#40. Friday in Manhattan (Friday, May 29, 2026)

What was your best day…of not being a tourist in a touristy place?

Pre-Friday

It has been a busy week of meetings. I had aggressively coordinated our annual market consultations (#74), mostly with hedge funds that invested in our debt and a few large banks we were trying to bring in as dealers: five meetings Wednesday, eight Thursday.

I want the team to get full value out of the trip, and selfishly, I want to learn as much as possible from these portfolio managers. Two of my research papers in the past year have been on hedge funds at government bond auctions (#121) and debt distribution frameworks (DDF, #74), so I expect a productive few days.

The consultations start unofficially Tuesday afternoon when I visit two hedge funds. The rest of the team arrives Wednesday morning: my director, Chris Pelletier from the government, Chris’s boss, and Jon Nassar, one of our senior traders. Their Newark Uber takes over an hour, so I start the first Midtown meeting solo. From there it’s essentially nonstop meetings through Thursday, mostly across Midtown with the occasional trip Downtown.

Despite being the most junior person there, I ask the most questions—trying to steer each conversation toward where that institution can provide the most unique value. By the end, I have a much clearer picture of how the big-money private-sector players see the market and which policy levers might best support both their activity and the market as a whole.

I get my evenings partly off. Tuesday, burritos with my university friend Tommy Tong, now a real estate agent. Wednesday, The Great Gatsby musical a few blocks from my place. Thursday, dinner and drinks with Jon (where I cover his bill to make up for a bad hotel recommendation¹) before racing to Death of a Salesman, starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, at the Winter Garden Theatre.

Only partly, though. After each break, I spend about three hours on my bed with my laptop consolidating notes and mapping out the next day’s questions.

Jon, my director, Chris, and Chris’s boss all fly out Thursday night—after what they all deem to be a highly successful two days in New York.

Friday

I take the A/C/E train downtown, this time to Liberty Street. I’ve got three meetings set up with some old acquaintances / occasional colleagues at the Federal Reserve. They’ve got a full breakfast spread set up, which I feel guilty about barely touching because I’m too busy talking.²

First, Kamal, their modelling expert, has read my recent dynamic debt modelling paper and wants to adapt parts of it to a conceptually similar Fed balance-sheet model. We run over time and plan to reconnect later.

Then Jason and Marcin from their foreign reserves team, joined by several new faces virtually and from Chicago, talk reserves and market structure with me for an hour.

Finally, I meet Soren and five others from the counterparties team, who we had consulted for input on our DDF reform (#74) and who had read my recent paper. We quickly get into a broader discussion about what dealer frameworks are supposed to accomplish, what institutions like ours should expect from dealers, and the role of diversity and resilience in an effective dealer base. I come away with a major realization about how fundamentally different the Fed’s dealer paradigm is from ours—and how internally coherent it is on its own terms.

The meeting runs to noon, then I return to my residence for two hours to synthesize the week’s notes before the rest of Friday wipes them from my brain.

With the work week done, I walk twenty blocks to the Argosy Bookstore on 59th and Park and browse its extremely old collection. The item that stops me is an eighteenth-century first American edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language—the dictionary from before “the dictionary” was really a thing. I assume it must be worth a fuck-ton, but the shopkeeper tells me it’s only about two thousand dollars.³ Then he offers to take it off the shelf so I can actually read it.⁴ Why not.⁵

In a literary mood now, I head back toward Midtown for the New York Public Library, where I examine the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, a written copy of the Declaration of Independence, and the original Winnie the Pooh dolls. Then I wait thirty minutes at Los Tacos No. 1 and make the wait worthwhile with six tacos.

A few blocks later I’m at Madison Square Garden for Charlie Puth, who naturally comes out in Knicks gear⁶ and brings out special New York guests Art Garfunkel, Jimmy Fallon, Busta Rhymes, and—somehow the only one I don’t know—Kirk Franklin.

But Puth isn’t the only major artist I’ll hear tonight. It’s Friday night, Afrojack is playing at Marquee in Chelsea, and already a few beers deep, I instinctively end up there. Within an hour the club is packed, the music is pounding, and everything is set for an epic party—except no Afrojack.

He finally appears just after midnight, and everyone’s pent-up energy releases at once. The next three hours are a haze of DJ beats, strobe lights, fog spray, and exchanging moves with random strangers shoulder-to-shoulder around me.

Random residents of this greatest city in the world, many with their own high-pressure jobs and esoteric interests that some specialized corner of Manhattan is perfectly built to satisfy, all here for an unrestrained night with a world-class DJ playing in their neighborhood.

You could almost mistake me for one of them, couldn’t you? Almost.

1. A week earlier, I had booked the cheapest legit hotel I could find, the OYO Times Square, and told Jon when he asked. I later saw the horrendous reviews and switched to the Edison. Jon had already copied my choice and ended up stuck in what he called a “nightmare, pseudo-hostel” with spring beds, barefoot hallway traffic, and some concern for his personal safety.
2. This is a nice reversal from my last visit for a conference in 2023, where Jason joked that the budget situation was “one step away from us having to eat our conference lunch from Bento boxes.”
3. The UK original can go for up to thirty thousand.
4. I still semi-seriously consider buying it, until I realize I have no way to store it in my luggage. And having it shipped defeats the whole purpose.
5. At that exact moment, a random woman appears and excitedly says she was looking for this same “first English dictionary.” She hovers while I flip through the A’s, starts talking about fate and destiny, then hands me her business card for her psychic services.
6. Who will start playing in the NBA Finals in a few days’ time. The whole city, especially around MSG, is already in a frenzy.