Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 66)

wherever he went. It became self-fulfilling. The people knew that when he bought a stock and said it’s going to go up, it would then go up, so more people would come in. So the SEC came in and said that they wanted the money back. They thought they were dealing with a grownup. They got the address from the Internet address and showed up on the front door and there’s this 14-year-old kid. It was a 14year-old kid who was not just unapologetic, but outraged, that the government was after him because he was doing nothing different from what people on Wall Street did, he said. He said, why come after me? If this bothers you so much, go get those people on Wall Street who just pump stocks and make money off it. He was exactly right about this. But the SEC got its panties in a twist and decided they were going to make an example of him because they were terrified that this was going to become an epidemic on the Internet. They were terrified. So they got tough with him. He hired a lawyer and he basically won. He kept all but a few thousand of his dollars and they eventually went away, but the thing that attracted me – well, a couple things attracted me to him. It was a very funny story. And he was actually quite astute about the markets and about how Wall Street worked and he was a kind of parody of Wall Street. This all happened before the Internet bust so he was doing this in the middle of the Internet boom. And he was a little microcosm of what was going on on Wall Street. But for a story to really work, it usually has to have more than one thing going on. The financial stuff was interesting but even more interesting was the family structure: his family and his parents’ inability to understand what he was doing. That actually ended up being a fairly typical case where the kid would go in his room, close the door, get online, and the parents had no ability to understand what was going on. They just concluded that their child was a genius and he should just be allowed to do this. But to be able to write about a family, a typical lower LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION middle class American family with this one little atypical component was very attractive. Sartisky: I would submit to you that this is a novelistic sensibility that you’re employing here. Lewis: Absolutely. I’m just using the real world for material. Sartisky: Exactly. And that you see these parallels. You’re writing this book a good while after you had written Liar’s Poker for example and yet the parallels of the manipulations of the markets that are carefully elucidated in Liar’s Poker and then later in Money Culture, reappear here in the form of Jonathan. You clearly connect those thoughts, you see the structure and you see it in terms of character also. In other words, you’re not a financial writer, you see it in terms of the people and as you just said, the conflicts within their families as well. Much as you saw the impact on your own father’s profession and life. Lewis: Yes, I’m actually not that interested, never was that interested, in money. My own money just sits in index funds. Wall Street, just the raw financial side of things, only interests me a little bit. The most it would interest me is From left, Allison, Tommy, Michael and Tom Lewis, 1973. 66 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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