A FINRA Kind of Day

Monday wasn't as much fun as the weekend. I spent the morning at the Sylvan learning center learning that I’m not supposed to help people launder money or trade on inside information. Once every three years – used to be every two – I have to watch bad actors on cheap sets run through ridiculous scenarios and chew scenery. The only high point was that I recognized one of the actors. I guess these videos are pretty old because Aiden Gillen, who played Mayor Tommy Carcetti on The Wire, was one of the leads in a group of the videos about ethics. His were the first group of videos so I spent the entire three hour session trying to figure out who he was. It didn’t hit me until about 4 o’clock this afternoon. Now I can’t remember what made it click, but that’s not important. I get frustrated at these continuing education things, but I guess they’re necessary – Martha Stewart. I just don’t like driving out to Mandarin. I don’t know anything about that side of town so I went the wrong way. I was almost to Switzerland – the unincorporated area of North Florida, not the glorified DMZ between France and Germany – before I called MJ to help me. It was a good thing I left as early as I did. After the fun filled morning, I got an email from work telling me that auditors wanted more details about some transactions in my bank statements. They’re f**king with me about a $2,500.00 deposit and a $63.90 deposit. These are the same people who ignored specific investor requests over the last ten years to pay more attention to Bernie Madoff and his transactions. I don’t know exactly how much money he stole, but I think it was a little bit more than $2563.90. These are the same people who paid absolutely no attention to the largest financial companies in the world completely ignoring their fiduciary responsibilities as they dove head first into the CMO debacle. But I have to come up with documentation about Lincoln’s bad bookkeeping and a check from my wife. It is so hard for me not to have a bad attitude about this. My compliance officer doesn’t like it when I make the joke that if we kill enough auditors then eventually they’ll stop coming around, everyone else I work with thinks it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.