God in the Cubicle: Wall Street and 'Widows and Orphans'

WHEN I READ THAT A 31-YEAR-OLD WALL STREET BROKER had joked in an email about selling toxic investments to “widows and orphans,” my first reaction was shock. Did he realize what he was saying?!?

            My response turned briefly to empathy. Who hasn’t said something in a private email that they’d be mortified having repeated in public?

Then the question shifted back outward. Does Wall Street see how much trouble its language gets it into with Main Street? 

The firm and the broker issued quick apologies. The incident reflected “very badly on the firm and on myself,” the broker said. He noted that his customers, in fact, are institutions, not individuals.

Still, I’ve been wondering if there’s a larger lesson to be drawn.

Perhaps new employees at public-facing businesses, as part of their training, should be asked to spend an afternoon searching through the references to “widows and orphans” in the Bible, Torah or other treasured text, then spend some time reading how the phrase comes up on the Internet. And maybe give a brief presentation on what they learn. Call it language/values sensitivity training.

They might get a better understanding of how that email, sent in 2007 by Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs broker, to his girlfriend, and released recently in response to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman, struck such a deep nerve.

And how, by within a week, it generated 5.2 million hits in Google, everywhere from The Wall Street Journal (which deemed its “dark humor” reflective of the “take-no-prisoners” mindset of the firm) to The Washington Post (which called the broker “a Michael Milken for the current times”) to Al-Jazeera (for which it was business as usual in America: “Goldman ‘boasted as market crashed,’” read its headline).

Some words are sacred to people. They’re vested with thousands of years of religious meaning. “Widows and orphans” is among them. The phrase is at the heart of a moral life in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained in the world” (James 1:26).

It comes up early. “You shall not abuse any widow or orphan” is among the commandments passed down to Moses (Exodus 22:22). It is echoed by prophets, who call on their audiences to “plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17) and “oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor” (Zachariah 7:10).

And it comes up often. In all, “widows” appears more than 90 times and “orphans” or the “fatherless” more than 40 in the Bible (“religion,” interestingly, appears only five times).

Most are in the Old Testament. There, we are called to care for the vulnerable and defenseless. Deuteronomy says to setting aside a portion of one’s harvest for “the alien, the orphan, the widow” – “grapes of your vineyard,” olives from the boughs of their trees, and gleanings from the field (Deut 24:19-21).

Doing so aligns one with faith tradition. God has a special concern for the marginalized, establishing a “border for the widow” (Proverbs 15:25) and bringing “justice for the orphan and widow” (Deut 10:18).

It is a reminder to be humble. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” says Deuteronomy. You never know but that one day one or a loved one could be in that same place – crying out, as in Lamentations, “we have become orphans, fatherless, our mothers are like widows” (Lam 5:3).

Not caring, in contrast, sets one against tradition. “If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry” and respond with “wrath,” Exodus continues. Job, searching for explanations for his suffering, asks if he’s done harm to widows (Job 31:16).

Linking ethical acts with spirituality, as these texts do – the care of the vulnerable with “obligations to God,” the “humanitarian” with the “religious” – and making that bond “unconditional,” is significant, says The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Actions carry importance beyond being the right thing to do. They can be expressions of the sacred. They bring religion to human scale, showing it’s not just what we believe but what we do with that belief.

Many on Wall Street know all this. Many firms have charitable arms. Living in New York, one sees the results in the charitable giving, both from financial firms and individuals in the industry, supporting AIDS care, food banks, shelters, museums, education, parks, and the arts. Goldman Sachs is a case in point; its Goldman Sachs Foundation has given away more than $100 million in grants in 200 countries promoting education.

But the culture of Wall Street – the brusque, master-of-the-universe mindset popularized in books and films like Liars Poker, Barbarians at the Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street, Boiler Room, and Capitalism: A Love Story – can talk a different language. “Widows and orphans” is a case in point. Wall Street has its own take on the words, both benign (a “widow and orphan stock” is a low-risk stock that can be counted on to generate income “through difficult financial times,” says the website Investopedia) and aggressive (“widows and orphans” is “Wall Street’s traditional euphemism for unsuspecting investors,” notes the UK newspaper The Independent).  

Courts of law will ultimately decide whether Wall Street firms have committed fraud in the financial meltdown, as the government claims in the Goldman case. But there’s also the court of public opinion.

With the country trying to crawl back from the financial collapse and recession, and Main Street convinced that Wall Street has profited from its suffering – and speaks, literally, a different language – it’s an opportune time for the financial world to show that, at least, when it comes to words, it gets it.

**

The Wall Street Journal,  I think, has been particularly strong in its coverage of the Goldman case and the controversial emails. Here are two examples: 

“Goldman’s Tourre Meets with Senate Investigators,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2010:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704627704575203882067718088.html

“Goldman’s Take-No-Prisoners Attitude,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703441404575206400921118356.html

This American Life, the National Public Radio program, has done terrific explanatory work on the causes and consequences of the financial meltdown. “Inside Job,” a co-production with ProPublica, is, I think, Pulitzer-worthy – and closes with a wonderfully arch Broadway production number, “Bet against the American Dream.”

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job

Bible.com is a good resource for key-word searches of scripture:

http://www.bibleontheweb.com/

There is a wealth of good non-scholarly writing on the Web from individuals wrestling with scripture’s implications today. One that has stayed with me was from an evangelical videographer working in the Sudan. Reflecting on the conflict there, which has killed so many men, leaving behind wives and children, brings James 1:26 into the present: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: that WE provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.” See his videos, too:

http://pianoplayingdave.wordpress.com/2006/08/16/widows-and-orphans/

At Goldman Sachs' annual meeting on May 7, chairman/ceo Lloyd Blankfein, responding to criticism that the firm needed to better serve the public and economy, said events had created "an opportunity to be introspective," and promised that the firm would review its practices:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/business/08goldman.html?scp=1&sq=goldman%20chief%20promises%20review%20of%20bank%27s%20practices&st=cse

Comments

[Diane Reynolds]

Hi John,

I've liked your three blogs on the FT and current economics. You write very clearly and simply, and your blogs are a good length. You also manage to deal calmly with an issue that could lead to a great deal of anger while at the same time you make your point that Wall Street is not acting as the Bible would hope. I also liked the blog on the Depression ... I haven't gone back further, but I think you have more blogs comparing the Depression to today, a topic of interest to me. I will see if my library has a copy of everyday life 1920-40, and would recommend the 1937 sociological study Middleton in Transition, which offers good insights into the Depression.

All the best,

Diane

[Jon]

Hi, Diane, Thanks for your comments on my blog. I recall reading the Middletown in Transition study a few years ago but would like to return to it. I recall that it made the point, which seemed contrarian to me, that churchgoing declined in Muncie, IN, in the Great Depression, in part because people felt embarrassed that they couldn't contribute when the collection plate comes around. I wonder if that's the case in churchgoing now.

I've gotten the "Everyday Life" book out of the library a couple times -- I keep thinking this recession will be behind us (wishful thinking!). I should probably just buy it.

Do you also watch Depression-related movies? One forgotten gem that I love is "American Madness" from 1932. It's one of Frank Capra's first films, and, in addition to pulling off some neat technique (like rapid shots depicting how a rumor leads to a run on the bank), I think it just works better for me than some of his later films on similar themes. His "It Happened One Night," which soon followed, is one of my all-time favorites.

[Jon]

Hi, Earlene, I hope your loan worked out all right. But for millions of people who have taken out loans in the past decade, it hasn't. I hope that our culture has learned a lesson, but fear that it -- and especially the business world -- has not. I have posted elsewhere on Quakers' take on debt and think that the spiritual accounting early Friends did is something we could learn from today.