Moral Hazard
KATE JENNINGS was born in 1948 and grew up on a farm near Griffith, in New South Wales. She attended the local high school, then studied arts at the University of Sydney.
Her speech at a rally in 1970 about the Vietnam War heralded the start of second-wave feminism in Australia. ‘How many of you,’ she asked, ‘would get off your fat piggy arses and protest against the killing and victimisation of women in your own country?’
Mother I’m Rooted
, a 1975 anthology of women’s poetry edited by Jennings, was similarly controversial. That year she published her first collection of poems,
Come to Me My Melancholy Baby
; her second,
Cats, Dogs and Pitchforks
, appeared in 1993, after two books of essays and a collection of short stories. All of these later books were written after Jennings moved to New York in 1979.
There she worked as an editor and travel writer for various publications. She met the artist and designer Bob Cato in 1983, and they married in 1987. Cato’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 prompted Jennings to take a corporate speechwriting job.
Snake
was published in 1996. ‘Without a second thought I read this novel as a classic,’ one reviewer wrote. Like its successor, it was a
New York Times Book Review
Notable Book.
Moral Hazard
(2002), published three years after Cato’s death, won the ALS Gold Medal, the Adelaide Festival Fiction Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction; it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Trouble
(2010) collects the best of Jennings’ many essays, poems and stories.
Kate Jennings lives in New York City.
GIDEON HAIGH is an independent journalist who lives in Melbourne. He is the author of more than thirty books, including
Bad Company: The Strange Cult of the CEO
,
The Office: A Hardworking History
and, most recently,
Certain Admissions: A Beach, a Body and a Lifetime of Secrets
.
ALSO BY KATE JENNINGS
FICTION
Women Falling Down in the Street: Stories
Snake
NON-FICTION
Save Me, Joe Louis
Bad Manners
Stanley and Sophie
Quarterly Essay 32: American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama
Trouble: Evolution of a Radical: Selected Writings 1970–2010
Kate Jennings
Text Publishing Melbourne Australia
textclassics.com.au
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Kate Jennings 2002
Introduction copyright © Gideon Haigh 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Fourth Estate 2002
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2015
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Primary print ISBN: 9781922182159
Ebook ISBN: 9781925095159
Creator: Jennings, Kate, 1948– author.
Title: Moral hazard / by Kate Jennings ; introduced by Gideon Haigh.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
The Devil Whooping It Up
by Gideon Haigh
The Devil Whooping It Up
by Gideon Haigh
THERE is a saying about the British Broadcasting Corporation that it has inspired no great novel because nobody with the talent to write one has stayed long enough to do the necessary research. The same is very nearly true of modern Wall Street, despite its apparent wealth of stories, of characters, of drama and of…well…wealth.
There does exist some pretty good stuff, chiefly satirical, written by those who have been close to the action:
Bombardiers
(1995) by Po Bronson (a trader at Credit Suisse First Boston);
All I Could Get
(2003) by Scott Lasser (a trader at Lehman Brothers);
Mergers & Acquisitions
(2007) by Dana Vachon (a banker at J. P. Morgan); there are the passable thrillers of Stephen Frey (ex-J. P. Morgan) and Tom Bernard (ex-Salomon Brothers); best of all, perhaps, the patrician comings and goings in the novels of Louis Auchincloss (a lawyer at Hawkins Delafield & Wood), such as
The Embezzler
(1966),
A World of Profit
(1968) and
Diary of a Yuppie
(1986).
Fictional characters have also long been located on Wall Street, from Charles Gray in John P. Marquand’s
Point of No Return
(1949) and Raymond Eaton in John O’Hara’s
From the Terrace
(1958) to Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities
(1987) and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s
American Psycho
(1991). But little of it would you regard as indispensable: in general, the Street has been described more vividly in journalism by John Brooks, Ken Auletta, James B. Stewart, Bryan Burrough, William D. Cohan and Roger Lowenstein; in memoir by Michael Lewis, Jeffrey Beck, Jim Cramer, Jordan Belfort, and John Rolfe and Peter Troob; and in films such as Oliver Stone’s
Wall Street
(1987), Norman Jewison’s
Other People’s Money
(1991), Ben Younger’s
Boiler Room
(2000) and J. C. Chandor’s
Margin Call
(2011).
I say ‘very nearly’ and ‘in general’, for there
does
exist Kate Jennings’ surprising
Moral Hazard
(first published in 2002); and I call it ‘surprising’ for the same reason the narrator, Cath, an Australian ‘bedrock feminist, unreconstructed left-winger’, finds her presence as a speechwriter at Niedecker Benecke, a bulge bracket firm ‘whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas’, to be surprising.
Jennings, furthermore, did the necessary research: she filled just such a role at Merrill Lynch in the 1990s, a period remembered rather benignly but actually one in which financial volatility became curiously normalised, intermingling crises in India, Scandinavia, Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil and Argentina with the collapses of Drexel Burnham Lambert, Kidder Peabody, Baring Brothers and Long-Term Capital Management, and preluding 2001’s dotcom
Götterdämmerung
, to the extent that the soothing notion of the market’s self-stabilising properties embedded itself in the title of Jonathan Franzen’s famous
fin de siècle
family saga,
The Corrections
(2001): ‘The correction, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets…’
Yet, in its fine disgust and moral purpose, Jennings’ work has less in common with the aforementioned titles than with an earlier period of writing about financial markets, around Theodore Dreiser’s
The Financier
(1912) and
The Titan
(1914), Upton Sinclair’s
The Moneychangers
(1908), Frank Norris’s
The Pit
(1903) and David Graham Phillips’
The Deluge
(1905), which describe the days—before the Federal Reserve, before
Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States
, and long before the Securities and Exchange Commission—when finance was perhaps even more lawless than it is now, and the public arguably even greater dupes.
‘Financiers do not gamble,’ says Phillips’ chief protagonist in
The Deluge.
‘Their only vice is grand larceny.’ Cath’s friend Mike, a wry risk manager, updates such parsing: ‘Tobacco companies are immoral. Children are amoral. Bankers are feckless.’ But when Cath herself pauses to consider the quotidian reality of corporate life, it is in unashamedly political terms.
The United States is a democracy, and yet it’s powered by autocratic corporations. Its engines are fascist. Nothing democratic about them. Paradoxical, wouldn’t you say?…
There’s a pretense at democracy. Blather about consensus and empowering employees with opinion surveys and minority networks. But it’s a sop. Bogus as costume jewelry. The decisions have already been made. Everything’s hush-hush, on a need-to-know-only basis. Compartmentalized. Paper shredders, e-mail monitoring, taping phone conversations, dossiers. Misinformation, disinformation. Rewriting history. The apparatus of fascism. It’s the kind of environment that can
only
foster extreme caution. Only breed base behavior. You know, if I had one word to describe corporate life, it would be ‘craven’.
Unhappy
word…
Corporations are like fortressed city-states. Or occupied territories. Remember
The Sorrow and the Pity
? Nazi-occupied France, the Vichy government. Remember the way people rationalized their behavior, cheering Pétain at the beginning and then cheering de Gaulle at the end? In corporations, there are out-and-out collaborators. Opportunists. Born that way. But most of the employees are like the French in the forties. Fearful.
Attentiste
. Waiting to see what happens. Hunkering down. Turning a blind eye…
American corporations. Invented to provide goods and services, but that’s the least of it now. Which brings me to globalization. Better not get me started.
What gives this monologue additional impact is its addressee: Cath is thinking aloud in the presence of her much older partner, Bailey, who because his faculties have been ravaged by dementia can understand not a word. And Bailey—once cheerful, warm, gregarious; now anguished, ‘becoming formless and vague’, requiring constant oversight—is the reason that Cath must keep such thoughts to herself at Niedecker Benecke: as do we all, she needs the money to keep body and soul together. ‘I was commuting,’ she reflects, ‘between two forms of dementia, two circles of hell. Neither point nor meaning to Alzheimer’s, nor to corporate life, unless you counted the creation of shareholder value.’
