A Brief Book Review of Junk by Ayad Akhtar
If you read the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times with any regularity, it’ll be hard not to think of a few things if you read this play, Junk (2017) by Ayad Akhtar. It’ll be hard not to think of Michael Milken when the financier Robert Merkin speaks, Ivan Boesky when the arbitrager Boris Pronsky enters a scene, or Rudolph Giuliani when we meet the prosecutor Giuseppe Addesso. These fictional characters and the drama described are clearly pulled from the real characters mentioned and headlines of 1980s Wall Street. For someone well versed in this period in the history of finance, this can get a bit distracting. Worse, at times it can make the comings and goings around the emergence of junk bonds feel derivative.
For a general audience not familiar with Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (1989) or Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street (1987) and other productions about this era, this will likely be a thrilling introduction to a period in American history. A period where newly relaxed standards around leverage changed the country massively. To Akhtar’s laudable credit, he has imagined a more multiracial, multicultural, and woman-welcoming version of the heights of Wall Street than the pathetic demographics of the industry would suggest exists today or did 30 years ago. And his Shakespearean ambition to describe something more eternal about power, masculinity, and succession is admirable.
If Junk piques your interest, it might be worth it afterward to read John Kenneth Galbraith’s brief but great book A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990). As I described in a review of it this year:
Galbraith contends that whenever someone is said to be a genius in financial markets, they probably are not, and whenever something is said to be new, it probably is not. “The rule,” he writes, “is that financial operations do not lend themselves to innovations. […] The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.”