Monday, August 10th, 2009...5:01 pm
Homophobia + Testosterone = Financial Collapse
Two quotes included in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker (“Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence”) disclose the cluttered psychosexual landscape of Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns, a firm that was sued (unsuccessfully) by an investor for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
According to the cocksure Cayne:
Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they’re arguing another case and we have to wait until they’re finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he’s going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it’s just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, “Today you’re going to get your ass kicked, big.” He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then.
Cayne, as Gladwell points out, had just presided over the financial collapse of an 85-year-old company and lost a billion dollars of his own.
When writer William D. Cohan (author of the account of Bear Stearns’s collapse, House of Cards) interview Cayne, the former CEO offered this assessment of Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank:
The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan. Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, “Raise the bridge.” This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend.
This potent cocktail of homophobia and testosterone appears to have clouded the fool’s judgment. Maybe his cock was not all that sure after all.
1 Comment
August 25th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Reported in the online Chronicle of Higher Education (25 Aug 2009):
“Testosterone Makes a Difference in Financial Risk Taking, Study of M.B.A. Students Finds” by Katherine Mangan
“Female M.B.A. students with higher testosterone levels are more likely to feel comfortable taking financial chances and to choose risky careers like investment banking or trading, according to a new study by Chicago researchers.
“A paper describing the study, ‘Gender Differences in Financial Risk Aversion and Career Choices Are Affected by Testosterone,’ was published in Monday’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The research was conducted by Paola Sapienza, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; Luigi Zingales, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and Dario Maestripieri, a professor in comparative human development at the University of Chicago.”
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