Trader in the woodpile
INVENTIVE as ever, Wall Street has come up with its own 0J. In California, the black football hero O.J. Simpson somehow finds himself charged with murder — just one of those laughable misunderstandings, as Bertie Wooster would say. Wall Street's fallen or misunderstood hero is Orlando Joseph Jett, the black boy wonder from Harvard who, trading in bonds, seemed to be making so many millions for Kidder Peabody and, by way of bonuses, some for himself. He also seemed to have bought almost every bond the Treasury had ever issued, but if he made money on them all, why worry? The alternative explanation, that there was something wrong with the figures, took a long time to dawn. Kidder's lawyer now says that this was all its OJ's fault. No one else knew, the lawyer says, or noticed, but his trades were losing money right from the beginning. The quickness of his hand deceived the eye, and so did the intricacies of today's financial engineering. The truth may be simpler than that. People are apt to believe what they want, and when it comes to believing in OJs, that goes double.
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