airplanes, cars or taking vacations they couldn’t afford; they saved their money and were expecting to live off the interest on their savings the same as their parents had done -- but, with the Federal Reserve forcing interest rates down to almost zero, this elderly group has taken a big pay cut and is totally screwed.”
“Yeah and Social Security is going broke on top of it. In a way, it’s good my folks are dead and not here to see all the bad shit coming our way.”
“It’s a recipe for disaster, Tuck, most of our 55 million seniors will end up broke long before they die. Our society is going to be confronting a massive poverty problem.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Janet, my objective is to spend my last dollar on the day I die.”
Jocko exhaled noisily. “A longer life expectancy has turned out to be a curse instead of a blessing. The glitch is we’re not dying fast enough; the Government is going to have to start knocking people off once they get to be 73 or so.”
“That’s such a horrible thing to say.”
“I don’t see any other way.”
Tuck took another sip of whisky and smacked his lips. “We’re facing a death spiral: the too-big-to-fail Zombie banks will only lend to big corporations who don’t need the funds; small businesses built this country but they can’t get loans to expand because the community banks are tapped out; house prices continue to decline while qualified home buyers can’t get mortgages to buy homes standing vacant; and the true unemployment figure is probably closer to 20 %.”
“I was watching CNBC the other day,” Janet said, “and they had an economist on who estimated the U.S. national debt, including entitlements for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at over $120 trillion. I’m not a scaredy-cat, Tuck, but that’s an upsetting number.”
“Refresh my memory, Janet, is a trillion a thousand-million?”
“No, a trillion is a million-million, it’s got twelve zeroes.”
“Now that’s what I call serious
