‘Fabulous’ Fab Tourre Ends Not With a Bang But a Whimper

Gentle reader no doubt recognizes in the headline the last line of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and wonders 'Oh what now?'

Goldman's Fab Tourre may be an idiot ( We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men, Leaning together, Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!) but I'm starting to think he's a better writer than Eliot was.

Compare "The love song of 'Fabulous' Fab Tourre" with Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
From CNBC:

The love song of 'Fabulous' Fab Tourre

A song Fabrice Tourre wrote just prior to the financial crisis was featured in the trial of the former Goldman Sachs executive Thursday...

In the trading room

A few of us

Were looking for glory

Although we were sad

To have an empty P&L

We could not help but keep hoping

And when a few clients

Took a credit-linked note

In exchange of a good fresh P&L....

And here's Eliot:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent...

'Prufrock' drones on like that for twenty freakin' stanzas.

Eliot tries to gussy it up by using an epigraph from canto 27 of the Inferno but even dragging Dante into the mopefest doesn't help:

S’Annotate Annotateio credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

In fact it makes more sense if Dante is run through Google Translate and stuck on the front half of Tourre's piece or used as a response in court:

If I believed that my reply was
A person who never returned to the world,
This flame without more staria shock.
Because of this fund but never
Did any one return, s'i'odo the truth,
Without the fear of infamy I answer you.

HT on the title of the CNBC piece: FT Alphaville, all other responsibility is mine alone.