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By Root 300 0

he spoke too quickly for anyone to follow exactly what he was saying. He wore his hair slicked back, in the manner of Gordon Gekko, and the sideburns long, in the fashion of an 1820s Romantic composer or a 1970s porn star. He wore loud ties, and said outrageous things without the slightest apparent awareness of how they might sound if repeated unsympathetically. He peppered his conversation with cryptic references to how much money he made, for instance. People on Wall Street had long ago learned that their bonuses were the last thing they should talk about with people off Wall Street. "Let's say they paid me six million last year," Lippmann would say. "I'm not saying they did. It was less than that. I'm not saying how much less." Before you could protest--But I never asked!--he'd say, "The kind of year I had, no way they pay me less than four million." Now he had you thinking about it: So the number is between $4 million and $6 million. You could have started out talking about New York City Ballet, and you wound up playing Battleship. Lippmann kept giving you these coordinates, until you were almost forced to identify the location of the ship--exactly what just about everyone else on Wall Street hoped you'd never do.

In further violation of the code, Lippmann was quick to let people know that whatever he'd been paid by his employer was not anything like what he'd been worth. "Senior management's job is to pay people," he'd say. "If they fuck a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that's ten million more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they've screwed up: They never want you happy. On the other hand, they don't want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted." At some point in between 1986 and 2006 a memo had gone out on Wall Street, saying that if you wanted to keep on getting rich shuffling bits of paper around to no obvious social purpose, you had better camouflage your true nature. Greg Lippmann was incapable of disguising himself or his motives. "I don't have any particular allegiance to Deutsche Bank," he'd say. "I just work there." This was not an unusual attitude. What was unusual was that Lippmann said it.

The least controversial thing to be said about Lippmann was that he was controversial. He wasn't just a good bond trader, he was a great bond trader. He wasn't cruel. He wasn't even rude, at least not intentionally. He simply evoked extreme feelings in others. A trader who worked near him for years referred to him as "the asshole known as Greg Lippmann." When asked why, he said, "He took everything too far."

"I love Greg," said one of his bosses at Deutsche Bank. "I have nothing bad to say about him except that he's a fucking whack job." But when you cleared away the controversy around Lippmann's persona you could see it was rooted in two simple complaints. The first was that he was transparently self-interested and self-promotional. The second was that he was excessively alert to the self-interest and self-promotion of others. He had an almost freakish ability to identify shadowy motives. If you had just donated $20 million to your alma mater, say, and were feeling the glow of selfless devotion to a cause greater than yourself, Lippmann would be the first to ask, "So you gave twenty million because that's the minimum to get your name on a building, right?"

Now this character turns up out of nowhere to sell Steve Eisman on what he claims is his own original brilliant idea for betting against the subprime mortgage bond market. He made his case with a long and involved forty-two-page presentation: Over the past three years housing prices had risen far more rapidly than they had over the previous thirty; housing prices had not yet fallen but they had ceased to rise; even so, the loans against them were now going sour in their first year at amazing rates--up from 1 percent to 4 percent. Who borrowed money to buy a house and defaulted inside of twelve months? He went on for a bit, then showed Eisman