Ed. note: Please welcome Jonathan Wolf to our pages here at Above the Law. He’ll be writing about issues related to the intersection of law and finance.
Elon Musk posts a tweet about taking Tesla private, and the SEC opens an investigation. Paul Manafort is found guilty on eight counts for financial crimes — five tax fraud charges, one charge of failure to report foreign accounts, and two counts of bank fraud — but he narrowly dodges conviction on 10 other equally opaque charges. You see yet another article about how Millennials prefer Bitcoin to stocks and we’re consequently all going to have to be working until we’re 87.
In today’s news cycle, these things barely register as a blip before we’re on to something else. But you have to ask yourself, especially as a participant in the legal industry, do you actually have any idea why the SEC might be interested in Elon Musk’s tweets, or what regulation he may have violated? Do you know why only one conviction for failing to report foreign accounts populates octofelon Paul Manafort’s rap sheet, but he got convicted on five times as many tax fraud charges? Do you want to save more and invest wisely, but lack direction beyond a vague recollection that you should skip avocado toast and maybe buy some tulip bulbs from our good friends the Dutch?
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These are the types of questions we are going to be taking on in this column, viewed through the lens of the legal profession. I’ll tell you what I know, and research what I don’t. I’ll do the heavy lifting so that you don’t have to. Because this shit matters.
You don’t have to be particularly savvy to realize that there are winners and there are losers in the U.S. economy, and that there tend to be patterns about who ends up a winner and who ends up a loser. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Policy interventions matter, and to know what to do to achieve a better, fairer, and more equal financial landscape for all Americans, we have to start with taking a hard look at our existing financial laws, potential areas for legal reform in the financial system, the headline-grabbing money matters that affect us both directly and indirectly, and yes, even our own personal savings and investment strategies. If you’re paying attention to the financial system, you won’t be left behind. Remember that scene from The Big Short where financier misfit Vinny is on the phone with the douchey-in-this-role-but-still-dreamy Ryan Gosling, and Vinny says, “Alright, listen, I got one last question for you: how are you f**king us?” Above all, this delve into the financial system will seek to answer that question for you.
As you strap yourselves in for this wild ride through tech celebrity CEO tweets and the myriad financial crimes of the Trump administration, you might be wondering who I am to guide you through this stuff. I’d encourage you to focus more on the content than the messenger, but I can tell you I’m a lawyer just like many of you, went through law school just like many of you, and work as a humble civil litigator at a firm of 26 attorneys in Minnesota. For you Travel Channel junkies, yes, I’m the same Jon Wolf who was the recent law school grad in the 2011 St. Paul episode of Man vs. Food Nation. My skill set has expanded since then, if that’s not enough of a qualification for you. I’ve been in touch with the SEC as part of my day job, but it’s not a regular occurrence (in my experience their attorneys are friendly and professional but take a long time to get back to you). The reason I’m writing this column has a lot more to do with the fact that I obsessively check my mutual funds five times a day rather than my day-to-day submissions to the esteemed courts of the great state of Minnesota. I like this stuff. Don’t write off all of us Midwesterners as hayseeds. In the column, I won’t stand on formality and I’ll do my best to avoid passing judgment on anyone for not knowing things that have probably never been adequately explained to them. And I’ll try to make it fun. Believe it or not, it’s possible to talk about financial matters in a way that people can actually understand and that isn’t boring as shit.
So welcome aboard! You have my thanks for giving this column a chance. Tune in again next week, and we’ll see just how far down the financial rabbit hole we can make it together.
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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].