“…I’m a freelance central banker,” he said….

Originally posted on Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013

Walter Kirn, novelist, essayist and critic, presents a memoir of having been gulled by impostor Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a/k/a “Clark Rockefeller” in the June 10 & 17, 2013 of the New Yorker.

While I waited for it, drinking cold coffee in my messy office above a Western-clothing store, I asked Clark what he did for work.  My professional hunch was that he did nothing at all, which is how I was thinking by that point, as a novelist who was currently stranded between books and was far too caught up in that other fiction, a life.

“At present, I’m a freelance central banker,” he said.

I asked him to explain.

“Think of a country’s money supply as a lake or a river behind a dam,” he said.  “Think of me as the keeper of that dam.  I decide how much water flows over its lip at what velocity, and for what duration.  The trick is to let through sufficient water to nourish and sustain a country’s ‘crops,’ but not so much that it floods the fields and drowns them.”  I later ran this metaphor past someone better equipped than I was to judge its merits, who deemed it “brilliant.”

“Which countries,” I asked Clark, “do you do this for?”

“At the moment?  Thailand.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“It’s fun.”

“Which countries before Thailand?”

“That’s confidential.”

In Kirn’s exquisitely turned phrase:

[Gerhartsreiter] had previously worked for the Greenwich, Connecticut, investment firm of S.N. Phelps; he went on to work for Kidder Peabody.  Bankers seemed to have a weakness for monogrammed hustlers full of tea and toast; someone would meet Clark at a yacht club and he’d end up running something for the person.  The fine young fugitive from California had struck out in show biz, which flaunts its phoniness, but somehow he just couldn’t miss out on Wall Street.

The classical gold standard is based on rules with intrinsic integrity.

The “pretence of knowledge,” in Hayek’s immortal phrase, intrinsic in the fiduciary management of a currency, really does present as a “weakness for monogrammed hustlers full of tea and toast.”

Bravo to Walter Kirn.