SubscribeIn October, Marc Sperling, the 36-year-old president of an equity-trading company, bought a new condo on the Upper West Side in a building where four-bedroom apartments like his cost more than $4 million. When he moves into the completed building next year, he plans to hold on to his other two apartments in Murray Hill and Miami Beach — each of which he values at about $2.5 million.So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the lower middle class people who bought into the housing Ponzi scheme were greedheads chasing easy money, but the people who orchestrated it, like James E. Cayne, can spend 25 million dollars on an apartment, attend parties more extravagant that Caligula could hallucinate from the depths of tertiary syphillis, attend bridge tournaments as his company precipitates a financial crisis, and keep his fucking job as Chairman while the Fed assumes the risk from all the toxic mortgage debt his firm accrued while he was CEO.
Mr. Sperling views the nation’s economic slump as a temporary problem, and is grateful that it has yet to affect him. “I think if you have the means to ride it out, that’s what you do,” he said.
His view of the subprime mortgage crisis seemed to reflect a sort of inverse class resentment.
“I don’t want to sound harsh, but the people who were buying million-dollar houses with a combined household income of $70,000 or $80,000 were the ones who were chasing easy money,” he said.
Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns, the bank’s chairman, James E. Cayne, paid $25 million for a 14th-floor condo at the Plaza Hotel.
He, too, is invited to the May 10 party at the Plaza. It will feature a dozen female string musicians made up to look like statues and clothed in dresses of fresh flowers, like roses and gardenias. There will be caviar and Cognac bars, as well as a buffet designed to visually replicate 17th-century Dutch paintings from the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, “The Age of Rembrandt.”
posted by DU at 7:42 AM on April 14