Conversations With Wall Street. Peter Ressler

kept my business and my personal lives separate—almost as if I were two different people. I had followed the motto in my material life that it was not personal, it was business. Yet my business and personal lives had tragically intersected in this historic moment. Facing death and loss, I realized that nothing I did was separate from anything else. I was the same person in the office pursuing money as I was as a father and a friend. Wherever I went, I took my heart, soul and mind with me. Everything I did was an action for which I had to answer. At first my colleagues felt the same. We had heartfelt conversations about how these losses had changed our view of life and business. In the several months following the attack, those in the financial industry approached our work with greater thoughtfulness; we were aware our lives had greater meaning as we wrestled with the deaths of so many. There was no time to spare. Every day could be our last. I began to take a searching and fearless moral inventory of my life and work—the one the Twelve Steps demanded of me. Then I began to take a moral inventory of my industry. As the Street went back to business as usual, I wondered if anything that occurred in those months had really mattered. Were we back to business as usual? I could not go back. In the wake of the devastation surrounding us, I saw the need for the industry to contribute more “good” in the world than harm. I never thought about how my clients or I made money before. In the months when I was making very little income after the attacks, I had plenty of time to think. Life was too precious not to demand more of ourselves. Were we adding value to the world, or were we taking value away? This was the question Monika and I asked the financial industry in our book called Spiritual Capitalism. I began to see the benefit for Wall Street to take a page from the Twelve Steps and make a “searching and fearless moral inventory of itself, make a list of all persons it had harmed, and become willing to make direct amends to such people wherever possible.”

      I had felt powerless watching the first responders rebuild the city. For me, joining the volunteer fire department in my Long Island community was the first way that I found to serve. Maybe it was my way of giving back to Bruce who had saved my life. Or maybe it was my way to give back to those firefighting brothers who had sacrificed so much to save Wall Street and my city. Perhaps it was both. For the next two years, as I trained as a firefighter in my spare time, I saw the amazing and powerful contribution of these humble men. It changed something in me. I began to see the world from their view—the view of those who made in a year what many in my industry earned in less than a week. I saw their struggles with supporting their families, paying the bills, and building a future. It was a different world than what I had seen in my two decades in finance. These people were not struggling by choice but by circumstance. They were one illness, one tragedy, one accident away from economic devastation. They could not write a check to right a wrong. They could only live their lives as if each day was their last. It moved me in the depths of my soul. I worked on the fire trucks and stepped into burning buildings alongside the plumbers, laborers, construction workers, and cops who served the community with the sweat of their brow every day. What did Wall Street do for the community, I wondered? We wrote checks. We attended black tie benefits for charity—but what did we do for others really? I had left the working class world as a teenager and had not looked back. But now, as one among them, I realized we were connected by virtue of our working lives—not separate at all. Their work protected my life. My work supported theirs. The financial industry of which I was part underwrote their livelihoods. Wall Street issued the municipal bonds that financed their salaries, advised the managers of their pensions, arranged financing for their state and local government employers, and funded the banks that supported their small businesses, personal credit and mortgages for their homes. It was a circle of prosperity. As I recognized our connection through the economy, I saw this as a monumental responsibility. If I believed myself to be an ethical and moral person, I was obligated to honor this great trust placed in me by society. The knowledge that Wall Street and Main Street were inextricably linked through our finances and livelihoods was nothing short of an epiphany.

      Seven years and four days later on September 15, 2008, life took another powerful and fateful turn. I found myself again in the middle of another historic event. What many of my colleagues called an “Economic 9/11,” I watched as the industry that had sustained me for twenty-eight years was decimated before my eyes. Long-term clients, venerable investment banking firms, and billion dollar hedge funds crumbled into rubble, with nothing remaining but the bodies and debris left behind. Those who survived braced for the aftershocks. Hundreds of friends and associates—captains of industry, long-term veterans of finance—were “shot” by the bad behavior of fellow employees. Some sadly were felled by their own bullets. Most never saw it coming. More to the point, Monika and I never saw it coming. We were not aware of the magnitude of the bubble that had been building. We knew real estate was overpriced, credit was too lax, and that what goes up must come down. However, we were completely unaware that some of our own clients and colleagues had been part of the subprime mortgage crisis directly— selling, trading and underwriting trillions of dollars of toxic debt. These individuals’ actions deeply affected our professional and personal lives along with that of thousands of colleagues and millions of ordinary people. Our own economic security evaporated with Lehman’s bankruptcy. The business we spent twelve years of our lives building was about to be ripped from our wombs, and we would be forced into a battle for life and livelihood. With this went our future dreams. Our employees suffered for our losses; our partnership dissolved, and our family took the blows.

      To discover that co-workers, clients and colleagues had been part of this great tragedy was all the more astonishing. While the financial industry bombs detonated and emerged as Main Street misery, we knew what others were feeling. As small business people with no help other than our own resources, we too were worried about our home; we too stayed up at night wondering how to make ends meet. The fruits of years of hard work and effort were gone through no fault of our own. We had borrowed within our means, invested in real estate and stocks for retirement, and put savings away for that rainy day. Like so many others, we did everything right, but somehow it went horribly wrong. We had no idea that the rain would bring with it a monsoon that did not stop for eighteen long months. When it stopped, we were drenched to the bone and emerged with a completely different perspective. We would never see money the same way. We would never see Wall Street the same way. We would never again see Main Street as separate from it all.

      The industry had devoured the economic security of millions of American people, who had nothing to do with the debauchery and somehow wound up with the bill. They had slain unarmed foes with abandon and walked triumphantly off the mortgage battlefield with spoils in hand. Without looking back, they destroyed homes, marriages, families and futures. Somehow, in its divine perfection, we found ourselves in a unique position to discover how these events had occurred and even more importantly, why.

      The lines from the Serenity Prayer surfaced in my mind: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” We needed that courage now. This was not about us; rather, it was about every one of us. We were called to action by a force of fate greater than ourselves. By the simple fact that we landed once again in the middle of a monumental moment in history, we understood there was no turning back.

      Shattered Dreams

       “This is a shock to me. I never thought in my entire career I would be in a position like this… I have lost everything. I don’t know what to do.”

      - Bear Stearns High-Yield Trader

      In early 2007, there were rumblings in the financial industry of a housing collapse. The game of finance is one part expertise, one part strategy, and one part guessing. Not everyone believed that housing was set to fall. Some of the most experienced market makers believed it would continue pushing the upper limits of reason. Many firms were buying more investment properties and increasing their mortgage securities portfolios. Others saw the end of the ten-year run and began to bet against the markets. On assignment for my long-term clients, which included large hedge funds, commercial banks and investment banks, my job was to ferret out the best mortgage talent in the industry. Every firm was in relentless competition with the others. Who would get to the top of the heap was determined by who hired the smartest, most innovative risk takers in the business –