Hundred-Dollar Bills Make Me Nervous

photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis portrait of Benjamin Franklin

Veteran traders on Wall Street know, "They don't ring a bell at the top of the market." But, as Joe Bob Briggs describes below, there are other signals as well.  Kevin Massengill


NEW YORK—So I’m standing behind a guy at the drugstore who says, “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything smaller,” and he pulls out a roll of hundreds.

In any other city this would be a drug dealer. But I live a few blocks from Wall Street and I’m looking at his shoes. You can always tell by the shoes. Wall Street guys don’t shop at Payless. They go to some secret shoe store where teams of cobblers use precision hand tools to put those little indentations on the side of the wing-tip and then coat the leather with a shiny lacquer finish normally used on muscle cars from the ’80s. The laces are different too. The laces look like piano wire, like silver garrotes that could be used to strangle International Monetary Fund employees in Venezuela—and probably are.

So, yeah, it was a Wall Street guy, and I’ve been through enough economic cycles for this to make me very, very nervous.

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