Money to Burn:  The Long and Short of It

© Copyright James Grippando 2010.  All rights reserved.

In March 2008, a group of powerful hedge fund managers gathered for a champagne breakfast at a Manhattan restaurant.  They specialized in short-trading—essentially betting that the value of a company's stock will go down.  They were rumored to have been celebrating the fall of Bear Stearns, the first major investment bank to go the way of the T-Rex and the Dodo bird.

Hearing of it, I immediately hatched the plot for Money to Burn.

Over the next seven months, I would conduct my research by watching Wall Street implode in real time.  Many of those startling events play a central role in the plot.  Short-sellers trading investment banks into oblivion.  Financial media fanning the flames by carelessly spreading dangerous rumors planted by unscrupulous traders.  Mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps landing insurance giants on life support.  Fortunes lost overnight in Madoff-sized Ponzi schemes.   It was fascinating research with several unexpected surprises. 

First, little did I know that Boies Schiller & Flexner—a law firm to which I have served as counsel for the past seven years—would assemble a team of some of its best lawyers to represent the victims in a multi-billion-dollar class action against the hedge funds that earned enormous profits by feeding their clients' assets to Bernie Madoff.  Claims against Fairfield Greenwich and others are still pending.

Second, I was fortunate to have my own sources at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the hedge funds that were scrambling to survive and profit from a crisis that only seemed to worsen with each passing day.  Through it all, however, the voice that spoke loudest to me was that of a fictional character.  A character of my own creation.  One based on my own father.

I wrote most of the outline for Money to Burn while at my father's bedside in a skilled nursing facility, and after his passing, the book almost seemed to write itself.  It was in the later stages of his illness, while reading early pages aloud to him, that I realized how much the crumbling financial world could have learned from a D-Day survivor whose idea of the American Dream was not just to buy a home, but to actually pay off the mortgage. 

What a concept.