how can you propose ideas to them without knowing what their appetite is ?
wondered the head of risk management at a major Wall Street firm. As arbitrageurs,
the partners tended to see every encounter as a discrete exchange,
with tallyable pluses and minuses. Every relationship was a " trade"--renegotiable
or revocable if someone else had a better price. The partners'
only close ties were within Long-Term, mimicking the arrangement
within their beloved group at Salomon.
They were a bred type-intellectual, introverted, detached, controlled. It didn't work to try to play one off against the other; they
were too much on the same wavelength. Andrew Siciliano, who ran
the bond and currency departments at Swiss Bank Corporation, was
stunned by their uncanny closeness. One time, Siciliano called Vicror Haghani, the head of the London office, and followed up in Greenwich
with J.M. and Eric Rosenfeld a month or two later. The
American -based partners didn't miss a beat; Siciliano had the eerie
feeling that he was continuing the same conversation he'd had with
Haghani .
Not that there weren't tensions within the firm. A small group.---
J.M., Hilibrand, Rosenfeld, and l Haghani-dominated the rest.
As at Salomon, compensation was skewed toward the top, with the inner
circle garnering more than half the rewards. This group also had voting
control. Lesser partners such as Myron Scholes were forever angling
for more money, as well as more authority. But the inner circle
had been together for years; as i n a family, their exclusive and inbred
all iance had became second nature.
If the firm could have been distilled into a single person, it would
have been Hilibrand. While veteran traders tend to he cynical and insecure,
the result of years of wrong guesses and narrow escapes, Hilibrand
was cool and maddeningly self-confident. An incredibly hard
worker, he was the pure arbitrageur; he believed in the models, stuck
to his prices, was untroubled by doubt. Rosen feld hated to hedge by
selling a falling asset, as theory prescribed; Halibrand believed and
simply followed the form. Hilibrand's collleagues respected him immensely;
inevitably, they turned to him when they needed a quick
read. He was highly articulate, but his answers were like unrefined
crystals, difficult for novices to comprehend. " You could refract the
light with Larry's mind," said Deryck .Maughan of Salomon Brothers.
Like the other partners, but to a greater degree, Hilibrand saw every
issue in black and white. He was trustworthy and quick to take offense at perceived wrongdoing but blind to concerns outside his narrow
sphere. His Salomon colleagues used to joke that, according to
the libertarian Hilibrand, if the street in front of your home had a
pothole you ought to pave it yourself. But money probably meant less
to him than to any of them. He found his passion in the intellectual
challenge of trading. Aside from his family, he showed interest in little
else. If anyone brought Hilibrand out of himself a hit, it was J.M.
Hilibrand had a filial attachment to the chief, perhaps stemming from
his close relationship to his own father. Rosenfeld had a similar devotion
to Meriwether.
Outsiders couldn 't quite explain J.M.'s hold on the group. He was
an unlikely star, too bashful for the limelight. He spoke i n fragments
and seemed uncomfortable making eye contact. He refused to talk
about his personal life, even to close friends. After organizing LongTerm,
J.M. and his wife moved out of Manhattan, to a $ 2.7 million,
sixty-eight-acre estate in North Salem, in Westchester County-complete
with a 15,ooo-square-foot heated indoor riding ring for Mimi .
The estate was set back three quarters of a mile on a private drive
that the Meriwethers shared with their only neighbor, the entertainer
David Lerterman . As if to make the property even more private, the
Meriwethers did extensive remodeling, fortifying the house with
stone.J.M. liked to control his private life, as if to shelter it, roo, from
unwanted volatility.
Though he attended a church near home and made several visits to
Catholic shrines, J.M. didn't speak about his faith, either. His selfcontrol
was implacable. Nor did he open up among his traders. At
firm meetings he was mostly quiet. He welcomed frank debates
among the partners, but he usually chimed in only at the very end or
not at all.
The firm's headquarters were t he ground floor of a glassy fourstory
office complex, on a street that ran from the shop-lined center
o f affluent Greenwich past a parade of Victorian homes on Long Island
Sound. Several dozen of Long-Term's growing cadre of traders
and strategists worked on the trading floor, where parttners and non-partners sat elbow to elbow, cramped around a sleek, semicircular
desk loaded with computers and market screens. The office had an
elaborate kitchen that had been put in by a previous tenant, but the
partners lunched at their desks. Food meant little to them.
J.M. Merton, and Scholes ( the latter two because they didn't trade) had private offices, but J.M. was usually on the trading floor,
a mahogany-paneled room that looked out through a full -length picture
window to the water, resplendent and often speckled with sailboats.
A side from the natty Mullins, the partners dressed casuall y, in
Top-Siders and chinos. The room hummed with trader talk, but it
was a controlled hum, not like the chaos on the cavernous New York
trading floors. Only occasionally did the partners revert to their past
life for a few rounds of liar's poker.
Besides the Tuesday risk meetings, which were for partners only,
Long-Term had research seminars on Wednt:sday mornings that were
open to associates and usually a nother meeting on Thursday afternoons,
when partners would focus on a specific trade. Merton, usually
in Cambridge, would join in by telephone. The shared close
quarters fostered a firm togetherness, but the associates and even
some of the partners knew they could never be part of the inner circle.
One junior trader perpetually worried that his trades would be
found out by the press, which he feared could cost him his job. Associates in Greenwich, even senior traders, were kept so much in the
dark that some resorted to call ing their London counterparts to find
out what the firm was buying and selling. Associate were never in vited
back to the partners' homes-there seemed to be an unwritten
rule against partners and staff fraternizing. Leahy, a college hockey
player, exchanged the normal office banter with the employees, but
most of the partners treated the staff with cool formality. They were
polite but interested only in one a nother and their work . The analysts
and legal and accounting staffs were second-class citizens, shunted to
a room in the back, where the pool table was.
Like everyone else on Wall Street, Long-Term's employees made
good money. The top staffers, could make S 1 million to $2 million a
year. There was subtle pressure on the staff to invest their bonuses in
the fund, but most of them were eager to do so anyway-ironically,
it was considered a major perk ot working at Long-Term. And so, the
staff confidently reinvested most of their pay.
Just as predicted, Long-Term's on -the-run and off-the-run bonds,
snapped back quickly. Long-Term made a magical S 15 million-magical
l because it hadn't used any capital . As Scholes had promised,
Long-Term had scooped up a nickel and, with leverage, turned it into more. True, many other firms had done the same kind of trade. "But
we could finance better," an employee of Long-Term noted. "LTCM
was really a financing house."