HANK: THE AIG FAT CAT

HANK THE AIG FAT CAT

(Gus, the Theater Cat, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, TS Elliot)
WilliamBanzai7s Book of Wall Street Fat Cats

Hank is the Cat at AIG's Back Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Maurice. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Hank.
His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,
And he suffers from a crotchety old palsy that makes his Fat paw shake.
Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Fat Cats -
But no longer a terror to AIG mice and to Goldman Sachs rats.
For he isn't the mountebank Fat Cat that he was in his prime;
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in its time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club
(Which takes place at the back of a West Palm Beach pub)
He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest Palm Beach days.
For he once was a Wall Street Star of the highest degree -
He has acted with Henry Kissinger, he's acted with Chinese Premier Zhu Ron---gi.
And he likes to relate his success on Wall Street,
Where the analyst Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.
But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,
Was FirefroFWMD, the Fiend of the AIG Fell.

`I have played', so he says, `every possible part,
And I used to know seventy A.R.T. speeches by heart.
I'd extemporize quantitative-guff, I knew how to gag on Banker riff raff,
And I know how to let the quarterly cat out of the bag.
I knew how to cover my tracks and my tail;
With an hour of CNBC rehearsal, I never could fail.
I'd a voice that would soften the hardest of institutional hearts,
Whether I took the lead, or in character parts.
I have stood by that rattle snake Zharb;
When the Curfew was rung, then I swung on the bell.
In the proxy season I never fell flat
Because I once understudied Vander Starr the Fat Cat.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was FirefroFWMD, the Fiend of the AIG Fell.'

Then, if someone will give him a toothful of cheap Shanghai gin,
He will tell how he once played the part of the global insurance Erroll Flynn .
At a Shakespearean road show performance he once walked on pat,
When some Fat Cat investor suggested the need for a CEO Fat Cat.
He once played a victimized CEO Tiger - could do it again -
Which a zealous hunter named Spitzer pursued down a drain.
And he thinks that he still can, much better than most,
Produce blood-curdling CEO noises to scare the Casper the Bailout Ghost.
And he once crossed the market stage on the Reuter's high wire,
To rescue that fool Cassano before the whole house was on fire.
And he says: `Now, these yupster kittens, they do not get trained
As we did in the days when real Republicans reigned.
They never get drilled in a regular troupe,
And they think they are smart, just to jump through their derivative hoops.'
And he'll say, as he scratches himself with his manicured claws,
`Well, Wall Street Theatre's certainly not what it was.
These systemic time bombs are all very well,
But there's nothing to equal, from what I hear tell,
That moment of mystery
When I made history
As FirefroFWMD, the Fiend of the AIG Fell.'