James Grippando: Money to Burn

© 2010

THE WARNING SIGNS WERE THERE. I JUST COULDN’T SEE THEM. MY nose was in my BlackBerry-“crackberry”-except when I was talking into it.

“Can you get me the numbers on Argentine debt denominated in Japanese yen?” I said. I was on with my Asia investment team leader.

The cabdriver glanced at me in the rearview mirror as if I were speaking Martian.

“Michael, give it a rest,” said Ivy. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”

Ivy and I were stuck in traffic on the busy Dolphin Expressway, having just flown in from New York. We were headed to the port of Miami for a Caribbean cruise that was luxurious by anyone’s standards, all expenses paid-one of the perks of being a top young producer at Saxton Silvers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment banking firms.

“This is the last phone call, I promise.”

She knew I was lying, and I knew she really didn’t mind. More than any woman I’d ever dated, Ivy Layton understood my world.

We’d met when she was a trader at Ploutus Investments, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund with offices in Manhattan and-where else?-Greenwich. It was also Saxton Silvers’ biggest prime brokerage client. Ivy’s boss managed the fund and steered all that business my way because he was incredibly intuitive and completely understood that on the day that I was born the angels got together and decided to create a-puh-LEEZ. Chalk it up to the fact that I was one of the lucky bastards who had correctly timed the burst of the IT bubble, making me a financial genius in a field of idiots. Idiots who apparently believed that overpaid CEOs of dot-com darlings didn’t have to do anything but pick out flashy corporate logos for negative earnings reports and watch the NASDAQ rise like a helium balloon on steroids. I gave Ploutus a reality check on a barfing-yes, barfing-dog that looked like a sock puppet but turned out to be the proverbial pin in the bursting bubble. Ploutus made me the go-to guy on Wall Street, which would never change so long as those aforementioned angels continued to sprinkle moon dust in my hair and starlight in my…whatever.

“Whoa,” Ivy said. “I haven’t seen this many fifty-story cranes since Shanghai.”

I glanced up from my BlackBerry. She was right. Downtown Miami had more empty towers under construction than South Beach had palm trees. I tried to imagine the skyline without the works in progress-what it must have looked like just three or four years earlier. Maybe a handful of skyscrapers over fifty stories.

“Condo crazies,” said the cabbie. “I bought one preconstruction in dat building over there.”

Our driver was a Bahamian immigrant, which was cool. It was as if we were already in the islands.

“Congrats,” said Ivy.

“And one in dat really tall one, too,” he said, pointing upward.

“Two condos in downtown Miami?”

“Plus three more in Fort Lauderdale.”

I was going back to my BlackBerry, but Donald Trump with the island accent had snagged my full attention. “You own five condos?”

“Yeah, mon.”

“No offense, but-”

“I know, mon. I drive a cab. But my mortgage broker says no problem.”

“Who’s your mortgage broker?”

“A friend who live in Little Haiti. He used to drive a taxi like me. Dresses really smart now. We call him the Haitian Sensation. Got me a NINA loan for one-point-six mill.”

NINA-no income, no assets, no problem. Just find a property appraiser to certify that the real estate was worth more than the amount of the loan and $1.6 million was yours. All you needed was a credit score and a pulse. Actually, that pulse thing was optional, too. Reports of dead people getting loans were proliferating. To me, the whole subprime market was beginning to stink like an old fishing boat, and I was glad to have absolutely nothing to do with mortgage-backed securities-even if they were making a few guys at each of the major investment banks filthy rich.

“They tell me so long as the property value keep going up, I’m safe, mon. I just flip dis condo, make a nice flippin’ profit, pay off dat flippin’ mortgage, buy another flippin’ condo. Just keep on flippin’ and flippin’.”

“That’s the flippin’ theory,” I said.

He changed lanes abruptly, blasting his horn at a speeding motorcyclist who apparently thought he owned the expressway. Our driver was suddenly agitated, but it wasn’t the traffic. He looked genuinely worried. I could see it in his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“So,” he said in a shaky voice, “you think it keep going up, mon?”

Sure, if the law of gravity somehow changed. “We can only hope,” I said.

I went back to my BlackBerry. Ivy was now listening to her iPod, moving to the music. Salsa. I didn’t know she was a fan, but apparently a visit to Miami made her feel more connected to her half-Latin roots.

We exited the expressway and were headed into downtown Miami. The port was all the way east, near a waterfront mall that Saxton Silvers had financed.

“What the hell is that?” Ivy said.

I looked up. Flagler Street was Miami’s east-west version of main street, and we were a block or so north of it. If your principal needs in life were YO MIAMI T-shirts, sugarcane juice, and any kind of electronic device imaginable, this was your little slice of paradise. For me, it was an area I couldn’t get through fast enough-especially today. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but the shops had already closed, the doors and windows protected by burglar bars and steel roll-down doors. Something was up.

“Looks like Biscayne Boulevard is closed,” the driver said, stopping at the traffic light.

Biscayne was Miami’s signature north-south boulevard, four lanes in each direction that were divided by an elevated tram and rows of royal palm trees down the middle. Office towers lined the west side of the street, and to the east beautiful Bayfront Park stretched to the waterfront. Over the years it had served as everything from the famous hairpin turn in Miami’s first Grand Prix road race to the televised portion of the Orange Bowl Parade route. These days, the Grand Prix had moved elsewhere, the parade was no more, and Biscayne Boulevard had been swept up in the high-rise construction craze. We had to get east of it to reach the port. But on this sunny Thursday afternoon, all cross streets were a virtual parking lot.

“We’re not moving, mon.”

We sat through a complete light change and still didn’t budge. I got out of the cab to see what was going on. Up ahead, traffic had ground to a halt as far as I could see. I stepped up onto the doorsill for a better view. The one-way street was like a shadowy canyon cutting through tall office buildings. Peering over the endless row of stopped cars in front of us, I got a cross-section view of the intersection at Biscayne and spotted the problem. Barricades appeared to be blocking all vehicular access to the boulevard. Mobs of people were marching down all eight lanes.

I climbed back inside the car and said, “Some kind of protest rally.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Ivy. “FTAA is in Miami this year.”

The Free Trade Area of the Americas was an effort to unite all the economies of the Western Hemisphere, except Cuba, into a single free-trade area that reached from Canada to Chile. Each year since 1994, the leaders of thirty-four democracies met to work toward eliminating barriers to trade and investment. Opposition was passionate, critics fearing the concentration of corporate power and the worst of everything that came with it: layoffs and unemployment, sweatshop labor, loss of family farms, environmental destruction. Thousands of those critics had descended on downtown Miami today to decry the FTAA’s eighth ministerial meeting.