When Jack Carlson wears his mother’s old green Lehman Brothers sweatshirt in New York City, people try to buy it off his back.
“People just come up to me and offer me money for it in restaurants,” said 33-year-old Carlson, founder of the Rowing Blazers clothing company, which sells a contemporary version of the so-called banker’s bag, a Wall Street accessory Year 1978. Branded articles of defunct investment banks that were the main architects of the financial crisis in 2008: officially hot, albeit arching, hinting.
Buying and selling products related to the crash has paradoxically become a thriving niche market. Also memorabilia linked to other disasters in recent financial history, such as the dot-com bubble and the Enron scandal.
In a Bloomberg article in which financial professionals described how they would personally invest or spend $ 1 million, Akshay Shah, founder of investment firm Kyma Capital, said, “When companies go bust, they leave memories of the power of corporations and theirs time. “eBay sellers, he noted, have picked up branded items and then put them up for sale in substantial multiples after a reasonable amount of time – like the $ 500 Lehman sticky notes” (Mr Shah commented carefully and said: “The key to success here would be the volume of the products and the patience.”)
However, cheaper items are available these days, a Lehman Brothers branded baby bib ($ 59.59 on eBay) and an emergency evacuation kit ($ 98.99). However, a 1987 Shearson Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. certificate will bring you back $ 295 – even if the stock it once represented is worth nothing. An Enron booklet “Conduct of Business Affairs” is available for $ 395 on the Wall Street Treasures “Stock Market Gifts and Collectibles” website.
“I’ve sold a lot of Enron memorabilia lately,” said Scott Davidson, 38, an accountant and financial planner who runs Wall Street Treasures and has sold finance-related memorabilia through various channels for the past nine years. “There is a lot of appetite. Everyone loves a good scandal. “
Among the current items that Mr. Davidson has in stock is a framed promotional item that has won the Most Innovative Company award for four consecutive years to Enron. It’s now on sale for $ 1,495. “The only innovative thing about them, of course, was the accounting scheme,” he said. “The innovation was the fraud.”
In a confusing boomerang of value, a once valuable stock certificate becomes utterly worthless and more valuable as a collector’s item than before in an afterlife. Why, one might ask, is anyone buying this stuff? Financial scandals and crises that have impoverished millions seem strange fodder for office decorations or workout sweatshirts.
“I think it has in part to do with collective identity,” Davidson said. “So many people owned a piece of Enron at the same time through their mutual funds. Everyone knew the story. “Personal identity is also part of it; He is often contacted by former employees of no longer existing companies looking for souvenirs of their time there.
The popularity of these cultural artifacts has led to a whole sub-genre of new offshoots and tributes, such as the Rowing Blazers banker bag. There are two versions that are adorned with “Duke & Duke Commodities Brokers” or “Pierce & Pierce Mergers and Acquisitions” – both fictional companies from films.
To produce it, Mr. Carlson worked with Warden Brooks, the company founded by Joan Killian Gallagher that made the original canvas bag in 1978 that made its way to the New York Finance telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s. “It has been a staple for interns, IB conferences, special events, elite clubs, associations, college and prep school gatherings, outside meetings, corporate programs and incentive groups,” the Warden Brooks website states.
The row blazer version ($ 135) is one of the company’s most popular products. “The banker’s bag is such a polarizing object,” said Carlson. “For some people it’s this really important status symbol, and for others it’s a kind of symbol of everything that has gone wrong.” Rowing Blazers also makes a yellow hat ($ 48) that reads “FINANCE” in black letters – the top-selling item on the site.
Sometimes people who wear FINANCE hats are just people who work in finance and think finances are cool, Carlson said. But perhaps more often it is an ironic gesture. “The people who buy the hat or the banker’s bag aren’t necessarily the people who idolize these extinct financial institutions,” he said. “There’s almost a sense of appropriation or a sense of empowerment that comes with it.” (Someone who works in finance once emailed Mr. Carlson accusing him of appropriating financial culture, he said.)
The popularity of these articles surprised him. “I really didn’t expect this to take off like this,” he said. “It’s so bizarre.” Occasionally, Mr. Carlson sells vintage items like a Merrill Lynch knitted sweater with bulls for $ 300 to $ 400, but they sell out very quickly.
This buying and selling of finance-related memorabilia is a cousin of the scripophily, stock certificate collecting: a niche hobby especially among finance professionals and history buffs. Paper stock and bond certificates that are withdrawn from circulation are often very decorative. Bob Kerstein, 68, founded scripophily.com in 1996, the premier website for buying and selling stock and bond certificates. He now has around 14,000 of them on the website, ranging from stock certificates for 19th century mining companies to Ask Jeeves stock issued in 2001, with Jeeves himself at the helm.
“The financial crisis is currently one of our biggest sellers,” said Kerstein. “We have mortgage notes on our website and people really like them because that really was the starting point of the Great Recession.” When he first started, he said collectors were most interested in the older certificates, but now “railroads are more deaf than a doorknob,” he said. “Modern certificates are more popular.”
Other popular items include Trump branded stock certificates and those for dotcom companies that no longer exist. Even the names of companies like MP3.com and Fashionmall.com can instantly conjure up stories of over-speculation in the early Web’s heyday, when it seemed like almost anyone with a website could find investors.
“Having one of these on the wall in your office is a reminder that you can make a lot of money on the stock market, but you can also lose a lot,” said Kerstein.
The idea that objects can learn lessons about the follies of money management is not new. William Goetzmann, professor at the Yale School of Management, is co-author of the book “The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture and the Crash of 1720”, which was partly inspired by memorabilia from the first major stock market crash.
This crash, popularly known as the South Seas Bubble, inspired a number of scrapbooks and satirical drawings that pointed to the absurdities of speculating. This crash even resulted in playing cards printed with satirical drawings. People may have played with cards that made fun of the feverish atmosphere of the trade and speculation that led to the crash.
“Saving the artifacts from stock market crises means more than just saying:” We want something to be remembered, “said Goetzmann.” It’s about having something that can be used ironically or satirically to force yourself to to recognize that human behavior can lead to these crises. “
This seems to be part of what is at work in the obsession with Lehman Brothers and Enron memorabilia – not only commemorating scandals or crises, but irony processing them. Sometimes that means buying and selling in a type of speculation that mimics exactly what you are mocking.
Or sometimes it’s easier. As Mr. Davidson said, “What else do you get from your financial advisor?”
