Five million Buckeye

My recent reading has included a novel kindly given me by a friend for Christmas, TOP PRODUCER written by Norb Vonnegut and brought out in 2009 by St. Martin's Press.

SPOILER ALERT: On the off chance you haven't read this novel yet and plan to do so: please don't read further.

The book begins by taking the metaphor of Wall Street as a "shark tank" quite literally. The boss of a hedge fund --or, strictly speaking, of a fund of hedge funds -- is murdered by being fed to the sharks at an aquarium. It turns out that the dead man, Charlie Kelemen, was engaged in various financial shenanigans that unsurprisingly made him enemies, and part of this was the blackmail of other people involved in financial shenanigans.

The protagonist of the story is a friend of Charlie's named Grover O'Rourke, who works at the prop desk of a second-tier investment bank, and is a "top producer" there. Whether he was named after a president or a muppet is unclear.

Anyway, O'Rourke is a widower, and back in the good old days when his wife was alive, the O'Rourkes and the Kelemens were a regular quartet. The two couples were four best friends.

O'Rourke turns out to be innocent of the murder, and he helps the police find the real culprit.


I have to say I admired the smooth way in which the author worked in Wall Street jargon and explained it as he went, without slowing down the plot. One trader says to another, "Five million Buckeye five and seven-eighths of '47 to go at six."


The particulars of the deal he is offering aren't important for the plot, except that you as reader ought to get the sense that you really are over-hearing events amongst traders [in this case bond traders] at an investment bank.


So Grover as memoirist explains to you that muni bonds traditionally have a face value of $1,000, which means that if they pay interest of 5 and 7/8ths they're paying $58.75 each. A 40 year bond issued in 2007 will be known as a '47. If you buy them at less than their face value you can get an effective interest rate higher than that 5 and 7/8ths. In the instant case, you can get them "to go at six."


So you could plausibly hear, "Five million Buckeye five and seven-eighths of '47 to go at six" but if you're a college football fan you'll probably be a little disappointed to learn that the lingo refers to municipal bonds with an Ohio issuer -- you aren't in fact financing the famous team.