Wealth, Greed, and Punishment

There were two interesting articles in the New York Times yesterday. One about Ruth Madoff (oddly, the article was placed in the Style Section) and how vendors, restaurants, and even her hairdresser have shunned her since her husband's arrest and subsequent guilty plea. Although she has not even been questioned by the US Attorney's office, "the street" belief is that she is as guilty as her husband, or at least, seemed to enjoy spending the "ill gotten" gains as much as he did. So New York restaurants, Hamptons florists, and her upper east side hairdresser have all asked her to disappear, to not patronize them.

Her hairdresser, with whom she loyally went to every six weeks for dozens of years, said that he knew people who lost "millions." Same thing with the florist. And the restaurants didn't want other patrons to leave if she showed up.

As the Madoff story continues to unfold, it is becoming clear that most if not all the investors will recover their principal. In other words, the amounts they gave Bernie Madoff to invest. What they "lost" was the unrealistic profits he promised them. The gains.

So here is this woman, not guilty of anything, being punished for something her husband did. And because, according to the article, she is not playing the public relations game. It's ironic, isn't it, that the people who sought Madoff's investments did so because he made them think they were getting something exclusive, something for only a few people. The peons were not able to get these massive returns. Yet when it all fell apart, these investors still have not learned a lesson about humility. They still seek exclusivity. God forbid that they get their hair cut next to someone who is married to a felon! Or show some empathy. Or compassion. Or even loyalty to someone who was loyal to them. But then, those very same "triggers" are what made Madoff so successful, he played into the emotions that these investors continue to have.

The second article was about the Yellowstone Club. I have talked about this place in previous posts. An exclusive club in Montana where just to join you have to have something like 5 million in liquid assets. It advertised itself as a place where the rich could "check their egos at the door." Well, clearly that never happened. The owners of the club, Tim and Edra Blixith, made and lost several fortunes, but finally figured out, like Bernie Madoff, that appealing to the need of the rich to run with the rich could make them money.

Now, of course, the Yellowstone Club is in bankruptcy, as is Edra Blixith who is divorced from Tim. The Blixiths took the Club and leveraged it for over 300 million, using much of that money not to improve the Club, but rather to buy all sorts of things for themselves and a failed "swanky" time share idea further enabling the really wealthy to stay away from the rest of us.

It now appears, like the Madoffs, that the Blixith's new occupations are responding the lawsuits.

There are dozens of morals in both of these stories. Hopefully we begin to look at our seemingly insatiable need for money and more money as an illness rather than something to celebrate. That we begin to really examine how we got into this age of greed not as a "fad" of self examination as we read our new subscription to Living Simply, but really as a means to understand how unhealthy this past decade or so has been for us, the planet, and our future. And maybe Rith Madoff's hairdresser can find it in himself to just cut her hair.

Leveraged Real Estate, Leveraged Morals

In Big Sky country, a former timberman Tim Blixseth, started a luxury resort just south of Bozeman.  Yellowstone Club.  The idea was to have a private ski and golf resort where people whose "net worth" was over 1 million could hang out together behind gates.

As these things go, Blixseth got divorced from his wife, lenders it turns out, literally fell over themselves to loan money to Blixseth based on his ownership interest in the Club, the economy went south, and as testimony indicates in a bankruptcy court in Montana, the whole idea was over leveraged and essentially a ruse.

Ah, but for awhile the Blixseth's lived like millionaires, shuttling from their base in Palm Springs to France, the Caribbean, and of course, Montana in their private jets, yachts, and expensive cars.  

It seems to me one of the moral tales of this most recent boom is not to believe what you see.  Bernie Madoff, financial institutions profits, mega-mansions, Enron, all of it seemed to be based on either smoke and mirrors or lies.  And that ethic seeped into every corner of our culture: mega-church ministers deceiving their congregations, politicians assuring us there were weapons of mass destruction, manufacturers promising products which never worked...and we even deceived ourselves, thinking the real estate boom would never end, that our own homes could pay for cars, boats, tvs, granite counter tops, gorgeous appliances, college tuition.  

Now is the time to look at what was happening that made all of us go, well, er nuts.  As in "what were we thinking?"  Is greed really the dominant motivator in our culture?  Or can we find ways to restore some sense in our lives, where people don't feel the need to create private, exclusive clubs based on fake financial statements thinking that you need to live next door to someone who has an equally fake net worth?  Can we restore some sense of community to our world, where we don't think it's cool to be an investor who gets 30% returns at the expense of excluding our neighbors from the same investment (we won't even debate what Madoff's investors were thinking).  Or where employees of a company don't think it's right to jack up some elderly person's electrical rate because they can create fake power shortages?

The question really is how do we find our own moral compasses?  How do we reduce the leverage and become grounded?