London theatregoers got a taste of the (frequently foul) language of the trading floor last month when a new play opened at the City?s Bridewell Theatre.
Set in New York, Burleigh Grimes chronicles the rise and fall of its eponymous hero.
Grimes and his employees are stereotypical bankers. At work, they live by Grimes?s Gordon Gekko-esque maxims (?Rumours are the new truth? and so on). Off duty, they drink, gamble, and letch.
Grimes gets rich through pump-and-dump schemes, using a tame TV journalist to talk up shares he has bought. Fuelled by greed, Grimes starts trying to ruin businesses and even whole industries for his own gain. So mad cow disease turns out to have been a story cooked up by Grimes to manipulate cattle futures, while the avian flu scare was placed by Grimes?s PR team when he was shorting poultry stock.
The story turns on Grimes?s most ambitious scheme, to make a killing in weather derivatives by creating an El Niño scare. To do this, he instructs a minion to fly a private aircraft over New York and drop anchovies on unsuspecting passers-by. But Grimes has made enemies, all of whom have an interest in bringing him down.
Far fetched? Well, yes, but great fun too. And the playwright, Roger Kirby, knows a thing or two about corporate misdeeds. When he?s not writing plays, he is a New York lawyer who, among other things, has represented Hollinger investors in their battle with Conrad Black.
Kirby consulted real-life bankers to learn their lingo and in-jokes. One wonders whether the SEC knows who supplied Grimes?s definition of ebitda as: ?earnings before investigation, termination, degradation, and the rest?.