Such are the opening lines of "Who cares?", George and Ira Gershwin's wonderful ode to love during the Great Depression. Ira continues, "I am not concerned with stocks and bonds that I've been burned with". Neither am I since they all went up in smoke in the big crash of 2008.
It happened on one trading day in October when I was at a jazz festival in Newport Beach, California. When I got back in the late afternoon there were dozens of urgent messages from my broker at UBS. My main portfolio holding had plunged from $41 to $6. This was a 140 year old company that had never missed a dividend or had a losing quarter. That was $100,000 gone in a day. My problem was the stock anchored some big loans that I had at the bank and so I got my first, last and only margin call.
I had worked in Zurich in the 1960's and '70's and came to marvel at the Swiss temperment and efficiency. What could be better than a cool headed bank with a warm heart (a black one it turned out that still defys US law and the IRS).
Despite the assertion by Harry Lime that after 700 years of peace and brotherly love all the Swiss gave the world was the cuckoo clock, it was working for us. We used their luxury box at Madison Sq. Garden, enjoyed our many lunches at the Four Seasons in NYC and Newport Beach and deposited their generous checks to our favorite charities. At a conference at the Bel Air Hotel I asked our Swiss account executive about the group of 50 or so in attendance. He said, "The people in this room represent about $8 billion of private wealth." Impressed? I was. It comes from not coming from old money. We got our money late in life through an inheritance that was bitterly fought over in what remained of a fractured family.
It's pretty well gone now through the double whammy of the housing bubble and the financial meltdown. I'm still alive, still married to my wife of 52 years and blessed with two amazing, wonderful and loyal children.
I'm like the character Mike Campbell in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises". Campbell confesses that he has lost all his money. "I lost it in two ways," he says. "Two ways?" says Jake, "what two ways?" Campbell answers, "Gradually and all at once."
But wait, Ira wouldn't let us end on a downer like that. His lyric continues: "I love you and you love me and that's the way it's meant to be...who cares what fails in Yonkers, as long as it's love that conquers".
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