Grumpa never speaks of his role in the two largest financial collapses of our lifetime; Blames everyone else for his greed

Grumpa met Michael Milken and went from a one bedroom apartment in the Bronx to a Westchester mansion down the street from the Clintons. He suffers a deep sense of shame that he wasted his life, blames everyone else, but never shares with friends or family that he was criminally fined by the SEC for his role in the fall of Drexel Burnham and Lambert.

"Abruptly after he bought the house, my father stopped showing that he had any money. We stopped going on fancy vacations. He stopped buying my mom fur coats. He stopped buying BMWs. It was bewildering to all of us because we went, seemingly overnight, from being rich to being not rich."

Here is an excerpt of Aunt Brie's blog from December 27, 2015:

The Big Short: A Review That Is Also A Love Letter To My Father

December 27, 2015

"The first — and only — person I wanted to talk to after watching The Big Short was my dad. If there’s anyone who knows about the bond market, and especially mortgage backed securities, it’s him. I’ve written about this a million times, but he started his career at Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1982. He recently told me the actual story of how he ended up there. His friend, Lukey Knee, got him a temp job in the back office, doing administrative work, for the traders, while my dad was waiting to find out if he got accepted into the NYPD academy. My mother was pregnant with me. My dad is competitive by nature, so while there, he took the Series 7, the test that all the traders took, to see if he could pass it. He did. He got the results the Friday before he was supposed to enter the Academy — enrollment there began on a Sunday. It was December, and I had been born a month earlier. The recruitment officer at the NYPD, sensing my dad’s hesitation, told him to delay his decision until the next round of cadets were accepted. In that time, my dad began to make money; he’s worked on Wall Street ever since.

Everything else I know about my father’s career after that is mostly mythology that I’ve written about before. I know he made a lot of money very quickly because we went from living in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx to, only 13 year later, living in a historic mansion in one of the most expensive towns in America. He was a senior vice president and managing director at Morgan Stanley, Prudential, DLJ. He switched jobs frequently. Abruptly after he bought the house, my father stopped showing that he had any money. We stopped going on fancy vacations. He stopped buying my mom fur coats. He stopped buying BMWs. It was bewildering to all of us because we went, seemingly overnight, from being rich to being not rich. I think he lost his taste for making money; but he also, with the insight privileged to only those can afford it, decided that money was corrupt, horrible, acquired through fucking over people, and not something he wanted to be associated with. He was 36. He “retired” for 2 years, wrote a book; then went back to working at small banks, this time on the sales side, packaging extremely safe mortgage backed securities.

The reason why I was so interested to talk to him about The Big Short was because beyond being a literal expert (and in my father-worshipping opinion, a genius) I know, in 2008, that he didn’t lose any money. He knew that the mortgages being given AAA ratings were garbage, and he didn’t deal with them personally. Of course he knew. If he didn’t, as someone with decades of experience, he would be a literal idiot.

When I called him this morning to talk about The Big Short, which is about various bankers who bet that the mortgage market would implode in 2008, and profited from it, he got immediately angry. “Those people are not heroes, you know,” he said.

“It doesn’t say they’re heroes,” I told him. “It was just an interesting film because it really explained what happened in 2008.”
“I’m staying as far away from that film as possible,” he spat. “Those people disgust me.”
He continued, “The American economy is built on greed. Everyone that blames the banks is missing the point. Everyone was greedy. The people selling those securities, but also the people accepting free money to buy houses they couldn’t afford.”

“But the mortgage brokers were targeting people who were ignorant or could’t speak English,” I said. “Those people were criminals.”
“I can’t talk about this anymore,” he said, handing back the phone to my mother.
“Why does Dad get so emotional about this?” I asked her.
“I’m sorry,” I heard my father wail in the background. “I don’t mean to get so angry about this.”Every conversation that goes on between my family members takes place over speakerphone; there is no secrecy.

He came close to the line again. “In truth,” he confessed. “Talking about this reminds me that I wasted my life.”"

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