A Curmudgeon Before His Time

I was just recalling when I first interviewed with the company in whose employ I remain, some 16 years later. The interviewers were the President and the VP in charge of the fledgling advisory service of which I would become a part, and eventually manage before being promoted to being the simple figurehead I am today.

The VP had a banking background. I was coming from a large S&L that had probably the most complex investment portfolio off Wall Street. (We had an arbitrage group on Wall Street, in fact, made up of a bunch of Ivy League engineering PhDs, and the mortgage prepayment model we built in-house was later bought by Salomon Brothers.)

So, my boss-to-be came from the corporate and muni bond world, whereas I was a mortgage guy. So he thought he'd try to trip me up. He asked a very simple question in Street lingo, and what it meant was can you buy bonds just based on the credit rating alone. Specifically, the question was, "Can you buy ratings?"

My answer: "No. I don't trust ratings."

Prescient.