In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive compensation downward, panders to the blurry “populist” agenda of the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, generally foments market uncertainty and other forms of intolerable chaos so that presto, before you know it, we have “The End of Wall Street As They Knew It.”

In other words: To your crying towels, bankers! Correspondent Sherman is on the scene, and no howling distortion of recent financial history you care to offer is too outlandish for him to faithfully record! After duly huddling with a couple of dozen financial titans, our reporter has arrived at a chilling verdict: “what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.”

Perhaps not—but what is exceedingly flip is brother Sherman’s account of the origins of the crisis.

Sure, there was that awkward business that sent the global finance sector to the brink of ruin, plus a devastating tsunami in Japan and whatnot—but the true culprit sending Wall Street titans back into their bedrooms to listen to Interpol on auto-repeat and cut themselves is of course the specter of government regulation. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, a largely toothless measure lousy with loopholes and lobbying dosh, becomes in the alternate universe of Adam Moss’s New York magazine a rash bid to expropriate the expropriators. Even though the full provisions of the already anemic bill don’t go into effect until 2016, the very thought of a somewhat straitened financial playing field so terrifies Wall Street’s stout corridor of wealth creators that, well, they’re bidding farewell to the most valuable commodity of all—their big swinging dicks. “The government has strangled the financial system,” Dick Bove, an especially excitable and frequently mistaken bank analyst, tells Sherman. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

You see, by force of the Volcker rule—a watered-down version of the central Glass-Steagall protections separating out commercial and investment banking that were disastrously repealed in 1999—Wall Street is re-thinking everything, from the scale of its year-end bonuses to its “core value to the economy.” And Bove, for one, preaches that all this doom-and-gloom thinking can’t help but be self-fulfilling: “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year. We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.” Another unnamed informant tells Sherman that the financial industry is gearing up for a state of near permanent pay-austerity at the mere thought of the Volcker rule, which doesn’t kick in officially until July: “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and they’re becoming lower-margin businesses. So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.”

Never mind that this diagnosis is diametrically opposed to the Bove-ian school of market alarmism, which holds that banks are being starved of desperately needed leverage and credit; this unnamed fearmonger sees them in a frenzy to raise capital, and one thing the Volcker rule undeniably seeks to achieve is minimal capital requirements to prevent speculative lending from veering once more into toxic chaos.

No, for Sherman, all that’s needed to stoke the proper mood of Misean panic is to rouse the specter of frightened bankers, and a few quick-and-dirty quarterly profit reports.

From the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent.

Other economic journalists might conclude that this downturn was a set of long-overdue market corrections, and given the broader turn around in the actual manufacturing economy, by no means an indication of worsening conditions—for investors and workers alike. Some radical others might even suggest that the shredded headcounts at the financial firms played a part in their own downturn in revenue. But while from his evidently privileged vantage in the driver’s seat of the Doc’s Time Machine, Sherman can divine all sorts of mischief arising from the yet-to-be-implemented provisions of Dodd-Frank, it does bear reminding that since 2010, BofA has been forced to eat a sizable portion of the toxic mortgage debt it acquired amid its spectacularly ill-advised purchase of Countrywide; Morgan has suffered tremendous losses in its Japanese operations and has, like most banks, been spooked by its exposure to the Euro-debt crisis (funnily enough, the firm’s US-based investment-banking operations—ie, the shop most directly affected by the dread Volcker rule, has booked profits amid all the tumult abroad); much the same general picture holds at Goldman, which as you may recall, has had more than its share of legal contretemps thrown into the bargain . As for Citigroup—the company whose very grotesque merged existence was the deregulatory excuse for repealing Glass Steagall—it’s been a basket case for so very long that a 16 percent loss in profits over the past two years seems cause for celebration, Volcker Rule or no Volcker Rule.

Indeed, for all of Sherman’s gullible huffing and puffing over the destructive reach of our new financial regulatory state, no one seems to have told the nation’s financial system this dire news, to judge by the actual behavior (as opposed to the opportunistic media rhetoric of its leaders). Yes, it’s been a rocky couple of years. And sure, Wall Street has lately shed plenty of jobs—who hasn’t? But in a report to investors inconveniently released one day ahead of Sherman’s dispatch from the existential trenches, Goldman Sachs—which continues to enjoy bullish stock performance amid its profit setbacks—announced this bit of non-emasculating news:

From a financial markets perspective, the environment looks quite friendly. The combination of better growth news and easier monetary policy is always welcome. In addition, we recently argued that corporate profit margins may still have room for further gains, despite the fact that they already stand at record levels from both a bottom-up and top-down perspective.

But no such merely empirical considerations can hope to stand up against the wrath of a stable of mainly unnamed bankers! Why, just look at Goldman itself, where Sherman reports that “months before the Volcker rule is set to kick in, star traders began [sic] to leave in droves.” And Goldman has lately shuttered its proprietary hedge-fund shop—in recognition that the line of essentially free credit that the Fed has opened up to investment houses may at last be about to dry up.

This, too, might well be seen as a sign of comparative health in the broader economy—especially with Goldman itself sounding so bullish on the investment climate, with the dread implementation of the Volcker Rule a scant five months away. After all, easy credit is what creates unsustainable bubbles in the first place, as even the most cursory study of the 2008 debacle shows. But not so in Shermanland! Even breakaway hedge shops are booking fairly lackluster profits (despite the obscene tax advantages they continue to enjoy)—so you know: Panic, everybody! Only Sherman is even less clear in explicating just what the cause for alarm is supposed to be in this case—while banks' hedge-fund divisions are curtailed under the Volcker rule, hedge funds themselves need not tremble before its pending implementation. There’s the bad economy, yes—but it’s just as important, he insists, to note that the hedge sector is “as overbuilt as the housing and credit markets that drove its profits,” with the overall number of hedge funds exploding about 16-fold (610 to 9.553) from 1990 to 2011. One would assume that a slowdown in an oversupplied speculative sector is not, you know, a bad thing by itself, either—especially given that even the most diehard Randians would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that hedge funds create economic value of any kind. But Sherman nonetheless frets on behalf of hedge managers that “the easy obvious plays are oversubscribed, which shrinks margins.... Many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the last year and a half.” It’s evidently a taken-for-granted, second-nature kind of axiom in today’s American economy that an “industry” made up entirely of “easy obvious plays” is integral to our very survival.

Or at the very least, it’s a great enabling premise of lazy, overclass-osculating, dick-obsessed magazine journalism. Witness Sherman’s closing brief for the productive wonders worked by yon investment class:

It’s certainly true that Wall Street’s money played an important part in New York’s comeback, helping to transform the city from a symbol of urban decay into a gleaming leisure theme park. Consciously or not, as a city, New York made a bargain: It would tolerate the one percent’s excessive pay as long as the rising tax base funded the schools, subways, and parks for the 99 percent. “Without Wall Street, New York becomes Philadelphia” is how a friend of mine in finance explains it.

Well, Gabe, I have news for you and your friend in finance: For the vast majority of people living in the glorious and gleaming leisure theme park known as Michael Bloomberg’s New York, Philadelphia looks pretty goddamn inviting (and not just for delusional “sixth borough” hipsters). For one thing, the city’s schools have lately taken to looting state budget funds to make up for shortfalls; the city’s parks are already relying to a disproportionate degree on private donations to run themselves—except, of course, when the mayor wants to unleash city cops to displace and round up those irksome unproductive kids protesting wealth inequality. And do NOT get us started on the regressively funded, frequently inoperative subways, OK?

Then again, New York magazine is, God knows, a gleaming theme park all its own, and it’s perhaps best not to disturb the placid reveries of its well-appointed editorial brain trust. Yes, sustaining the enabling fictions of New York-style policy analysis does involve adducing sweeping assertions from the thinnest air: “The rising tide of the real-estate and credit markets lifted all boats,” Sherman burbles, apparently in reference to hedge funds, but a quick Google search for “Long Term Capital Management” will rapidly disabuse any civilian in the real economy of such a ludicrous notion. (And the ever-fallacious “rising tide” thesis is especially laughable when applied more broadly in today’s America.) Likewise, Sherman’s wind-up paragraph preposterously announces that “the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties”—certainly news to any financial regulator of the mid-twentieth century, when off-shore mutual funds were heavily prosecuted and hedge funds were much more regulated (even without mandatory SEC registration); or to the economic policymakers of the Great Society era, who enforced corporate tax rates north of 40 percent, more than twice of today’s post-Dodd assessments. But why should we expect any other version of events from the hallowed precincts of Adam Moss’s TriBeCa wing of the great New York theme park? For as this week’s cover story plainly demonstrates, nothing can be considered real in this abject weekly’s pages unless it comes straight from the mouth of a banker.

Chris Lehmann is the co-editor of Bookforum and is the author of Rich People Things.

---

See more posts by Chris Lehmann

17 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

9 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

18 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

1 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

5 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

10 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

7 comments

I know this because, during my three-plus years as a copy editor, I had this argument many, many times.

When I left to take a non-copyediting position at another company, I sent an e-mail to some of the editors telling them to spell it however they wanted going forward. I no longer cared. Which was kind of the case to begin with. I never had a personal investment in that space between the words, but as part of my job, it was my duty to point out that it should exist. It was a job that suited my tendency to worry about details, but one that also forced me to engage in unexpectedly absurd conversations.

I pretty much knew I wanted to go into journalism since I served as an editor on my high-school newspaper, the Three Penny Press, but what exactly I wanted to do changed throughout the years. Initially I thought I wanted to work for People, but then I realized that I am way too shy to approach famous people and ask them about their personal lives. Also, my desire to be their best friend would likely interfere with my ability to do objective reporting. Then I decided I wanted to work at a fashion magazine, a dream killed by The Devil Wears Prada, a friend's internships in the industry and the acknowledgment that I'm not very good at putting clothing combinations together. (I like dresses for a reason.) But starting at some point in college, I aspired to one day, fingers crossed, work at New York magazine. I was a faithful subscriber, despite living in Evanston, Illinois.

It was my one-day-if-I-work-really-hard goal, but when I did the requisite round of informational interviews for jobs in New York, I paid a visit there as well. I was introduced to the copy chief, who oversees fact-checking and copyediting, and I mentioned that I was far more interested in the latter. The former, with its inherent asking-questions-of-strangers, makes me incredibly uncomfortable, even when it's just "Are you still located at 123 Some Street?" Plus, I'd always had an eye for error: When one of my best friends in elementary school asked her mom what "f-u-k" meant because she'd seen it on the door to the bathroom stall, I helpfully jumped in: "I think you mean f-u-C-k." You're welcome, Friend's Mom.

All of this is to say that I never necessarily aspired to be a copy editor. I enjoyed the experience-seriously, your job is to sit and read articles-but when my day-camp counselor asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not tell her that I hoped one day to correct who-whom mix-ups or determine whether "faucetry" was a real, dictionary-approved word. I told her I wanted to be a princess.

The job has its perks-an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance-but it also has its side effects when you unintentionally drink the copy Kool-Aid. Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can't not spot them. You can't simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a "pubic" figure. You walk by a beauty salon the morning after you had sex for the first time with a guy you've been seeing and point out that there's no such thing as "lazer" hair removal, realizing that this may not be the best way to get to have sex with him again.

Another downside of the job is that only your mistakes are apparent. The catches are basically invisible. No one will look at an edited article and think, I am certain that, once upon a time, there was a double quote where there should have been a single, and a wise person fixed the issue for my benefit. But if you let a "their" slip through in the place of a "there," you are a complete moron. And if you are working online, commenters will let you know so. Then your boss will let you know that the commenters are saying so in case you didn't see it yourself. Also, people will want to talk to you-outside of work-about grammar. Aside from the guy who called me "awkward, in a cute way," I think the worst line I've heard was from the dude who asked my thoughts on the serial comma.

When you edit for the Web, you always feel like you're playing a frantic game of catch-up. Editors may schedule posts to publish at a certain time, and your goal is to give them a read-through before they go live. You don't leave your desk much. Once, however, we had a company-wide meeting, and I had to let things go unfinished. A co-worker could tell I was antsy about being away and taunted me that there might be typos on the Internet. This immediately struck us as funny because of course there were typos on the Internet-I just didn't want them on my Internet. It's also how I got the name of my future band, Typos on the Internet, for which he bought me a T-shirt (complete with a keyboard design) as a farewell present.

Still, despite all the rules, sometimes you get to make decisions regarding, um, unexplored territory: In February 2008, the New York Times ran an article on the cover of its "Arts & Leisure" section about a production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart. The piece was accompanied by a huge picture of Stewart embracing his co-star, Kate Fleetwood, in a moment of rapture. Both have their eyes closed, her face is turned upward, and he has one hand on her back pulling her closer. Only a sliver of his other hand is visible, and it appears fairly low on the front of her body. It could be read as if the rest of it were occupied, and the editor of the culture blog was quick to see the humor. He was equally amused by the fact that, as a result, I would have to tell him the proper way to punctuate the verb "finger-blasting." Was it hyphenated? One word? Two? What would it be in noun form? After more discussion of the matter than is probably appropriate in a work setting, I made an executive decision that it should be hyphenated. This proved unexpectedly helpful for tagging posts when, months later, Don Draper finger-blasted Bobbie Barrett outside the powder room on Mad Men.

Not that pop culture didn't try again and again to subvert me. My head still hurts a little when I think back to an article I edited about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The writer was trying to describe the combination of physical appearance and actual age of Brad Pitt's character at various points in the movie. It took possibly as long as the movie itself to determine that the just-born Benjamin would be an old-man baby (that is, a baby who is like an old man) and the almost-dead Benjamin would be an old-baby man. I think? Honestly, I'm still not sure if this is right.

Thank God I was just a kid when Prince turned himself into a symbol, but musicians continue to think it's cute or edgy to defy convention with their names. The day Panic at the Disco (né Panic! at the Disco) dropped that stupid exclamation point was one of my happiest as a copy editor. I felt so undeservedly victorious that I wrote a blog post about it. It began like this:

Late last week, in a development sure to shake the rock-and-roll and copyediting worlds, the band Panic! At the Disco announced that it was dropping the exclamation point from its name. "At least for me, it got a little bit annoying to try to write that every time you're typing the name," guitarist Ryan Ross told one of MTV's two! reporters. "It was never part of the name to us." Wha? The punctuation didn't matter? "We wrote it that way once, when we first started the band, and then ... people kept writing it that way, and it was a freakin' whirlwind," explained singer Brendon Urie. "We never made a big deal out of pulling it off the name. ... I mean, every time I write [our name], I never put an exclamation point in there."

Not that they came up that often, really, but that random mark had always annoyed me. The fact that they never meant it to be there was infuriating. (By the way, that "wha?" is a joke, not a typo.) Nevertheless, I went on to commend them for this announcement, even forgiving them for calling their latest album the awkwardly punctuated Pretty. Odd., and to plead for other musicians to follow their lead:

We only pray will.i.am., moe., and !!! will follow suit.

It's like !!! never thought, Hey, what if someone wants to Google us!!! But they clearly didn't read my piece or rudely chose to ignore it, sending a message to people like Ke$ha that kreativity is kick-a$$. (Beyoncé, on the other hand, deserves praise for her grammatically correct "If I Were a Boy"-because she's not really a boy, you see? It's a statement contrary to fact.)

To be fair, it's not just famous people who are guilty of taking such liberties. In the past few years, my own university-educated sister has started spelling things semi-phonetically or with added letters for emphasis. She's not tired, she's tiyad, and sometimes even tiyadddddd. The word has appeared in text messages and e-mails so often that it's become a family joke. Like I will tell my mom that it's been a long week and I am very, very tiyad. I have also learned from my sister's e-mails that not only did my little cousin look "omggggg adorabull" in his baseball gear but the planned fried-chicken addition to a restaurant's menu sounded "yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." She was both wrong and totally right on those.

I left the New York gig when the work started to feel routine. I still loved the publication and web site-Website?-but it was really only challenging in terms of how much content I had to go through in a short period of time, a fundamental conflict for the role. I feared my ability to do critical thinking was fading, so I got a job that required me to brainstorm ideas and figure out which stories to run rather than just clean things up in the end. I swore I wouldn't let errors slip by if I saw them, but I also wanted to move on from my former role. That this plan failed is evidenced by the fact that my team now refers to a particular headline structure as the Lori Rule, as in "I think that breaks the Lori Rule..." They also IM me to ask how to spell things, even though all I'm going to do is look them up in the online dictionary. Of course, when a co-worker recently wrote me to say she had a copy question, I hastily responded with, "That's what I'm hear for." Sigh.

I know it's all a little once-a-copy-editor-always-a-copy-editor, but I can't help it if I think unnecessary quotes are funny, as if signs are trying to be ironic. Or if I'm turned off by guys who spell it "definately." I don't sit around and diagram sentences for fun or keep a dog-eared copy of Strunk & White on my nightstand. But I continue to empathize with other copy editors when I spot typos in their publications because I've definitely been there. Except when the New Yorker didn't catch "Chris Mathews." That was funny.

And, yes, I realize that writing a whole essay on copyediting is basically setting myself up to be called out because there is likely an error in here somewhere. You know what? It happens. If you want to tell me about it, I'm all ears. Just don't be a douche bag.

Lori Fradkin is an editor at AOL. She lives in New York and worked previously at New York magazine.

---

See more posts by Lori Fradkin

158 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

89 comments

The Misery of the American Parent, by Jennifer Senior
"Social-science researchers keep coming to the same conclusion: having children makes adults unhappy. Why? Maybe it's because American parents are demanding more of themselves than ever before. Or maybe it's because we've forgotten what 'happiness' actually means. A look at why parents hate parenting."

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

31 comments