ABSTRACT
Joseph Jett's arrival on Wall Street in the early 1990s was surely a triumph of opportunity over expectations. Blind faith in the glory of free markets, though, tended to sidestep the new and somewhat alarming realities of those markets. And finally, faith in free markets and in the all-knowing abilities of top corporate managers gave management the ability to operate almost without any strings. Jett was running, in effect, a million-dollar lemonade stand, because Kidder's computers used different methods to value the same-day transactions and the future transactions. The job of BT's salesmen, thus, became a quest to find the sucker in the market—a customer who would be content, nay, eager, to gobble up huge quantities of BT's incomprehensible financial instruments. Citron was directly "supervised"—the quotes are well-advised—by a county board with no financial background and even less financial sophistication.
