I’m The Man Buying Stocks On The Day Of The Crash

Hey, do you know what’s really interesting about the recent financial crisis?

All the corporate suicides!

There’s been a bunch of ‘em recently. CEO’s, investment bankers and hedge fund managers all over the world are committing hara-kiri like nobody’s business. One nutty blogger even has a running tally of mortgage-related suicides in the US and it’s currently up to seventy two (although I’m not sure when he started counting or what his criteria is.)

Technology hasn’t helped the trend either. According to the Financial Times, in mid-October, at the peak of the financial crisis, the phrase “suicide methods” suddenly rose to a multi-year high on Google Trends, which tracks how often words or phrases have been searched on Google. Some people have gone as far as calling it an epidemic.

Yes, by all accounts, it’s a hard knock life right now for the stinking rich. So much pressure at those ridiculously high-paying jobs! I don’t envy them at all.

The following are some of the more notorious suicides that caught my eye:

-Back in September, Kirk Stephenson, the CEO of private equity house Olivant, jumped in front of a speeding train at a rail station west of London because the value of his company’s stake in banking giant UBS went down 20% from £950million to £770million (that’s British Pound Sterlings signs, kiddies) and apparently he couldn’t handle the stress that went along with that type of loss. He was married and had an eight year old son. I guess he must’ve not been thinking about them when he made the decision to leap onto the tracks.

But you know, poor guy, he had to do it. Do you expected him to downgrade to a 200 foot yacht with just ONE measly helicopter?!? Fuck that. Once you get accustomed to a certain lifestyle, it’s hard to go back. It was best to leap in front of that speeding train. It was courageous, really.

-A few months later, two days before Christmas in New York, Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, was found dead at his desk, both wrists slashed and a bottle of pills nearby. Apparently, the esteemed monsieur told the cleaning staff at his office that he wanted them out by 7pm so that he could work late, then locked the door and placed a waste paper basket under his desk to catch the blue blood flowing from his open wrists (how considerate of him.) Security staff found him the next morning, still sitting at his desk, with a box-cutter on the floor beside him.

The guy’s fortune was the definition of “old money”, as his relatives had been ennobled by France’s King Louis XIV after bankrolling his reign –some of them even got guillotined for it back at the height of the French Revolution. Apparently not enough of ‘em, though.

M. de la Villehuchet had lost $1.4billion of his family’s money in the notorious Bernard Madoff scam. When it became obvious to him that the money lost in the Ponzi scheme was unrecoverable, he chose to end it all rather than face life being just mildly wealthy. How noble of him.

-In more recent news, the body of Chicago real estate mogul Steven L. Good was found in his Jaguar (pronounced “Jag-yu-wahr”, of course) just this Monday, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. His firm was responsible for more than 45,000 properties sold for over $10billion in sales, but I guess he couldn’t handle the pressure of the real estate bubble bursting. Maybe he wasn’t much of a saver.

-And the very following day, German billionaire Adolf Merckle, jumped in front of a train in the town of Blaubeuren in southwestern Germany after his holding company, VEM Vermoegensverwaltung (phew, thank god for cut & paste) ran up a significant amount of debt. His personal net worth at the time of his death was estimated at around $9.2billion, down from a previous estimate of $12.8billion. That extra $3.6billion really made a difference, huh?

Oh sure. You might think I’m a jerk for making jokes about these people’s misfortunes, but I don’t feel any sympathy for these materialistic pricks, none whatsoever. If they measured their self worth by their bank accounts and couldn’t go on living because of a slight dip (or even a huge one), then fuck ‘em. They were probably doing more harm than good in the world. I’m not hating, I’m just saying that there’s way more people in the world that are deserving of some pity than these greedy bastards.

And can someone explain what is up with all the death-by-train suicides? What are these rich motherfuckers doing at the train station? Shouldn’t they be jumping from their private jets into molten gold pools while strangling themselves with diamond-encrusted choke chains? That’s what I’d do with my billions. Because, you know, there’s only so much shit you can buy before getting bored –at some point you gotta get creative.

All of this just reminds me of this video, courtesy of the Onion: