http://www4.thedailybell.com/28314/Anthony-Wile-David-Goldman-on-Wall-Street-the-Middle-East-and-the-Judeo-Christian-PerspectiveDavid Goldman on Wall Street, the Middle East and the ‘Judeo-Christian Perspective’
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with David P. Goldman.
Introduction: David P. Goldman writes the “Spengler” column for Asia Times Online and the “Spengler” blog at PJ Media. He is also a columnist at Tablet, and contributes frequently to numerous other publications. Goldman was global head of debt research forBank of America (2002-05), global head of credit strategy for Credit Suisse (1998-2002) and also held senior positions at Bear Stearns and Cantor Fitzgerald. In 2001 he was elected to Institutional Investor Magazine’s All-American Fixed Income Research Team. Goldman was a senior editor at First Things (2009-11) and Forbes magazine columnist (1994-2001). His books, How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) and It’s Not the End of the World – It’s Just the End of You were published by Regnery in September 2011. He is a regular guest on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report” and has appeared on Fox News and other national news venues.
Daily Bell: Give us some background on yourself. Where did you grow up?
David P. Goldman: In and around New York City. When an infant, my bedroom looked out on Ebbets Field, the old home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. There began and ended my exposure to spectator sports. I spent the longest time in Great Neck, then the most liberal community in the United States, and graduated high school there. My family was left-wing and secular, and I looked to classical music for spiritual sustenance. It was my passion. I played and composed but was never very good at either.
Daily Bell: Where did you go to school and what career did you embark upon?
David P. Goldman: My B.A. is from Columbia, and from there I went directly to a doctoral program at the London School of Economics. I suppose my idea was to become an academic but two years of London wearied me. I was a radical and a hothead, and had no patience for academic economics. Instead, I stumbled into freelance journalism. My first piece was published by the London Spectator − on the plight of East African Asians – but I gravitated towards the fever-swamps of the political left.
In 1977 I became economics editor of a dreadful publication controlled by the odious Lyndon LaRouche. He fired me five years later. By that time I had gotten to know Dr. Norman A. Bailey, then head of plans at the Reagan National Security Council, who recruited me as a consultant. When he left NSC I worked for his consulting firm, and then for the supply-side firm Polyconomics, where I became chief economist, mainly because no one else would take the job. I was a bit like Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus.
In 1986 I tried to make a career change back to music and did all but the dissertation for a doctorate in music theory. I might be teaching music theory at some small college today except for the birth of my first child, who wanted to eat almost every day. That forced me into more remunerative work.
Daily Bell: You held senior jobs on Wall Street, including a gig as global head of bond research at Bank of America with 140 professionals reporting to you.
David P. Goldman: I didn’t take the usual route to Wall Street. When at Polyconomics I had ample opportunity to speak to Prof. Robert Mundell, who was then out of favor with time to waste on me. Mundell was the grandfather ofsupply-side economics; in 1999 he won a Nobel. He had deep insights into the nature of capital markets, and I learned enough from him to look for the cracks in markets before they showed. I learned a tiny fraction of what Mundell knew, but it gave me an advantage on Wall Street.
My partner at Polyconomics, the supply-sider Jude Wanniski, pushed me out in 1992, and Larry Kudlow opened a door for me at Bear Stearns. Bear gave me a chance to learn the business. I left Bear in 1996 to start a small hedge fund; just before the Long-Term Capital failure in 1998, I closed it and paid out my investors with a modest profit and took a job at Credit Suisse. Credit markets then were in turmoil, and I built quantitative models to value corporate bonds and bond portfolios that became quite popular. On the strength of that success, Bank of America hired me away in 2002 to create a new fixed income research division, and I had a big staff to supervise.
Daily Bell: Give us some background on Wall Street and what you think of it. Has your thinking changed?
David P. Goldman: In the 1990s and early 2000s I believed that the financial industry had a major contribution to make to economic efficiency. In fact, it had made such a contribution. Mortgage-backed securities helped to mobilize capital locked up in homes and made capital available to entrepreneurs. So did so-called junk bonds, which made credit available to emerging companies. Credit derivatives initially helped banks to diversify their risks.
Take Bear Stearns, where I started my Wall Street career 20 years ago. They were upstarts and outsiders. They didn’t have the country-club investment banking relationships to underwrite corporate debt. But the advent of mortgage-backed securities allowed them to become the top dealer in that market because they didn’t need the country-club connections to do so. Bear was a solidly Republican shop; Steve Forbes got a lot of support from the partners before the 1996 presidential election. The firm failed, in large part due to its own complacency, in 2008.
