Wall Street Woes

Well, my day is fucking ruined.

Today, your Aunt Slugger received an email with a link to this article. For those of you who cannot stomach the entire article, it is about how some investment professionals, faced with slumping incomes, are struggling to make ends meet.

"That is so sad," you may be saying right now. "This economy really sucks, and people are really suffering, and--"

So let me stop you right there. This article is NOT. ABOUT. THOSE. PEOPLE. This article is not about the married couple with two children trying to figure out how to put food on the table. This article is not about the single mother who can't afford soy formula for her baby with allergies.

No, this article is about people with a formal education in finance who cannot figure out that the rising cost of Wheat Chex is not the driving force behind their financial difficulties when they are writing checks for thirty grand for their 6-year-old kid's private school education.

It so happens that your Aunt Slugger moonlights in the investment industry, when I am not dedicating entire minutes at a time to this advice column that has saved so many lives over the years. Now the time has come for me to merge my more lucrative career (giving advice via a free blog that has no advertising and one regular reader) with my hobby (showing up to an office every day and referring to "The Wall Street Journal" simply as "The Journal"). So today I am going to issue a

CRITICAL PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE INVESTMENT COMMUNITY

so that maybe we won't have to read any more of this bullshit.

First and foremost, do not ever, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be quoted in a national publication as saying this:

“If you’re making $50,000 and your salary gets down to $40,000 and you have to cut, it’s very severe to you. But it’s no less severe to these other people with these big numbers.”

This quotation comes from Alan Dlugash, who was also quoted as saying, “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress. Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

That's absolutely right, Alan Dlugash. People without money have absolutely no idea what real stress is. Wondering how you're going to feed and clothe your children - that's amateur hour compared to the crushing stress of knowing that your asshole friends will think less of you if you move your children from their elite preparatory school to a parochial school, or God forbid, the public school system.

Second, you need to move. The reason your mortgage is so high is because you bought an overpriced house in a gated white flight community with a town ordinance against fast food chains (except for Starbucks) and a city council with nothing better to do but fight bitterly about whether or not the seafood at the annual town barbecue is sustainable.

And finally--and this is critical--you need to be told about yourself. If you were half as interesting as you think you are, you would be twice as interesting as you are. You work in finance. You don't save the world. Stop being a fucking predictable mess of a human, with your prep school tuition and your European cars and your newfound salmon price sensitivity. Think about real human suffering. Homeless people. Hungry people. People in war-torn nations.

Think about that before you open your big mouth to a Bloomberg News reporter and make my eyes bleed on a Thursday morning.