A FROM THE G-MAN EXCLUSIVE
Nomi Prins is a journalist and Senior Fellow at Demos. She is also an accomplished author whose books include: It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley, September, 2009) and Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (The New Press, October 2004), a devastating exposé into corporate corruption, political collusion and Wall Street deception.
Other People's Money was chosen as a Best Book of 2004 by The Economist, Barron's and The Library Journal. Her book Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (whether you voted for them or not) (Polipoint Press, Sept. 2006) catalogs her travels around the USA; talking to people about their economic lives.
Before becoming a journalist and author, Prins worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and running the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London.
She has appeared on numerous TV networks; internationally on BBC World, BBC and Russian TV, and nationally on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC, CSPAN, Democracy Now, Fox and PBS. Prins has been featured on hundreds of radio shows globally including for CNNRadio, Marketplace, Air America, NPR, regional Pacifica stations, New Zealand, BBC, and Canadian Programming.
Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, Newsday, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Slate.com, The Guardian UK, The Nation, The American Prospect, Alternet, LaVanguardia, and other publications.
The multi-talented writer's latest book, "Black Tuesday", as described by Amazon.com, "is a mesmerizing historical novel that captures the swirl of New York City's greed, power, romance and desperation on the cusp of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and Great Depression, eerily mirroring the present. In this vivid tableau of New York with its colorful, diverse cast of characters, Black Tuesday evokes the passion and atmospheric tension of one of our most fascinating historical epochs."
From The G-Man contacted Prins to discuss her latest literary contribution and the frightening cultural and economic similarities it presents between 1929 and today.
G-Man: Why were you so compelled to write this novel?
Prins: I’ve always wanted to write both fiction and non-fiction. After I completed It Takes a Pillage, the inevitability of what was happening in the world economically – widespread collapse due to the unrestrained financial community’s practices - was driving me crazy. I needed an escape. I’d worked over a decade in investment banking, and then I’d been writing about if for nearly a decade. My brain was fried from all the facts and numbers. I wanted to write a novel, to dig into the deeper, more emotional elements of writing.
I wound up attending a talk by author Anne Rice, and her son, Christopher, also a writer, in downtown LA. Something she said really resonated – write the book that you’d want to read. It didn’t quite help me formulate the idea for Black Tuesday, but the advice stuck and took hold. Around the same time, on a whim, I walked into my local library during Great Gatsby month. I got a copy of the classic, re-read it, and decided that I didn’t like any of the women in it – that the 1920s deserved a woman that didn’t rely on her men, but of course, it had to also have historical authenticity. A bit of an idea began to form.
Then I met a woman who’d live through those times and she told me about her prudent father during the Depression. Leila’s little sister, Rachel, is based on her. Leila herself came to me one night, when I was thinking about how we can often make very different choices depending on whether we listen to our hearts or our minds. The two men in her life represent those sides of her. A million revisions later, Black Tuesday was completed.
Prins: Without a doubt, it was making myself remain focused on 1929 and within the heads of my characters. During the time that I was developing the plot, I was also researching the history of the time, the newspaper articles, the bank documents that I could find, and books written during the period. I had to really steer myself away from the journalistic part of me, and view this information, as my characters would living through it, not as I would looking back upon it.
Fortunately, I also spoke with a number of senior citizens that recalled their experiences during the Great Depression. One in particular became the basis for the home life arc of Leila Kahn, the protagonist. I spent a lot of time walking the streets of the Lower East Side putting myself inside Leila’s head as if she was doing so in 1929, and throughout the places her destiny and choices take her in Black Tuesday. Sometimes she would really exasperate me with her indecision. I’d want to give her advice, but that wasn’t my role as the author, she had to come upon her path on her own.
G-Man: Did you have any specific writer in mind, like Patricia Cornwell or John Grisham, when you started the novel?
Prins: Howard Fast to a large extent. When I was a kid I had read the Fast series, The Immigrants – many times over. I think it really resonated; the way he could express the upper class coldness and sad distance that the wealthier characters had, their detachment from the rest of the population, in contrast with the imperfect passion of the working class characters. He has a scene of the 1929 crash in the first book of the series, which of course, meant nothing to me as a kid. But I re-read the series while working on Black Tuesday, and I finally had context for it in my mind. It’s interesting how things you don’t understand, stick with you for decades, and then present themselves entirely differently.
Separately, I love John Grisham's books, so maybe some of the courtroom scene in Black Tuesday, and the district attorney character come from my reading of his work. Also, I admire the extent to which Grisham has pushed the thriller genre into the exploration of fraud and corruption in the legal system, daring to insert the stark, sobering realities of its harsh injustice throughout his novels.
G-Man: Are there any similarities between you and the lead character Leila Khan?
Celebrated author Nomi Prins
Prins: There’s the fact we both discovered Wall Street at the age of 19. I had started working at Chase Manhattan Bank just before graduating early from college, as a programmer analyst. She, in 1929, was offered work at a Wall Street diner. I dated people that were ‘banker’ types, but also the ‘artist’ ‘working-class’ types. Leila goes through that as well.
But, besides that, she is very much her own person and the events she experiences are specific to her life and times. Her economic struggles, and her violence-riddled past were much harder than mine, and she has to overcome much more because of that, and also because of being a woman in those times, uncovering the things she does. She questions herself more than I did. I used to think I knew everything – I was wrong of course, but that didn’t matter at the time, and at that age.
G-Man: During your research, what was the most dangerous and disturbing aspect you discovered about the 1929 crash -- and how likely is it that America is on the verge of experiencing something similar or even worse?
Prins: I believe we are at the brink of the Second Great Depression for many of the same reasons we fell into the first one. Into the Crash of 1929, there were six big banks, whose firms and leaders controlled most of the market activity and lending. They inflated the values of stocks and ‘trusts’ that were financial mechanisms by which many investors could ‘pool’ together their money, and borrowed money, to purchase or sell various stocks in bulk. These were inflated on the back of false representation by the banks, a co-opted media and enabling political leaders. Even when the crash happened, the biggest bankers thought they could contain it, and could inflate stocks until the market settled. Ultimately, that didn’t work of course. The financial markets and lending systems collapsed. Then, like now, people faced foreclosures, small businesses and farmers couldn’t get loans, and yet bankers paid themselves bonuses for Christmas 1929 anyway. The country dove into a long Great Depression.
In 1933, when FDR was elected by a large margin over Herbert Hoover who didn't get the pain of the country, his administration enacted the Glass-Steagall Act that forced banks to divide into two separate types of firms in order to avoid the situation re-occurring; commercial banks that dealt with people’s loans and deposits, and investment banks that could create new securities and trade, but would not be backed by the government if they failed.
Today, we have the worst aspects of the lead-up to the Great Depression. We have six banks that control the market. We had them inflate the housing market, in particular the subprime markets, so they could stuff those loans into more complicated assets, and when it became apparent these assets didn’t have the value that banks said they did, the market collapsed, the economy sank. Yet, today, there is no will in Washington to break up these banks into risky and less risky parts. The opposite. Instead, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Dept sought epic ways to subsidize this flawed and dangerous banking system, as the rest of the economy continues to deteriorate. We didn’t learn what we should have from the history of 1929.
G-Man: What do you suspect will be the reaction to your book, especially within the banking and Wall Street community?
Prins: I think, because it is fiction, it won’t ruffle as many feathers as some of my other books did. It’s not likely any Wall Street CEO will read a book about a young immigrant woman from the Lower East Side that takes on one of history’s most powerful bankers. This is one of the ironies of Black Tuesday. In 1929, there was little chance a major bank partner would be caught strolling in New York’s Lower East Side amongst the working class immigrants, and today, barring some of the younger ones looking for real estate opportunities, or being generally cooler than their counterparts, and thus probably not likely to stay in banking long, it’s the same thing. You can’t imagine Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein ambling through Orchard Street today, or the narrow streets of Chinatown. Some things don’t change.
That said, without giving away the plot, if one considers the specific crime within in the book, he or she would see a very clear connection between the past and present frauds that bankers commit, and their entitlement feeling to reaping profits on the backs of a struggling population.
G-Man: If Hollywood comes calling with an offer to turn your novel into a major film, who should direct it, and what actors would you like to see casts in the roles of Leila Khan and Roderick and Jack Morgan? Why?
Prins: That’s a great question! How did you know I spend my free time casting the film? Well, my first choice for director would have to be Martin Scorsese (though if Warren Beatty gave me a call, I wouldn’t say ‘no’ – Reds is one of my all time favorite movies). Scorcese’s masterpiece Gangs of New York was such an immaculate production, depicting not just the detail, but also the emotions of that time. Equally, the award-winning HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, produced by Mark Wahlberg, perfectly juxtaposes the feel and minutia of Atlantic City, and the corruption. I did send a copy of the book to Wahlberg’s production company office – so here’s hoping. Mark? Martin?
In terms of casting, I’d want Mila Kunis as Leila, Ewan McGregor as Roderick, and Ed Harris as Jack Morgan. Since you’ve already gone there, I’d cast Colin Farrell as Nelson. Kunis is a great actress who would really rise in a dramatic lead role. I loved her in the Black Swan, and I believe she could downplay, yet harness Leila’s sexuality, while exploring her personal discovery and growing awareness of the corruption around her. Physically, she has the appearance that Roderick covets, too. Harris has those steely eyes and could pull off the sociopathic nature of Morgan, while expressing the power he exudes without overplaying it, which is very much the character of the real Jack Morgan. And I just love Ewan McGregor, he has that fair, sexy aspect to him, but also the ability to play the complexity of a man who hates himself but wouldn’t change what he does anyway – that internal conflict.
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