For Love And Money A Novel Of Stocks And Robbers

Annie Custer worked for a force so powerful that nothing on earth could control it. Sometimes it acted like a perfect summer of endless sunny days with showers that came and went only before dawn. And sometimes it brought season after season of hurricanes with tornadoes and tidal waves that wreaked destruction everywhere. When times were good, the whole world wanted to get into the stock market and ride its highs to the top. When it turned bad, everyone wanted to run away and hide from its devastation. The funny thing about the stock market, though, was that anyone could take a vacation and miss the highs; but no one could escape the tsunami waves, the avalanches, the free-fall crashes. They affected everyone. Everywhere. God or the devil or nature itself, the stock market was the true dictator that ruled the earth. No one could conquer it forever, not its former chairman, who took too much pay, or anyone else. For better or worse, when it started to move in any direction it changed lives. On Monday, September 18, it was Annie Custer's turn to get caught in the deadly currents. That day there was mixed feeling on Wall Street. The good news was that after the deluge of 9/11 and several years of market free fall, recovery of the Dow and NASDAQ finally seemed firmly on track. The bad news was that parts of the economy hadn't followed suit. Turned out there couldn't be such a thing as a jobless recovery, or a recovery of jobs in only one sector. From sea to shining sea, millions of people in many fields were still out of work and suffering. In the brokerage business, customers were still licking their wounds and regarding their brokers with suspicion for bad investment advice from years past as well as the financial irregularities that had surfaced in the fall of giant companies and the toppling of dot-coms. Billions of dollars in paper gains had disappeared forever, and not without repercussions. Above all, the United States is a free and litigious country. Clients were suing their brokers left and right, placing the blame for all their woes squarely on them. Annie Custer's old-line firm, Hall Stale, was taking a big hit. The firm had so many complaints to defend that there was a logjam of arbitrations looming years into the future. It was costing a lot of money to settle the legitimate cases, and costing even more to fight the clearly ridiculous ones. For Hall Stale-and the brokerage business in general-it was a lose-lose situation. In addition to the lawsuits, something else was making business difficult for brokers. New standards for consumer protection had cut commissions to pennies. Former million-dollar-a-year brokers were struggling to make six figures, and six-figure brokers were out of the game altogether. Offices were emptying, and people were without work of any kind. The climate was as uncomfortable for brokers as it had been decades ago in the early 1970s when all the small investment houses went out of business and thousands of people lost their jobs. That Monday morning, Annie was worrying about the usual subjects: money, her husband, her daughters. Money, her husband, her daughters. Money . . . husband . . . daughters. Every day it was the same thing. She had a greatly reduced income and the same old bills-and she was one of the lucky ones. Her husband had not died in the World Trade Center attack, her clients were still solvent, and she hadn't been sued. All in all, she was an unusual person-and she'd worked hard. She'd never been just a stock jockey who pushed the stocks of whatever companies, bonds, or funds Hall Stale happened to be promoting at the moment. She was more than the money managers who specialized in different areas but never did the actual transactions. She logged in most of the trades for her clients herself-hundreds of thousands of them a year-and she didn't rely solely on her assistant to do the scut work, either. She wasn't above doing paperwork. ShGlass, Leslie is the author of 'For Love And Money A Novel Of Stocks And Robbers', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345448019 and ISBN 0345448014.