Street Seller Quotes

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.

I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn’t write anything or sell anything, I’d passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I’d had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen round the corner in late middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.

Henry looked up and down the empty avenue—no cars or trucks anywhere. No bicycles. No paperboys. No fruit sellers or fish buyers. No flower carts or noodle stands. The streets were vacant, empty—the way he felt inside. There was no one left.

Gilliam says of that time, ‘I thought at least getting the Catholics, Protestants and Jews all protesting against our movie was fairly ecumenical on our part. We only missed out on the Muslims. And I thought that was pretty fantastic to see, marching in the streets with placards against Brian. We had achieved something useful.

When you leave your old neighborhood for your land, the city streets and businesses will almost instantly fade from your mind. The chirping of birds will replace the yelling of people.

Spring declares itself solely in the quality of the air or the little baskets of flowers that street-sellers bring in from the suburbs; this is a spring that is sold in the market-place.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

The hearing was adjourned. For a few brief moments, as I left the Law Courts on my way to the van, I recognised the familiar smells and colours of a summer evening. In the darkness of my mobile prison I rediscovered one by one, as if rising from the depths of my fatigue, all the familiar sounds of a town that I loved and of a certain time of day when I sometimes used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper sellers in the languid evening air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the moaning of the trams high in the winding streets of the town and the murmuring of the sky before darkness spills over onto the port, all these sounds marked out an invisible route which I knew so well before going into prison. Yes, this was the time of day when, long ago, I used to feel happy. What always awaited me then was a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, for with the prospect of the coming day, it was to my cell that I returned. As if a familiar journey under a summer sky could as easily end in prison as in innocent sleep.

A small crowd had gathered to gaze at the astonishing display of color: vivid blues; regal purples; soft, candy-floss pinks; strawberry reds; vibrant lime greens; sun-bright, buttercup yellows; rich oranges; and creamy, vanilla whites. Tilly’s eyes were unable to take it all in, her mouth unable to suppress a smile of sheer delight. It was as if someone had poured a box of paints onto this one street, leaving nothing with which to brighten up the drab gray of the rest of the city she had just passed.

...it's a good idea to remember that whenever there is a buy and a seller, somebody is wrong. Make sure it's not you

A cloth seller is wandering from street to street. It’s evening, still no sales. It feels like he is walking through a desert, dying to get a drop of water, dying to make a sale. He is frustrated now. He gets angry at a customer who actually wanted to buy a lot of clothes from him. Those who walk miles and miles through a desert often die just a few feet away from water.

Standing out there on the street, I realized that every person nearby--children, seniors, hardworking parents, and, yes, buyers, sellers, and users--was my neighbor. In major world religions, there is no commandment more fundamental than to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Now I was being challenged to manifest that love: this was a test of my love, of my vision. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you.

FOR THE VOICELESS by El Niño Salvaje I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. I raise my voice and wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for the invisible. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised; for the victims of this so-called “war on drugs,” for the eighty thousand murdered by the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the purchasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers who have parlayed their “new money” into hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and suburban developments. I speak for the tortured, burned, and flayed by the narcos, beaten and raped by the soldiers, electrocuted and half-drowned by the police. I speak for the orphans, twenty thousand of them, for the children who have lost both or one parent, whose lives will never be the same. I speak for the dead children, shot in crossfires, murdered alongside their parents, ripped from their mothers’ wombs. I speak for the people enslaved, forced to labor on the narcos’ ranches, forced to fight. I speak for the mass of others ground down by an economic system that cares more for profit than for people. I speak for the people who tried to tell the truth, who tried to tell the story, who tried to show you what you have been doing and what you have done. But you silenced them and blinded them so that they could not tell you, could not show you. I speak for them, but I speak to you—the rich, the powerful, the politicians, the comandantes, the generals. I speak to Los Pinos and the Chamber of Deputies, I speak to the White House and Congress, I speak to AFI and the DEA, I speak to the bankers, and the ranchers and the oil barons and the capitalists and the narco drug lords and I say— You are the same. You are all the cartel. And you are guilty. You are guilty of murder, you are guilty of torture, you are guilty of rape, of kidnapping, of slavery, of oppression, but mostly I say that you are guilty of indifference. You do not see the people that you grind under your heel. You do not see their pain, you do not hear their cries, they are voiceless and invisible to you and they are the victims of this war that you perpetuate to keep yourselves above them. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible, that you would just as soon be swept from your streets like the trash that blows around your ankles and soils your shoes. Congratulations. You’ve done it. You’ve performed a cleansing. A limpieza. The country is safe now for your shopping malls and suburban tracts, the invisible are safely out of sight, the voiceless silent as they should be. I speak these last words, and now you will kill me for it. I only ask that you bury me in the fosa común—the common grave—with the faceless and the nameless, without a headstone. I would rather be with them than you. And I am voiceless now, and invisible.

The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument. The constant argument over the value of the shares of some major publicly traded company has very little value, as both buyer and seller can see the fair price of the stock on the ticker, and the broker’s commission has been driven down by competition. The argument over the value of credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds—a complex security whose value was derived from that of another complex security—could be a gold mine.

No institution- behind the façade, behind the pompous name and the numerous employees- truly functioned. No decipherable order, only an unruly and uncontrollable crowd on streets cluttered with sellers of every possible type of merchandise, people speaking at the top of their lungs, urchins, beggars.

481 I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been. After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing. Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life. The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

I stood and waited on the open second-floor landing, and tried to imagine what appalling series of bureaucratic errors had led to this estate being so well looked after. In most parts of London, they collect the dustbins from the middle-class streets and empty them into the council estates, before setting fire to a couple of Ford Cortinas on the pavement.

Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave.

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went

There’s something about sleeping in your own bed of years ago, in seeing your mom in the kitchen, in smelling zaatar2 in the streets; something to hearing the squeaky horn of the kaak3 seller’s motorcycle, to seeing familiar streets and faces, and hearing the familiar language and noises that just set your heart beating faster, get your breath coming quicker, get your smile to flash in a second and your stress to melt away into the heat… Take me home.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high. Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption. It’s not the “Mexican drug problem,” Pablo thinks now, it’s the North American drug problem. As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors? Corrupt to the soul. That’s the big story, he thinks. That’s the story someone should write. Well, maybe I will. And no one will read it.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The lessons of market history are clear. Styles and fashions in investors’ evaluations of securities can and often do play a critical role in the pricing of securities. The stock market at times conforms well to the castle-in-the-air theory. For this reason, the game of investing can be extremely dangerous. Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose. Investors would be well advised to treat new issues with a healthy dose of skepticism. Certainly investors in the past have built many castles in the air with IPOs. Remember that the major sellers of the stock of IPOs are the managers of the companies themselves. They try to time their sales to coincide with a peak in the prosperity of their companies or with the height of investor enthusiasm for some current fad. In such cases, the urge to get on the bandwagon—even in high-growth industries—produced a profitless prosperity for investors.

It would take me all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned, not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on.... there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties — gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another, there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers.... He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and, wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience....

On the first day of his duel with the bears, Saunders, operating behind his mask of brokers, bought 33,000 shares of Piggly Wiggly, mostly from the short sellers; within a week he had brought the total to 105,000—more than half of the 200,000 shares outstanding. Meanwhile, ventilating his emotions at the cost of tipping his hand, he began running a series of advertisements in which he vigorously and pungently told the readers of Southern and Western newspapers what he thought of Wall Street. “Shall the gambler rule?” he demanded in one of these effusions. “On a white horse he rides. Bluff is his coat of mail and thus shielded is a yellow heart. His helmet is deceit, his spurs clink with treachery, and the hoofbeats of his horse thunder destruction. Shall good business flee? Shall it tremble with fear? Shall it be the loot of the speculator?” On Wall Street, Livermore went on buying Piggly Wiggly.

He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties—gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another; there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers; he never saw the White Russian countess again. He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience.

Because so many people were betting against GameStop —and brick-and-mortar retail in general — the overall short position was enormous, almost comically so. At certain points over the past six months, it had bounced between 50 and even 100 percent of the overall float, meaning nearly all the shares of GameStop in existence had been borrowed and sold by short sellers, all of whom had an obligation to rebuy those shares at some point in the future. So, what if Keith was right, and the stock went up instead of down? It would be like watching investors trying to get out of a burning building, through a single, narrow door. The stock would rocket. As a financial educator, Keith knew that short selling could be one of the riskiest plays on the market. You really needed to be certain a stock was going down, because your upside was limited, but your losses could, theoretically, be infinite. The fact that so many competent investors were short selling GameStop could mean the stock really was a dog; but it also meant the stock was loaded with rocket fuel, and it wouldn't take much to ignite and sent it right to the moon.

And as a long-short fund, he'd also been obligated to take short positions — betting against companies — which was a tactic that, to most experts in finance, was uncontroversial. The thinking went, when companies were performing poorly, or were mismanaged, or were in an industry that was being overrun, or were simply likely to fail, taking a short position wasn't just logical — it protected the marketplace by pointing out overpriced stocks, prevented fraud by acting as a check against dubious management, and poked holes in potential bubbles. Short sellers also added liquidity and volume to a stock — because they were obligated to buy the stock back at some point in the future. Yes, short sellers profited when companies failed, but usually a short seller wasn't banking on a company failing — just that the stock's price would eventually correct toward its true valuation. Sometimes, though, a trader picked up a short position because the company in question really was going to fail. Because, perhaps, it was in an industry that was dying; had management that seemed completely unable or unwilling to pivot; and had deep fundamental issues in its financing that seemed impossible to overcome.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called “electronic front-running”—seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing him to the next. (What had happened to Brad, when he traded at RBC.) The second they called “rebate arbitrage”—using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever kickbacks the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the kickback was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called “slow market arbitrage.” This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange, and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges, before the exchanges were able to react. Say, for instance, the market for P&G shares is 80–80.01, and buyers and sellers sit on both sides on all of the exchanges. A big seller comes in on the NYSE and knocks the price down to 79.98–79.99. High-frequency traders buy on NYSE at $79.99 and sell on all the other exchanges at $80, before the market officially changes. This happened all day, every day, and generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.

And for the four remaining days - the ninety-six remaining hours - we mapped out a future away from everything we knew. When the walls of the map were breached, we gave one another courage to build them again. And we imagined our home an old stone barn filled with junk and wine and paintings, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and bees. I remember our final day in the villa. We were supposed to be going that evening, taking the sleeper back to England. I was on edge, a mix of nerves and excitement, looking out to see if he made the slightest move toward leaving, but he didn’t. Toiletries remained on the bathroom shelves, clothes stayed scattered across the floor. We went to the beach as usual, lay side by side in our usual spot. The heat was intense and we said little, certainly nothing of our plans to move up to Provence, to the lavender and light. To the fields of sunflowers. I looked at my watch. We were almost there. It was happening. I kept saying to myself, he’s going to do it. I left him on the bed dozing, and went out to the shop to get water and peaches. I walked the streets as if they were my new home. Bonjour to everyone, me walking barefoot, oh so confident, free. And I imagined how we’d go out later to eat, and we’d celebrate at our bar. And I’d phone Mabel and Mabel would say, I understand. I raced back to the villa, ran up the stairs and died. Our rucksacks were open on the bed, our shoes already packed away inside. I watched him from the door. He was silent, his eyes red. He folded his clothes meticulously, dirty washing in separate bags. I wanted to howl. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold him there until the train had left the station. I’ve got peaches and water for the journey, I said. Thank you, he said. You think of everything. Because I love you, I said. He didn’t look at me. The change was happening too quickly. Is there a taxi coming? My voice was weak, breaking. Madame Cournier’s taking us. I went to open the window, the scent of tuberose strong. I lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. An airplane cast out a vivid orange wake that ripped across the violet wash. And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit. The bottle of pastis? he said. I smiled at him. You take it, I said. We lay in our bunks as the sleeper rattled north and retraced the journey of ten days before. The cabin was dark, an occasional light from the corridor bled under the door. The room was hot and airless, smelled of sweat. In the darkness, he dropped his hand down to me and waited. I couldn’t help myself, I reached up and held it. Noticed my fingertips were numb. We’ll be OK, I remember thinking. Whatever we are, we’ll be OK. We didn’t see each other for a while back in Oxford. We both suffered, I know we did, but differently. And sometimes, when the day loomed gray, I’d sit at my desk and remember the heat of that summer. I’d remember the smells of tuberose that were carried by the wind, and the smell of octopus cooking on the stinking griddles. I’d remember the sound of our laughter and the sound of a doughnut seller, and I’d remember the red canvas shoes I lost in the sea, and the taste of pastis and the taste of his skin, and a sky so blue it would defy anything else to be blue again. And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible./

In his job as a financial educator, Keith had spent a fair amount of time breaking down the act — and sometimes art — of short selling, in a way that less savvy customers could understand. When a trader believed a company was in trouble, and its stock was overvalued, they could 'borrow' shares, sell them, and then when the stock went down as they'd predicted, rebuy the shares at a lower price, return them to whoever they'd borrowed them from, and pocket the difference. If GameStop was trading at 5, you could borrow 100 shares, sell them for $500; when the stock hit 1, you bought back the 100 shares for $100, returned them, pocketing $400 for yourself. You paid a little fee to the lender for their trouble and came out with a tidy profit. But what happened if the stock went up instead of down? What happened if GameStop figured out how to capitalize on its millions of nostalgic customers, who spent billions on video games every year? What if the stock went to 10 instead of 1? What happened was, the short seller was royally screwed. He'd borrowed those 100 shares and sold them at 5. Now the stock was at 10, but he still needed to return his 100 shares. Buying them on the market at 10 meant spending $1000. And what was worse, when he'd borrowed the shares, he'd agreed on a timeline to return them. There was a ticking clock hanging over his head, so he had a choice — buy the shares back at 10 now, losing $500 on the deal — or wait a little longer, hoping the stock went back down before his time limit was up. And what if he waited, and the stock kept going up? Sooner or later, he had to buy those shares back. Even if the stock went to 15, 20 — he was on the hook for those 100 shares. Theoretically, there was no limit to how much he could lose.

Little Nicky heads to the Badlands to see the show for himself. The Western Roads are outside his remit as a U.S. Treasury agent, but he knows the men he wants are its denizens. Standing on the corner of the Great Western and Edinburgh Roads, a sideshow, a carnival of the doped, the beaten, and the crazed. He walks round to the Avenue Haig strip and encounters the playground of Shanghai’s crackpots, cranks, gondoos, and lunatics. He’s accosted constantly: casino touts, hustling pimps, dope dealers; monkeys on chains, dancing dogs, kids turning tumbles, Chinese ‘look see’ boys offering to watch your car. Their numbers rise as the Japs turn the screws on Shanghai ever tighter. Half-crazy American missionaries try to sell him Bibles printed on rice paper—saving souls in the Badlands is one tough beat. The Chinese hawkers do no better with their porno cards of naked dyed blondes, Disney characters in lewd poses, and bare-arsed Chinese girls, all underage. Barkers for the strip shows and porno flicks up the alleyways guarantee genuine French celluloid of the filthiest kind. Beggars abound, near the dealers and bootleggers in the shadows, selling fake heroin pills and bootleg samogon Russian vodka, distilled in alleyways, that just might leave you blind. Off the Avenue Haig, Nicky, making sure of his gun in its shoulder holster, ventures up the side streets and narrow laneways that buzz with the purveyors of cure-all tonics, hawkers of appetite suppressants, male pick-me-ups promising endless virility. Everything is for sale—back-street abortions and unwanted baby girls alongside corn and callus removers, street barbers, and earwax pickers. The stalls of the letter writers for the illiterate are next to the sellers of pills to cure opium addiction. He sees desperate refugees offered spurious Nansen passports, dubious visas for neutral Macao, well-forged letters of transit for Brazil. He could have his fortune told twenty times over (gypsy tarot cards or Chinese bone chuckers? Your choice). He could eat his fill—grilled meat and rice stalls—or he could start a whole new life: end-of-the-worlders and Korean propagandists offer cheap land in Mongolia and Manchukuo.

refuge imagine how it feels to be chased out of home. to have your grip ripped. loosened from your fingertips, something you so dearly held on to. like a lover’s hand that slips when pulled away you are always reaching. my father would speak of home. reaching. speaking of familiar faces. girl next door who would eventually grow up to be my mother. the fruit seller at the market. the lonely man at the top of the road who nobody spoke to. and our house at the bottom of the street lit up by a single flickering lamp where beyond was only darkness. there they would sit and tell stories of monsters that lurked and came only at night to catch the children who sat and listened to stories of monsters that lurked. this is how they lived. each memory buried. an artefact left to be discovered by archaeologists. the last words on a dying family member’s lips. this was sacred. not even monsters could taint it. but there were monsters that came during the day. monsters that tore families apart with their giant hands. and fingers that slept on triggers. the sound of gunshots ripping through the sky became familiar like the tapping of rain fall on a window sill. monsters that would kill and hide behind speeches, suits and ties. monsters that would chase families away forcing them to leave everything behind. i remember when we first stepped off the plane. everything was foreign. unfamiliar. uninviting. even the air in my lungs left me short of breath. we came here to find refuge. they called us refugees so, we hid ourselves in their language until we sounded just like them. changed the way we dressed to look just like them. made this our home until we lived just like them and began to speak of familiar faces. girl next door who would grow up to be a mother. the fruit seller at the market. the lonely man at the top of the road who nobody spoke to. and our house at the bottom of the street lit up by a flickering lamp to keep away the darkness. there we would sit and watch police that lurked and came only at night to arrest the youths who sat and watched police that lurked and came only at night. this is how we lived. i remember one day i heard them say to me they come here to take our jobs they need to go back to where they came from not knowing that i was one of the ones who came. i told them that a refugee is simply someone who is trying to make a home. so next time when you go home tuck your children in and kiss your families goodnight, be glad that the monsters never came for you. in their suits and ties. never came for you. in the newspapers with the media lies. never came for you. that you are not despised. and know that deep inside the hearts of each and every one of us we are all always reaching for a place that we can call home.

The bathing boys abandoned their frolicking and gathered in a horde around the singing man. Nobody made a sound. Their heads swayed gently in tune. Even Malik sahib and the fruit seller looked enchanted. The mysterious contours of his voice in the mellow, orange twilight were like the sound of nature, the call of beauty. And the road water, though the filthiest in Lahore, mimicked the red blush of Heer's cheeks which, the player revealed, "were scented like a rare flower on a spring morning." -- The Player

friends had started hanging around. Franny could feel her stomach hardening and twisting into knots when they arrived, pushing and shoving one another and tripping over their huge basketball shoes. It was a wonder they didn’t knock over a display rack or topple one of the neatly stacked pyramids of paint cans. They seemed to be everywhere at once, and she couldn’t possibly keep an eye on all of them. Actually, she was a little afraid of them. While they dressed like kids, she knew they were actually young men. They were bigger than she was and full of rough male energy. From what she observed it seemed Ben was their leader and they were reporting to him. She was sure they were up to no good. Their whispered conversation was full of winks and nudges, and they constantly checked over their shoulders to see if they were being overheard. She tried to keep her distance, but if she had to approach them to help a customer, she noticed they would move away or fall silent. Whenever Mr. Slack appeared, they disappeared. Returning to the invoices, Franny went through them one more time. She couldn’t understand it. According to the paperwork, the store had received enough batteries to last through the summer, based on her best estimate using last year’s figures. They’d gotten twenty boxes each of AA and D batteries, the most popular sellers, and ten boxes each of the other sizes. Last week she’d noticed the display rack was nearly empty, and she’d asked Ben to fill it. “Can’t,” he’d said, avoiding her eyes. “They’re all gone.” “There should be plenty in the storeroom,” she’d insisted, looking curiously at his two buddies, who were lounging by the paint display. They seemed to find the conversation extremely amusing. “Go check again.” “There’s no point. I’m telling you, they’re all gone. Look, I’m taking a break now,” he’d said, signaling his friends to follow him outside. Sure enough, she couldn’t find any batteries in the storeroom, either. She was sure they hadn’t been sold; she would have noticed the unusual number of sales and ordered more. Where had they gone? It was very disturbing, especially since she’d been having such a hard time lately making up the bank deposit. That was always the first task of the day. She would take the previous day’s take out of the safe and add up the checks and cash, square them with the total sales figure, and fill out the deposit slip. Then Mr. Slack would put the whole business in a blue vinyl zippered pouch and take it to the red-brick bank across the street. For the past few weeks, however, she hadn’t been able to get the figures to match, even though

We wandered the entire length of the street market, stopping to buy the provisions I needed for the lunch dish I wanted to prepare to initiate l'Inglese into the real art of Sicilian cuisine. I took l'Inglese around the best stalls, teaching him how to choose produce, livestock, game, fish, and meat of the highest quality for his dishes. Together we circled among the vegetable sellers, who were praising their heaps of artichokes, zucchini still bearing their yellow flowers, spikes of asparagus, purple-tinged cauliflowers, oyster mushrooms, and vine tomatoes with their customary cries: "Carciofi fresci." "Funghi belli." "Tutto economico." I squeezed and pinched, sniffed, and weighed things in my hands, and having agreed on the goods I would then barter on the price. The stallholders were used to me, but they had never known me to be accompanied by a man. Wild strawberries, cherries, oranges and lemons, quinces and melons were all subject to my scrutiny. The olive sellers, standing behind their huge basins containing all varieties of olives in brine, oil, or vinegar, called out to me: "Hey, Rosa, who's your friend?" We made our way to the meat vendors, where rabbits fresh from the fields, huge sides of beef, whole pigs and sheep were hung up on hooks, and offal and tripe were spread out on marble slabs. I selected some chicken livers, which were wrapped in paper and handed to l'Inglese to carry. I had never had a man to carry my shopping before; it made me feel special. We passed the stalls where whole tuna fish, sardines and oysters, whitebait and octopus were spread out, reflecting the abundant sea surrounding our island. Fish was not on the menu today, but nevertheless I wanted to show l'Inglese where to find the finest tuna, the freshest shrimps, and the most succulent swordfish in the whole market.

WILL emerges from the theatre into a street throbbing with nefarious life-whores, cutpurses, hawkers, urchins, tract-sellers, riffraff of all kinds in an area of stews (lowdown pubs), brothers and slums.

Beloved are all right," she murmured gruffly, "Wouldn't want to go burning 'em." "Not even in the service of truth?" "That's not serving truth!" Mosca thought back to what she'd already said to Kohlrabi, and tried to make sense of her scattered thoughts. "I mean...if I told people what to believe, they'd stop thinking. And then they'd be easier to lie to. And...what if I was wrong?" "So...if you may not decide what is true, and the men of letters may not, who may?" "Nobody. Everybody." Mosca looked up at the windows where the jubilant people of Mandelion swung their bells. "Clamoring Hour - that's the only way. Everybody able to stand up and shout what they think, all at once. An' not just the men of letters, an' the lords in their full-bottomed wigs, but the street sellers, an' the porters, an' the bakers. An' not just the clever men, but the muddle-headed, an' the madmen, an' the criminals, an' the children in their infant gowns, an' the really, really stupid. All of 'em. Even the wicked, Mr. Clent. Even the Birdcatchers.

There’s so much need in the world. It turns my heart to granite. They are beggars out there, every one of them—from the crippled soldier crying on the corner to the street sellers and crooks and landlords. The bewigged crowd is no different. Better dressed, but desperate nevertheless. Especially at the palace. It’s pathetic, really. I

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers “the boys” and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers.

His brother Najib owned an auto-parts store at bustling Shikarpur Gate, the mouth of the narrow road linking their village to the city—an ancient byway that had once led southward through the passes all the way to India. At dusk it is clogged with a riot of vegetable sellers’ handcarts beset by shoppers, Toyota pickup trucks, horse-drawn taxis, and three-wheeled rickshaws clambering around and through the throng like gaudy dung beetles. Nurallah’s brother Najib had gone to Chaman, just across the border in Pakistan, where the streets are lined with cargo containers serving as shops, and used motor oil cements the dust to the ground in a glossy tarmac, and every variety of automotive organ or sinew is laid bare, spread out, and strung up for sale. He had made his purchases and set off back to Kandahar. “He paid his customs dues”—Nurallah emphasized the remarkable point—“because that’s the law. He paid at every checkpoint on the way back, fifty afghanis, a hundred afghanis.” A dollar or two every time an unkempt, underage police boy in green fatigues slouched out of a sandbagged lean-to into the middle of the road—eight times in the sixty-six miles when last I counted. “And then when he reached the entrance to town, the police there wanted five hundred afghanis. Five hundred!” A double arch marks the place where the road that swoops down from Kabul joins the road leading in from Pakistan. The police range from one side to the other, like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows. “He refused,” Nurallah continued. “He said he had paid his customs dues—he showed them the receipt. He said he had paid the bribes at every checkpoint all along the way, and he was not paying again.” I waited a beat. “So what happened?” “They reached into his window and smacked him.” “They hit him?” I was shocked. Najib might be a sunny guy, but Kandahar tempers are strung on tripwires. For a second I thought we’d have to go bail him out. “What did he do?” Nurallah’s eyes, beneath his widow’s peak, were banked and smoldering. “What could he do? He paid the money. But then he pulled over to the side of the road and called me. I told him to stay right there. And I called Police Chief Matiullah Qatih, to report the officer who was taking the bribes.” And Matiullah had scoffed at him: Did he die of it? The police buzzards had seen Najib make the call. They had descended on him, snatched the phone out of his hand, and smashed it. “You call that law?” Now Nurallah was ablaze. “They’re the police! They should be showing people what the law is; they should be enforcing the law. And they’re the ones breaking it.” Nurallah was once a police officer himself. He left the force the day his own boss, Kabul police chief Zabit Akrem, was assassinated in that blast in the mosque in 2005.1 Yet so stout was Nurallah’s pride in his former profession that he brought his dark green uniform into work and kept it there, hung neatly on a hook in his locker. “My sacred oath,” he vowed, concluding: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then I see a police truck coming, I will turn away. I will not warn them.” I caught my breath. So maybe he didn’t mean it literally. Maybe Nurallah wouldn’t actually connive with the Taliban. Still, if a former police officer like him was even mouthing such thoughts, then others were acting on them. Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban.

The three flower shops were obliterated. The petals of the once-dewy flowers and their sellers' flesh burnt together. The people reacted and, unlike the birds, they did not react in unison. They ran towards the narrow streets near the masjid, trampling over the old and limping beggars. They pushed and shoved and cursed and cried. The birds circled in the air, pitying the humans who had lost their humanity.

Two cars are racing through narrow streets lined with stalls. The cars plunge through the stalls, people scatter, tables of fruit and vegetables and meat and fish are knocked and sprawled and squashed and smashed. I want to see the film about the cleanup, the film about the people who are injured by the cars, the film about the people whose livelihoods have been ruined by a man in sunglasses who values his life above all else. I feel like I'm the only person rooting for the fruit seller instead of the hero.

We only get one life: some die in bed, others die on horseback, and if you have the chance to die on horseback, then do so. Be a Napoleon in this world. Even if you're a watermelon seller, then be the Napoleon of watermelon selling.

As interest rates began to rise in the post-war period, leaving your cash at a bank that paid near zero percent interest was not such a good investment. Corporations and municipalities had millions of dollars to invest, but could not get a decent return on the short-term cash. They wanted a rate, because any rate was better than nothing. At the same time, securities dealers on Wall Street began holding trading positions. Previously the role of the broker-dealer was as a pure middleman. That’s the broker part of broker-dealer. When a client wanted to sell a bond, the firm’s salesmen scoured the market to find a buyer. If they could find a buyer, the trade was done: end-user seller to end-user buyer, and the Wall Street firm just stood in the middle. That changed in the 1950s. Some broker-dealers, like Bear Stearns and Salomon Brothers, realized they could make money buying bonds for their own trading account. And, they could even make money betting on the direction of interest rates.

New York Children’s Aid Society in 1853. His organization and the New York Foundling Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of Charity, were responsible for the most massive resettlement of the Eastern poor in American history, the Orphan Train Project. Brace and his workers swept through New York City streets, gathering up orphans and children of the poor and shipping them out west. Between 1853 and the early 1930s, approximately 250,000 children were “resettled.

Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers. “You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt,” he later recalled.19 Most’s ingenious idea was to, after a fashion, mimic this basic structure. The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading—the simultaneous buying and selling of big baskets of stocks first pioneered by Wells Fargo two decades earlier—and a little-known aspect of mutual funds: They can do “in kind” transactions, exchanging shares in a fund for a proportional amount of the stocks it contains, rather than cash. Or an investor can gather the correct proportion of the underlying stocks and exchange them for shares in the fund. Stock exchange “specialists”—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the “warehouse” and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets. This elegant creation/redemption process would also get around the logistical challenges of money coming in and out continuously throughout the day—one of Bogle’s main practical concerns. In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves, or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.

If you can’t convince yourself “When I’m down 25 percent, I’m a buyer” and banish forever the fatal thought “When I’m down 25 percent, I’m a seller,” then you’ll never make a decent profit in stocks.

TINY CRAB CAKES 1 egg 1½ cups fresh breadcrumbs (see Note) ¼ cup finely chopped scallions (2–3 scallions) 1 tablespoon mayonnaise 1 teaspoon lemon juice (juice of about ⅙ medium lemon) ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce ¼ teaspoon seafood seasoning mix, such as Old Bay 8 ounces fresh lump-style crabmeat, picked over 2–3 tablespoons vegetable oil Scallion brushes for garnish (optional; see page 19) MAKES ABOUT 24 MINI CAKES (4–6 SERVINGS) 1. To make the Curry-Orange Mayo, whisk together the mayonnaise, curry powder, orange zest, orange juice, and Tabasco in a small bowl. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or up to 3 days. When ready to serve, transfer to a pretty bowl and sprinkle with the scallions. 2. To make the crab cakes, lightly beat the egg in a large bowl. Add ¾ cup of the breadcrumbs, the scallions, mayonnaise, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and seasoning mix. Stir well to blend. Add the crabmeat and mix gently, being careful not to shred the crabmeat entirely. 3. Spread the remaining ¾ cup of breadcrumbs onto a plate. Form the crab mixture into 24 cakes, using a scant tablespoon for each one, and dredge lightly in the crumbs. Arrange on a wax paper-lined baking sheet. 4. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in one or two large skillets over medium heat. Cook the cakes until golden brown and crisp on one side, about 2 to 2½ minutes. Flip and repeat. The cakes should be hot inside. Repeat with any remaining cakes, adding more oil as necessary. Serve immediately, or place on a foil-lined baking sheet, wrap well, and refrigerate for up to 24 hours, or freeze for up to 2 weeks. 5. If you make the cakes ahead, remove from the refrigerator or freezer 30 minutes prior to reheating. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Bake the cakes until hot and crisp, 10 to 15 minutes. 6. Arrange on a platter with the sauce for dipping, and garnish with the scallion brushes, if desired. Note: Tear 3 slices of good-quality bread into pieces and whir in a food processor to make breadcrumbs. Portland Public Market The Portland Public Market, which opened in 1998, continues Maine’s long tradition of downtown public markets, dating back to the 19th century. Housed in an award-winning brick, glass, and wood structure, the market, which was the brainchild of Maine philanthropist Elizabeth Noyce, is a food-lover’s heaven. Vendors include organic produce farms; butchers selling locally raised meat; purveyors of Maine-made cheeses, sausages, and smoked seafood; artisan bakers; and flower sellers. Prepared take-away food includes Mexican delicacies, pizza, soups, smoothies, and sandwiches, and such well-known Portland culinary stars as Sam Hayward (see page 127) and Dana Street (see page 129) have opened casual dining concessions.

Should I Invest in a Timeshare? In my professional career, timeshare properties have been by far the worst investments I’ve seen. Buyers are lured with a free dinner or spa coupon, only to endure a hard sales pitch by peddlers who do not know the meaning of the word no. This will be the most expensive dinner you will ever not buy, if you sign up for the “free seminar” in exchange for a restaurant coupon. You can’t borrow against a timeshare or use it like a regular financial asset, and you can only reside in it for very short and specific periods of time. If you are really considering getting a timeshare, then only buy it on the secondary market; simply do an Internet search—you’ll find plenty of remorseful sellers offering you their units at huge discounts.

The meter said six pounds, so I passed a ten pound note through the window and watched a fifteen-second production of ‘I’m Not Sure I’ve Got Change For That’, starring licensed cab driver 99102, before getting out and heading back down the street.

l’after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l’interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end.

Imagine, for instance, that someone passed a rule, in the U.S. stock market as it is currently configured, that required every stock market trade to be front-run by a firm called Scalpers Inc. Under this rule, each time you went to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft, Scalpers Inc. would be informed, whereupon it would set off to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft offered in the market and, without taking the risk of owning the stock for even an instant, sell it to you at a higher price. Scalpers Inc. is prohibited from taking the slightest market risk; when it buys, it has the seller firmly in hand; when it sells, it has the buyer in hand; and at the end of every trading day, it will have no position at all in the stock market. Scalpers Inc. trades for the sole purpose of interfering with trading that would have happened without it. In buying from every seller and selling to every buyer, it winds up: a) doubling the trades in the marketplace and b) being exactly 50 percent of that booming volume. It adds nothing to the market but at the same time might be mistaken for the central player in that market. This state of affairs, as it happens, resembles the United States stock market after the passage of Reg NMS. From 2006 to 2008, high-frequency traders’ share of total U.S. stock market trading doubled, from 26 percent to 52 percent—and it has never fallen below 50 percent since then. The total number of trades made in the stock market also spiked dramatically, from roughly 10 million per day in 2006 to just over 20 million per day in 2009.

The black market was closing. The last sellers and buyers clustered behind an out-of-business toy store in Brooklyn, where the road smelled of trash and the subway trains that ran high above the street rattled the loudest. There were no children for sale at this hour. The last and least important bits of the day’s tidings were hastily sold.

The word 'Dorf' lies, although the Dablem Dorf station is covered with straw. Arabian students hang out in front of the entrance to the underground, and only the German kiosk of the kabob seller clues us in that the bus did not arrive through a secret passage and set us down in Morocco. The University buildings are hidden among trees, intertwining paths and signposts, which exclude each other. The arrow points to another arrow 3 m away, which is pointing back, perpendicular to the first. With signs making sure no one can get lost during his search, he searches and searches and it seems entirely irrelevant that he can never find the place he is searching for by tracing the signs. A Mobius strip, the circular blindness of the streets, and exhausted Minotaur are harbingers of the paths of this place, which only multiply behind the revolving door of the Ethnological Museum.

Silber, the real reason the exchange was shut, and the reason the U.S. Treasury was involved, was not stock prices but gold. European sellers were entitled to convert their sales proceeds into gold at the U.S. subtreasury building located on Wall Street across from the exchange.

In Georgian times lunch hardly existed, although for those who breakfasted early, a small snack might be eaten. In towns many shops sold pies and pastries, while street sellers offered shellfish and other ready-to-eat items. Dinner was the main meal, eaten at any time in the afternoon between two and five o’clock. The timing of dinner was related to the hours of daylight, since the cooks needed to work in daylight, especially for formal dinners with guests where preparations could take hours. Dinnertime for the elite became later and later, and in contrast to the meagre breakfast, a formal dinner could be a dazzling array of food. The first course, served on the table all at once, had numerous dishes, and was followed by a second course with a smaller selection of meats and fish, along with savoury and sweet items. Finally, a selection of nuts, sweetmeats and occasionally fruit constituted the dessert course, at which point the servants withdrew.

Spring declares itself solely in the quality of the air or the little baskets of flowers that street-sellers bring in from the suburbs; this is a spring sold in the market-place.

A pork seller had a violent dispute with his wife on the street; it began with the merchant, who sold the flesh of poultry and animals, suspecting his wife of also selling her own flesh.

The S.E.C. has not been loath to join the popular hue and cry against the friendless short seller. From this we have a right to deduce that they not only want an orderly market, but a market which shall forever gently rise. Of course, that conception is just plain silly, like Voltaire’s suggestion that a community ought to be able to support itself by everybody taking in everybody else’s washing.

The book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, was a Wall Street Journal best seller

short seller has an economic incentive to sell as much as possible – to attempt to drive the price down – in order to increase profits. A simple concept from economics is at work here: prices fall when supply increases. It is as true for cars as it is for shares. For stocks, we call this decrease in price a “dilution of share value” because the price of the shares is falling not because the company performed badly but because there are simply more shares in circulation (an increase in supply).

As I sit here with one foot on either side of the ledge, looking down from twelve stories above the streets of Boston, I can’t help but think about suicide.

That was because of the uptick rule. The rule was part of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (rule 10a-1). It specified that, with certain exceptions, short-sale transactions are allowed only at a price higher than the last previous different price (an “uptick”). This rule was supposed to prevent short sellers from deliberately driving down the price of a stock. Seeing an enormous profit potential from capturing the unprecedented spread between the futures and the index, I wanted to sell stocks short and buy index futures to capture the excess spread. The index was selling at 15 percent, or 30 points, over the futures. The potential profit in an arbitrage was 15 percent in a few days. But with prices collapsing, upticks were scarce. What to do? I figured out a solution. I called our head trader, who as a minor general partner was highly compensated from his share of our fees, and gave him this order: Buy $5 million worth of index futures at whatever the current market price happened to be (about 190), and place orders to sell short at the market, with the index then trading at about 220, not $5 million worth of assorted stocks—which was the optimal amount to best hedge the futures—but $10 million. I chose twice as much stock as I wanted, guessing only about half would actually be shorted because of the scarcity of the required upticks, thus giving me the proper hedge. If substantially more or less stock was sold short, the hedge would not be as good but the 15 percent profit cushion gave us a wide band of protection against loss.

After analyzing about 160 individual options trades, we found that for half of them no trades occurred on the exchange where Madoff said that they supposedly took place. For many of the remaining half that did trade, the quantity reported by Madoff just for my client’s two accounts exceeded the entire volume reported for everyone. To check the minority of remaining trades, those that did not conflict with the prices and volumes reported by the exchanges, I asked an official at Bear Stearns to find out in confidence who all the buyers and sellers of the options were. We could not connect any of them to Madoff’s firm.

To illustrate the losses from market impact, suppose XYZ stock has a “true” price of $50 a share. Assuming for simplicity that it trades in 10-cent increments, between trades there will be buyers bidding for various amounts at $49.90, $49.80, $49.70, and so forth. Similarly, sellers will be asking $50.10, $50.20, et cetera. Someone who places an order to buy at whatever price is available in the market, called a market order and one of the most common types, will pay $50.10, a little above the true price. This 10-cent difference between the price paid and the “true” price is called market impact. Market impact increases with order size since, to continue our example, a large market order may clean out not only the offering at $50.10 but also stock offered for sale at higher prices, resulting in an average purchase price above $50.10 and a market impact greater than 10 cents per share. When Steve Mizusawa and I operated Ridgeline Partners, we reduced these costs by dividing large orders into smaller ones of $20,000 to $100,000, and waiting a few minutes between transactions to allow the market price to recover. We know the “true” price is somewhere at or between the highest bid price (the Bid) and the lowest asking price (the Offer), but not exactly where. On average, it is about halfway between the two. To see that market impact is a real cost, suppose in our example that just after buying stock at $50.10 the buyer wants to sell it at market. He gets $49.90, for an immediate loss of 20 cents or about 0.4 percent.

In his 1901 tract, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Naoroji writes: What a spectacle [the opium trade] is to the world! In England no Statesman dares to propose that opium may be allowed to be sold in public houses at the corners of every street, in the same way as beer or spirits. On the contrary, Parliament, as representing the whole nation, distinctly enacts that ‘opium and all preparations of opium or of “poppies,” as “poison,” be sold by certified chemists only, and every box, bottle, vessel, wrapper, or cover in which such poison is contained, be distinctly labelled with the name of the article and the word “poison,” and with the name and address of the seller of the poison.’ And yet, at the other end of the world, this Christian, highly civilised, and humane England forces a ‘heathen’ and ‘barbarous’ Power to take this ‘poison,’ and tempts a vast human race to use it, and to degenerate and demoralise themselves with this ‘poison’! … It is wonderful how England reconciles this to her conscience. This opium trade is a sin on England’s head, and a curse on India for her share in being the instrument.38

Blankfein, who up until now had resisted pushing back against short-sellers, was becoming convinced that the pressure his stock was under was not an accident.

Travelling in South America had opened my eyes to how passionate people can be about life. From the market stallholders, to the tour guides, to the bus drivers, to the street cashiers and jungle cake sellers, and the many other travellers we met during our journey, they were all so full of enthusiasm for everything they did. They were passionate about where they lived, passionate about their job – whatever it entailed – and passionate about their existence on this earth. I hoped some of this had rubbed off on me and would stay with me forever.

It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers. Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn't apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.

Into its pinched streets, the fish-sellers told me, cars from Kolkata arrive daily, sent by government officials or corporate executives just to buy the best of the day's catch. The daily market is the town's centerpiece. For streets together, cereal-sellers sit surrounded by sacks of six or eight types of cereals; fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters, little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of fish; on blue tarpaulins, vegetable-sellers arrange potatoes, gourds, red onions, beans both broad and French, big and little aubergines, pumpkins and huge heads of cabbage.

The law in our time is, and probably ought to remain, almost unrealistically humanistic; in its eyes, corporations are people, stock exchanges are street-corner marketplaces where buyer and seller haggle face to face, and computers scarcely exist.

84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.

But bridging the gap isn’t as simple as coming down or coming up in price. You have to play to the fears. Remember how we discussed having Walls? And the Wall being our motivation to succeed? Buyers and sellers have the same thing. The seller’s biggest wall is a future in which they have Not Sold. The buyer’s biggest wall is a future in which they have Not Bought. Seems simple, right? I play to those fears in every negotiation. With my seller on 12th Street, I reminded him that the risk of not countering was going on the market and not selling at all.

For you, Manya, scrambled eggs with cream cheese and lox, our number-one seller. For the young lady a waffle with hot syrup and whipped butter and for Abe a steak sandwich with sautéed onions. Sounds good?" He left us for a moment before seating himself on the fourth chair at our table. He brought a basket with assorted breads, rolls, bagels and bialys that he lathered with butter and shoveled into his mouth. "Taste, taste." True to the sign that read In and Out in 20 Minutes, the food appeared not only quickly but on hot plates. "I learned from you, Manya. Always hot plates." The waffle was a novel experience: crisp, sweet, the butter served in a fluted paper cup, the syrup in a miniature pitcher.

Only a stock that many traders were selling short could be cornered; a stock that was in the throes of a real bear raid was ideal. In the latter situation, the would-be cornerer would attempt to buy up the investment houses’ floating supply of the stock and enough of the privately held shares to freeze out the bears; if the attempt succeeded, when he called for the short sellers to make good the stock they had borrowed, they could buy it from no one but him. And they would have to buy it at any price he chose to ask, their only alternatives—at least theoretically—being to go into bankruptcy or to jail for failure to meet their obligations. In the old days of titanic financial death struggles, when Adam Smith’s ghost still smiled on Wall Street, corners were fairly common and were often extremely sanguinary, with hundreds of innocent bystanders, as well as the embattled principals, getting their financial heads lopped off. The most famous cornerer in history was that celebrated old pirate, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who engineered no less than three successful corners during the eighteen-sixties. Probably his classic job was in the stock of the Harlem Railway. By dint of secretly buying up all its available shares while simultaneously circulating a series of untruthful rumors of imminent bankruptcy to lure the short sellers in, he achieved an airtight trap. Finally, with the air of a man doing them a favor by saving them from jail, he offered the cornered shorts at $179 a share the stock he had bought up at a small fraction of that figure.

Whether you look back at Tulsa’s wealthy “Black Wall Street” of the early twentieth century or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Sellers family in Denmark circa 1950s and 1960s, black people and black power always meant being able to have economic self-sustainability and access to the ballot box.

At our absolute limit, we were almost indifferent as to whether we did the deal or not. Meanwhile the seller had now alienated us, and we preferred not to have any further dealings with him. Consequently his deal was less attractive, and our top price now dropped below $405,000. Meanwhile we considered alternatives. We soon bought a better lot, built a new house, and spent twenty-two happy years there. The haggler’s lot remained unsold for another decade.

Smith suggested that in an economy of many small buyers and sellers, each trying to increase his own profit, our collective benefit would be maximized as though guided by an “invisible hand.” The notion is of limited use, because most markets are not as Smith assumed. Take computer chips: 99.8 percent of them, worldwide, are made by just two US companies, and the smaller one is fighting to survive.

In the street of the perfume-sellers Miss Jenkins subsided on a settee like a fat bee drunk with essences, [...}

But eBay-EachNet made the mistake of introducing transaction fees for sellers right away. In an effort to generate the increased profits that Wall Street investors were demanding,

This proposal adds to the ancient rule of caveat emptor the further doctrine, “Let the seller also beware.” It puts the burden of telling the whole truth on the seller. It should give impetus to honest dealing in securities and thereby bring back public confidence.