Cut-Throat Business (photo by What What via Flickr)

There are a lot of layers to the rotting mess of Wall Street and our economy; some are visible to the public, some are not.

There are the corporate front men who draw down some big bucks at the top of the financial industry; they get paid to be out in front and dodge bullets about the decisions made by the board of directors and management, and in some respects, to take the populist flack we’re dishing out now. They are paid to be the public face of the company.

There are the corporate management teams, which may or may not have worked its way to the upper echelons of their respective firms. Some of them may have truly slaved away over a hot desk for years to earn their rank, others may simply have been good at customer golf and sucking up to the boss, while being in the right place at the right time. You might see some of these chaps at the right golf courses or country clubs.

There are the boards of directors, of which many members are picked simply to look good on the board and be solid yes-men. (I’d say yes- women, but we all know women are pretty few and far between in the board rooms of the Fortune 500.) You might see these guys’ mugs in your annual statement if you own stock (but not if you own mutual funds).

And then there are the smart kids.

You probably won’t see them unless you or one of your friends raised them.

Calvin Trillin wrote a brilliant piece in The New York Times last week, in which a friend of his explained with enormous brevity why Wall Street collapsed last year.

The friend explained it was the smart kids who came to Wall Street who did it.

Trillin both puzzled and marveled at this explanation.

When I read it, I felt the immediate click of recognition. Ah, yes. Trillin’s friend saw what I saw in the bowels of the corporate world, but he managed to package it into a tidy handful of words.

You see, in the early 1990′s I worked for a Fortune 100 company as a corporate drone; I was one of those little handmaidens to the gods who wore Brooks Brothers suits and drove their big-assed Jaguars from Monday through Thursday and their restored convertible Corvette on Fridays before they headed to the yacht club to kick off their weekend. Occasionally I might be invited to have a cocktail at the country club to celebrate some business benchmark, but my duties were typically bound within the office I was assigned to, firmly ensconced between vice presidents of different functions, doing scut work related to financial reporting, corporate governance and mergers and acquisitions projects.

From the fine vantage point my office offered, I saw “banksters” coming and going daily, plying their services to this Fortune 100 holding company’s various corporate family members. Some of these names are now extinct, but I could expect to see Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Northern Trust and more beating a sedate tattoo along the carpeted hallway. The banksters made the corporation good money, sometimes more than the core businesses did during cyclical downturns. It was understood there was a symbiotic relationship between the banksters and the corporate holding structure for this reason.

And these banksters were sharp — sharp, like a knife. They smelled like it, if one can say smarts and money have an odor. It’s something like Italian wool combined with a faint trace of Cuban cigars, silk ties and fine leather shoes, laced together with a hint of single malt whiskey and a whiff of new car interior. Perfumers have tried forever to put this together into a bottle, but their attempts lack that subtle, acrid scent which trails a smart man of a certain intensity. I suspect you’d find the same men wafting the same odor in the halls outside congressional offices, if you could take the time to wait and watch.

These guys weren’t the smart kids, but they were almost as smart; they understood enough of what their little bevy of brilliant, young and cocky geeks were doing crunching away in small rooms under clocks displaying times around the world, enough to sell the crunching as must-have products to Fortune 100 companies.

The smart kids made these banksters lots and lots of money; at the time, Enron had not yet imploded and the smart kids were making Enron look like a money factory.

And the banksters were loving it, those heady days when everything they touched would acquire the same patina of wealth. They were so sure of themselves, so sure of their products and the team which made them so much money; how could their clients resist?

They couldn’t; the clients believed the numbers they saw, because they were numbers people and the language of numbers persuaded them in a way even the stench of smarts-plus-money couldn’t.

Now the Fortune 100 companies have their own smart kids on board, too; the firm for which I worked had some of the best and brightest, slogging away every day making global currency scream for mercy, holed up in a fishbowl-like room without windows and too-many computer monitors and hundred-line phones, ties hanging unknotted and slack around opened necks of poplin button-down shirts, shouts in different languages emanating from time to time as markets closed in Asia, then Europe…

The firm also encouraged staffers who weren’t working in finance to submit ideas which might make even more money once these ideas were in the hands of smart kids. And if you owned stock in the company, heck, who would turn down an opportunity to grow the value of one’s stock?

So I submitted an idea I thought up over lunch in my cube, and the smart kids answered with more questions. I went to meet them and talk over my concept; during the course of the conversation, we talked about Enron and what they were doing.

“They must be smarter than us, whatever it is they are doing; they are making money hand over fist, and we can’t figure out how they are doing it,” these smart kids told me. “We’ve looked at it and looked at it, and we can’t duplicate it.” There was no guile in these guys; they were gritty competitors in the world of money, but they gave up props willingly to smarter kids who could best them, these highly educated and savvy financial adversaries.

I couldn’t fathom how Enron could be smarter; it didn’t seem possible. And in less than 18 months, it became obvious that it wasn’t.

The only way those smart kids at Enron could do what they were doing was to cut corners, break the rules, outright cheat their way to the top of the heap. And the smart kids who lived by and within rules, who never considered the rules might be broken, couldn’t and didn’t catch them.

I always wondered where Enron’s smart kids went after the firm crashed, and where Worldcom’s smart kids went, too. They had to work somewhere.

Perhaps we know now where they ended up.

Trillin’s friend got it right, that it was the smart kids who did this. It just wasn’t all of them.

And it took some very sharp men who weren’t quite as smart to enable them and our addiction to their kind of promises.