The Zeroes

As eight sets of boxers slugged through the night, traders and bankers streamed toward Hammerstein, unfurling rolls of hundreds in hopes of charming the check-in girls and buying their way into the capacity event. Via text messages and cell phone calls, The Word had gone out: Wall Street was celebrating tonight. "The past month had seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average surge past 14,000 points for the first time. These guys were making fortunes by creating securities more complicated than the Rosetta stone and also far more valuable. For these guys-my guys, for better or worse-all was right and just with the world. "No one had yet developed a name for this era, this decade with the once-a-millennium calendar quirk of two zeroes perched in the middle. As I gazed across the room in front of me, 'the Zeroes' seemed fairly spot-on. Wall Street's breathless pursuit of zeroes, that easy-money mentality, had permeated every aspect of our culture. In my role as Wall Street's scorekeeper, I too had fallen prey to the mind warp. "But I had no inkling that, when the figures were tallied at the end of 2009, there would be zero increase in household net worth for the decade. Zero net job creation. Zero median income growth. Zero stock market appreciation. Or that the global economy, imperiled by a group of collective zeroes, faced an imminent meltdown that would wipe out millions of people financially-myself included. Given my unique perch, perhaps I should have. But wealth and excess ha