Economy: Confessions of a Subprime Rock Star

For anyone who's wondering just who these people are who were responsible for the subprime meltdown, check out this brief piece from June's GQ magazine. Magazine/sausage-making analogies aside, I think there's enough truth here to be instructive:

I was a Subprime Rock Star
-> The story of Glen Pizzolorusso, who had everything and lost it all. As told to Alex Blumberg

I was working at WMC Mortgage buying subprime loans from mortgage brokers. We'd package loans into big pools and sell them to Wall Street: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch. We were doing about $3 billion a month, and you know, we were making about 5 percent of that, so you do the math. I personally was making between 75 and a hundred grand a month.

I was 25, 26 years old. I had five cars: a couple of Mercedeses and Porsche. I had a family house in suburban Connecticut, a penthouse on East 70th Street, and a house I'd built on the water in Fairfield, Connecticut. We're going out, spending five grand at dinner, five grand at the club afterward, you know, a couple of times a week. I remember this one night, we went out to Tao, four of us. Tao is one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city. It was in Sex and the City. So we go to Tao and we're sitting next to Tara Reid and a couple of her friends. On one side of us are a bunch of players from the Yankees, on the other side players from the Red Sox. Everyone's friends. All talking to each other.

Then we go out to Marquee, a club, another of my stomping grounds. Rolled up -- there's a line of 500 people outside -- walked right up to the door, said to the doorman, Give me my table. Get inside, order three or four bottles of Cristal, a thousand bucks a bottle. Christina Aguilera is doing some I'm-Christina-Aguilera-and-I'm-gonna-get-up-and-sing kind of thing. Cuba Gooding Jr. is there with that kid from Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive. I had a great time. You know? I was a rock star. At the same time, I also realize how stupid it was. Why would anyone spend $1,000 for a bottle of champagne to impress people in a club?

I think I noticed things were changing when I got my first paycheck for $25,000 for the month. I know it sounds obscene, but I'm sitting there thinking, I just made more than most people make in six months, and it doesn't even cover my expenses.

You could just feel it winding down. And it was scary. So I sold the cars. Got rid of the penthouse, sold the house in Fairfield, which totally sucked. I bought it for like $1.375 million. I put down like 10 percent, and I dumped probably another $250,000 into it. And then when I sold it, I had to come to the closing with an additional $35,000 just to sell the stupid thing. Just to get rid of those payments. It was unbelievable.

The rest of the piece consists of boo-hoo, I really learned my lesson.

My heart bleeds for you, rock star.

Meanwhile, drought in Ethiopia. 125,000 kids already suffering from malnutrition. Gee, if only there were more money in the world. But alas, there's just not enough to go around.