The professor paused.
“It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic. You’re all a little too young to remember that there were people—educated people, people with serious careers—who chased down ‘rare’ Beanie Babies. Who bought heart-shaped plastic-tag protectors. Who told themselves that their massive collections of plush toys would pay for their children’s college tuitions.
“In fact, you were those children, and I’ll wager that none of you are being floated in this fine institution with proceeds from Beanie Baby auctions. We all mocked those assholes, but their only mistake was that they chose to believe, as we all have, that money is rational. That price is truth. That the market doesn’t lie. But it does. It lies. Or, at least, it will stretch the truth for a very, very long time.
“Real estate. That’s our present-day delusion. More than that: Mortgages. Because a mortgage is never just a mortgage, is it? It’s a promise. A promise that your life can change. A promise that you can be the sort of person who should live in that house no matter how far it is from your real price range. And let’s be truthful, shall we? What is a promise like that but your world-famous American Dream?”
Kalchefsky looked out at the class, breathing hard, jaw clenched, like a wolf in some sort of intellectual standoff over a carcass. “You can grow up to be anything you want. Isn’t that what they told you? Your mommies and daddies in the front seat of their SUVs while they were driving you, their special snowflake, to soccer practice? Except that you got it mixed up and thought that it meant ‘You can grow up to own anything you want.’ Not the same thing, America. Nowhere near the same thing.”
Maybe Saina was right.
Maybe people from other countries really did hate Americans.
Why was Kalchefsky being such an asshole? How surprised would he be if he knew about Andrew’s SUV, how it had just been towed by a shiny black truck with gold fangs painted on the grill, the keys pocketed by a wiry repo man Andrew hadn’t even bothered to argue with? If he knew that Andrew had owned everything he wanted and that now maybe he was going to grow up to own nothing at all?
Crack! Kalchefsky slammed a palm down on the lectern. “And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built.”
Kalchefsky picked up a marker and slashed at the whiteboard, then moved aside so that the class could see what he wrote.
Our second big mistake—we thought that risk could be quantified.
Our third big mistake—Alan Greenspan.
The class giggled. “Oh no,” he said, shaking his head at them menacingly. “It’s not funny. It’s not something that any of you should be laughing about unless you’re so rich you don’t have to care. Alan Greenspan is going to go down in history as a social-climbing, self-hating, Ayn Rand–loving, Zionist fraud. You just don’t know it yet. But I do.
“But before we break down Greenspan, let’s look at our second big mistake,” he said. “Does anyone know the name David X. Li?”
Andrew looked up. Kalchefsky was writing it on the board: David X. Li, which meant that he was probably Chinese. If it was Lee, with two e’s, then it could have been a white guy instead.
“Learn it. Remember it. He’s going to go down in the history books as the accountant who took down America.”
Kalchefsky’s losing it, Andrew typed.
Character? Crazy prof vs. whole world is against him? Recurring. Goes downhill through set, thinks club is lecture hall. Meta, meta, meta.
“Ole David X-marks-the-spot Li. A Chinese swashbuckler who rode into town and duped the entire American financial system into believing that he could lasso risk.” Kalchefsky turned and wrote on the board:
Pr[TA<1, TB<1] = ?2(?-1(FA(1)), ?-1(FB(1)), γ)
Whoa. How did he just reel that off? Impressive.