At the turn of the millennium, Randall Lane, former head of Forbes' Washington bureau, knew what this decade would be about. He started Trader Monthly – a slick glossy magazine that was to become the GQ of Wall Street. It portrayed a glamorous world of yachts and private jets, fine wines and lavish mansions. Meanwhile, trading floors were functioning like giant casinos, and the banking community was gambling with the average Joe's savings.
Lane and his company got caught up in the madness. They had front row seats to the vast wealth of Wall Street – and they dreamed that some crumbs would fall their way.
In "The Zeroes," we get a ringside seat alongside Lane to some of the biggest parties of the decade, including a Wall Street "Charity" boxing night held at Manhattan's lavish Hammerstein Ballroom. This 5-part web series pits the fantasy of unlimited growth against the wheeling-and-dealing of Wall Street's glitzy surface.
A morality tale uniquely fitted for our times, "The Zeroes" cuts to the heart of what drove America to believe in dreams too good to be true, including for Randall Lane.
As Lane says: "When the figures were tallied at the end of 2009, there would be zero increase in household net worth for the decade. Zero net job creation. Zero median income growth. Zero stock market appreciation… But wealth and excess have a blinding effect, especially amid the kind of greedfest that comes along once every thousand years. "We wrecked the economy, we gave no moral leadership, we didn't make the planet better. What did we do?"