HIGH SPEED WALL ST TRADING: FLASH COWBOYS

JANET MASLIN, N.Y. TIMES

Michael Lewis writes that before he began working on “Flash Boys,” he had little interest in the stock market, “though, like most people, I enjoy watching it go boom and crash.” And like most people, he had an antiquated notion of what the stock market was. At the start of “Flash Boys,” his dazzling, troublemaking new work of reportorial storytelling, Mr. Lewis summons that sweet old image of a trading floor full of screaming brokers, slamming telephones and hysteria-inducing ticker tape. Picture that, he suggests. And then forget it, because it’s gone.

Flash Boys” describes the surreal-seeming technology that replaced it. And it also explores the breakup of big, central stock exchanges into many small ones; the impossibility of investors’ knowing exactly what is being done with their money; and the immense new opportunities for skimming, kickbacks, secret fees and opacity that the new system has spawned.

Because Mr. Lewis is at the helm finding clear, simple metaphors for even the most impenetrable financial minutiae, this tawdry tale should make sense to anyone. And so should its shock value. “Flash Boys” is guaranteed to make blood boil.

And because this is Mr. Lewis, it’s a book about white-hatted heroes who set out to rectify the system. The principal figures in “Flash Boys” were not widely known outside the business world, or even within it, though they will be now. You could find some on LinkedIn, but Wikipedia had never heard of them or their accomplishments. That only adds to the excitement surrounding a book that has been kept carefully under wraps. It went on sale Monday.

 

Mr. Lewis’s first illustration of high-frequency trading depicts the kind that can transmit stock market information from New York to Chicago and back in one-tenth of the blink of an eye and has divided the world of stock traders into the haves and have-nots, depending on what speeds they can afford. It involves the stealthy building of an absolutely straight tunnel to run fiber-optic cable through the mountains of Pennsylvania. The firm building the tunnel calls itself Spread Network, and the job is monstrous. Huge mountains need to be drilled through. Every small town needs to grant permission. No one can know what the tunnel is for, and the cost of the digging is beyond astronomical.

 

But this was 2010, when the stock market was obsessed with speed, and Wall Street traders considered no proposition too unreasonable, no cost too steep. Sure, they asked questions. “Where is the backup if your line goes down?” (“Sorry, there isn’t one.”) “When can you supply us with the five years of audited financial statements that we require before we do business with any firm?” (“Um, in five years.”) But they also paid $14 million each just for initial access to the thing because milliseconds could be worth huge fortunes if properly and secretly manipulated. With the story of the cable, “Flash Boys” inspires both awe and horror at the same time.

 

That wound up being the response of staid, mild-mannered Bradley Katsuyama to United States business practices. Mr. Katsuyama was happily ensconced at the Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto when, in 2002, he was transferred to New York. The bank wanted more of a Wall Street presence, but Mr. Katsuyama turned out to be a lot more than that. Mr. Lewis, who clearly got to know his subjects very well, is full of colorful stories about Mr. Katsuyama’s New York stint (one colleague swung a baseball bat in the office) and the effect it had on him.

 Like this book’s other heroes, Mr. Katsuyama has an inquisitive, scientific mind; the more clearly he saw that the markets were rigged, the better he wanted to understand what was wrong with them. He began experimenting on his own and developed a better understanding of how the hoodwinking worked. Federal investigators and New York State’s attorney general have begun looking into whether such trading practices ought to be monitored and regulated.

 

One of his first colleagues, in what would eventually become a gutsy, game-changing new venture, was Rob Park, an algorithm guy. “All Brad needs is a translator from computer language to human language,” Mr. Park told Mr. Lewis. “Once he has a translator, he completely understands it.” With the funding of the Royal Bank of Canada, the two conducted a series of experiments that provided invaluable information about how high-frequency traders could predict imminent stock movements and exploit them. They even created a weapon, called Thor, that was meant to level the playing field for the ordinary investor. “It would have been very easy to make money off this,” Mr. Park says of Mr. Katsuyama. “He just chose not to.”

From left: Rob Park, Brad Katsuyama and Ronan Ryan. Credit Stefan Ruiz for The New York Times

 

The rest of the book tells the riveting story of how this detective work exposed more and more dangerous flaws in the present market system. Mr. Katsuyama consistently sounds like a force for decency and good, even if Mr. Lewis gives him a “Batman” moment or two. To his future wife he declared (really?): “It feels like I’m an expert in something that badly needs to be changed. I think there’s only a few people in the world who can do anything about this. If I don’t do something right now — me, Brad Katsuyama — there’s no one to call.”

 

So he did something, in this book’s one true movie moment. “Let’s just create our own stock exchange,” he proposed to Mr. Park. That was in 2011, and it occurs less than halfway through the book, because Mr. Lewis needs room to talk about why changing the world wasn’t as easy they expected it to be. Many a dirty trick awaits anyone trying to push back against common Wall Street practice with a firm dedicated to fairness and transparency. But the firm, which was called the Investors Exchange until someone realized that the Internet address could be read as Investor Sex Change, and then became IEX, opened in October 2013. It has had support from Goldman Sachs, because, according to Mr. Lewis, events like the “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, are ever more apt to occur in a fast, computerized system and scare American investors out of the market. One of the book’s most controversial points is that affiliation with a fair and square IEX will be good for larger firms’ reputations.

 

But Mr. Lewis hardly means to suggest we’re out of the woods. He ends this book with a trip through the forest, up a mountain and right to the base of a sinister microwave tower with an F.C.C. license number that he provides. Got a computer and a free day? He claims you can track down that license to find another Wall Street nightmare in the making.

THE BLOOMBERG YEARS II: THE MAYOR OF WALL STREET

GINIA BELLAFANTE N.Y TIMES

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No mayor in New York’s history has done more to consolidate the city’s identity with Wall Street. Mr. Bloomberg obviously does not bear responsibility for the creation of the indecipherable, huckster financial instruments that resulted in our economic crisis and the litany of personal miseries that followed, but he was one of the country’s most impassioned and nurturing supporters of Wall Street during its most ethically unhinged hour.

....A political figure rarely afraid of expressing reproach — someone whose administration stigmatized fat people, poor teenage mothers, members of the teachers’ union — Mr. Bloomberg seems to imagine that any impulse short of adulation will shoo Wall Street away. Several weeks ago he publicly denounced Eliot Spitzer, not for his domestic failings but for his wish to curtail the worst instincts of the banks and to maximize their utilitarian value. (“This is our industry,” the mayor said. “We’d appreciate it if someone recognized that this is our tax base.”)
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Wall Street has benefited under Mayor Bloomberg much more than other industries, as evidenced by the pronounced inequality felt all over the country and experienced most dramatically here.

The average salary in the securities industry in 2011 was $362,900, according to the state comptroller’s office, an average higher than before the financial crisis and more than five times the average in the rest of the city’s private sector. As a share of private sector wages, the securities industry grew from 21 percent at the beginning of Mayor Bloomberg’s first term to 28 percent early in his second, while never accounting for more than 6 percent of jobs.

The top 1 percent of earners in New York make nearly 40 percent of the total income of city residents, nearly twice the national figure. This number has grown. At the beginning of Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure in 2002, the top 1 percent of earners in New York made 27 percent of the income.

It is worth considering these numbers in the context of the previous gilded age, the era of Oliver Stone’s first “Wall Street,” in 1985, when the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers made 15 percent of the city’s income, virtually in line with the national figure at the time.

 

During a presentation to the American Sociological Association last week, James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research and education group, offered a look at income polarization in the city that included this startling statistic, culled from census data: while real median family incomes were flat from 2000 to 2010, median family incomes rose an average of 55 percent in eight high-income neighborhoods, including TriBeCa and the Upper East Side, the home ZIP codes of the financial industry.

To what extent can we hold Mr. Bloomberg responsible for these gulfs? For the fact that the poverty ratio has remained essentially unchanged in New York since his first days in office, with roughly a fifth of the city’s residents living below the federal poverty level?

Certainly, some of the disparity would exist without him, and the poverty rate has been more or less intractable for the past 30 years. But it is easy to envision that we might have arrived at a better place with someone who had paid more visceral attention to inequity than with someone who felt the need to sue the City Council to block a measure mandating a living wage (the suit was thrown out of court).

And still, it is not fair to paint the mayor as a Dickensian ogre who utterly ignored the poor. His Young Men’s Initiative, to which he contributed $30 million of his own money, seeks to improve the lives of young underprivileged black and Latino men. The administration’s efforts to expand education and job training in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for example have led to higher high school graduation rates and lower rates of unemployment. A network of organizations and agencies called NEON, an innovation of the Department of Probation, puts probation offices in neighborhoods where rates of incarceration have been high so that those in the criminal justice system are saved long commutes to mandatory meetings with their officers. Instead they are encouraged to use their time productively.

 

Probation Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi plans to open satellite offices in neighborhoods, where probationers can get their cases seen faster, in exchange for local outreach work.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/probation-department-open-local-offices-exchange-community-service-anti-crime-work-article-1.470893#ixzz2cmFyFGh4

 

 

What’s striking about a recent report delivered by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, which examines demographic data neighborhood by neighborhood, is that poverty actually declined between 2000 and 2011, though by no means hugely, in some of the most afflicted places in the city — in Brownsville and in various enclaves of the South Bronx.

Where poverty has crept up are those places where income levels hover around the city’s median of $55,000 — neighborhoods like the Fresh Meadows, Hillcrest and Elmhurst sections of Queens and Stapleton and St. George on Staten Island. Job losses, rent increases and foreclosures have brought those previously able to sustain themselves to precarious new lows.

 

One legacy of the Bloomberg era is that it has redefined our economic and social categories — giving us a universe of superrich that have assumed a great share of our psychic space, and replacing a working class with an artisan class. The mayor spoke this month on his fiscal legacy at the former Pfizer pharmaceutical factory in Brooklyn, making this explicit.

The building had served as a manufacturing plant for 150 years, the mayor told his audience. Five years ago, executives closed it. “But today, as you can see, this is once again a manufacturing hub,” he continued. “Only now it’s an incubator for a new generation of craftsmen and women, who are making everything from furniture and fashion designs to kimchi and cookies, to software and 3-D printers.”

 

 

Mayor Bloomberg, who did nothing to elevate the status of teachers, an exercise that might have helped draw the most talented to that profession, has done a lot to elevate the status of people who make things, or rather the people who make the right things intended to be sold to the right MacBook-carrying-Martha’s Vineyard-vacationing people.

 

Workers leave the Bronx factory Stella D'oro.

 

To the graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who can create $13,000 copper bathtubs (of the kind the mayor recently imported from France for his home) or cerused cocktail tables commissioned by uptown decorators, New York is an increasingly hospitable place. If what you make is more pedestrian, Stella D’oro cookies once sold in places like Key Food, instead of $6-a-piece shortbread of the type you might find at Chelsea Market, the mayor’s subliminal message winnows down to this: “Good luck, and send us a postcard from Ohio.”