The Three Trillion Dollar Opera:
Memoirs of the Banker Macheath
Transcribed and edited
by Joel Schechter
Editor's Note: When last seen in Brecht's
Threepenny Opera, the gangster Macheath, alias Mack the Knife,
spoke of entering a more socially acceptable profession. He has found
it, if these confessions can be trusted.
It was only a matter of time before I left my
gang of highwaymen behind and became a legitimate banker. I asked my
wife Polly to send all our profits to Jack Poole's banking house in
Manchester, while I took a brief vacation in the Newgate district. (My
stay in the prison there ended with a reprieve from the Queen of England,
who honored my entrepreneurial talents with knighthood.) Some of my
early career was reported with wild inaccuracy by a German writer named
Bertolt Brecht, in his musical titled The Threepenny Opera;
but the most recent developments in my life have yet to be told. Rather
than let Brecht or his followers again misrepresent my admittedly exciting
adventures in capitalism, I decided to pen this modest memoir myself.
The honest and rewarding life I led as an international
banker might not win approval from everyone. We businessmen of the 21st
century live in a time when some of the public would rather hear about
stock market scandals and crashes than read dull financial page accounts
of multi-billion dollar loans, rising, usurious interest rates and other
banking news.
Once I transferred my Manchester holdings to
the United States, bought a skyscraper in New York, and installed a
new unassailable vault in the building, I was more convinced than ever
that owning a bank is more profitable than burgling one.
My life as a banker led me to associate closely
with prominent corporate executives and high government officials. I
cannot name my friends here; they would lose public trust if linked
to my infamous history of highway robbery and extortion. But I am now
an honorable man, with honorable friends in high places (not just my
skyscraper, either). I adhere to the finest laws that lobbyists can
secure, all of which exempt me from prosecution. Once I understood the
newly deregulated banking laws, I could see that I was born to sell
derivatives, mortgage packages and hedge funds.
A firm like mine is now too big to fail; therefore
when the firm falters it receives generous government bailouts. In a
December 2010 speech, Senator Bernie Sanders must have had me in mind
when he mentioned a secret bailout by Federal Reserve officials who
loaned $780 billion to Goldman Sachs, as well as $2 trillion to Morgan
Stanley, and $2.4 trillion to Citigroup, all without public disclosure.
This is indeed a land of opportunity. Where else could a man like me
borrow trillions?
Little did Brecht know when he wrote The
Threepenny Opera that this new era of bank bailouts would warrant
a sequel: The Three Trillion Dollar Opera.
My own reserve funds have been deposited offshore
in a secluded West Indies location. (The same island was celebrated
by John Gay in his 1729 stage play Polly. His portrait of me
as a pirate in that play was not flattering, but I love its setting,
with the beautiful blue sea and the nattily dressed British colonials.)
My enchanting wife Polly (whose name inspired
John Gay's play) and I are now older, but as literary figures we live
on in new versions of the old dramas. Although our careers began in
18th-century England, we acquired modern capitalist aspirations in Brecht's
Threepenny Opera, and today we are quite at home with ruthless
financial transactions in the United States.
I recently appointed Polly director of a new
disaster relief firm called "The Widow's Friend." The company designed
for an age of climate change provides emergency loans to nations that
suffer floods, hurricanes, drought, oil spills and other environmental
catastrophes. Polly's father, Jeremiah Peachum, pioneered the practice
of profitable disaster relief. (Although known as "The Beggar King,"
the man was inordinately wealthy due to his success as a fund collector
on behalf of war veterans and the unemployed.) While Polly will give
away millions to widows and orphans, she also will collect and disperse
billions to governments that lease new oil, gas, uranium and electronic
media rights in their time of trouble. Her firm also will find great
demand for its services in areas that need rebuilding after wars. (Polly
refuses to fund war weaponry in those regions; even if she wanted to
do so, prominent arms manufacturers already control the market.)
My old comrade in arms, Tiger Brown, who fought
by my side in India, and served as London's police chief, now advises
Scotland Yard on counter-terrorism strategy, and oversees security for
famous singers with unruly admirers. Brown's daughter Lucy often hires
her father's guards, as she performs Brecht and Weill songs with a very
popular band. Occasionally I accept her complimentary tickets, and listen
fondly to the old refrains: "The world is poor and men are bad/ And
we have nothing more to add."
Nothing like an evening of art to prepare one
for re-entry into the fray. The competition never rests, and I buy out
as much of it as I can afford. While I have no interest in taking a
seat in the government's cabinet (why buy what you already own?), I
expect to be appointed to the Federal Reserve Board; for the present
I am content to borrow its funds.
No longer an outlaw, but a friend of judges,
I now marvel at the benefits law confers on those who can afford to
abide by it. Not long ago a firm of mine was fined $550 million by the
Securities and Exchange Commission because we held one hundred percent
of the short side on collateralized debt obligations before the American
housing market collapsed, at the same time our firm was advising investors
their obligations would be paid in full. I never admit to such conduct
in public, my subordinates are well paid to endure the discredit; but
if fined for it, we immediately pay the millions asked, and write it
off as part of the firm's operating costs. Such fines cut into the profits,
but I can handle a few cuts; that is why friends still call me Mack
the Knife.
I have outlived my critics (Brecht among them)
by decades; for which survival I acknowledge wonderful government support
in the form of banking deregulation, undersight (certainly not oversight)
of stock market trading, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the occasional
rewriting of my story by someone like Brecht or the Italian satirist
Dario Fo.
Polly wept as she read Senator Carl Levin's recent
description of American mortgage firms and Wall Street banks as "a financial
snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing." "He
didn't mention your firm once," she lamented. I told her not to worry,
we should be grateful for the Senator's neglect; through benign inaction,
he and other officials have helped us acquire great financial wealth
and respectability.
In case you didn't see it, when Senator Levin
reprimanded the Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated the other day (April,
13, 2011), he announced that "Goldman clearly misled their clients,
and they misled the Congress." What is the world coming to, when a Senator
so openly praises the achievements of my colleagues? It almost makes
me want to become a Senator myself.