What are your true feelings about America and its dream of home ownership? Do you believe it will survive the economic meltdown? Do you think most people will keep paying their mortgages and not walk out on their homes?

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If so, you might want to join me in buying mortgage-backed securities, commonly lumped into that odious investment category known as “toxic assets.” Years ago, on Wall Street, I helped create these securities with computer software (which I described in “My Manhattan Project”). Now, I farm oysters out in Long Island. But like a lot of people, I’m always on the lookout for a good investment opportunity. And for a few months now, I’ve been thinking that the economic panic has been overblown and that, if you look carefully, bargains can be found in toxic waste.

I’m hardly the only one—with the hand-holding of the Treasury Department, two large companies have recently started buying them as part of the once-ballyhooed …

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“You put chicken into the grinder”—he laughed with that infectious Wall Street black humor—“and out comes sirloin.”

🙂

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I wanted a piece of that. But first, I kept a promise to my wife—that if she recovered, we would backpack around the world.

Returning to New York a year later, I had an interview at Shearson Lehman’s mortgage-research department. Again, I sought advice from Professor Gesiak. I drove to his apartment in Greenpoint and confessed to him that I had never studied finance, and I had only taken one course in computers. Over the kitchen table, while his wife minded the toddlers, he gave me a quick tutorial on the “present value of future cash flows.” It was only freshman calculus, after all.

Out the back window, clotheslines on pulleys ran across the courtyard to adjoining apartments, like a scene from The Honeymooners. Once I demonstrated that I understood how to discount a cash flow, Leszek brought out the hard stuff. Over glasses of vodka chased by raw garlic and butter on rye, he recounted how he had black-marketed goods in communist Poland. Halfway through the bottle, he claimed that the Polish zloty had been on the vodka standard—that is, the conversion ratio of zlotys to dollars on the black market was always the same as the price, in zlotys, of a half-liter of vodka.

Heading back to Manhattan that night, I smashed my car on the ramp up to the BQE. But the good news was that I got the job. I was in the mortgage-packaging business.

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