A Play-By-Play Of Jeffrey Epstein's Staggering Financial Illiteracy

Because I’m in finance, friends and family have frequently asked me how Jeffrey Epstein made his money, but I’ve never really been able to tell them.

I hoped footage from Steve Bannon’s abandoned documentary — included in the Department of Justice’s release of more than 3 million documents on Jan. 30 — could shed light on the matter. A significant portion of the interview focused on finance and economics.

It’s clear that over and over again the Epstein files show powerful people telling other powerful people, “you should talk to Jeffery.”

Epstein could obviously cultivate strong relationships with wealthy and powerful men decades his senior and turn these relationships into money and access — access to presidents, Wall Street titans, royalty, and just about any powerful person on the planet who also had money and access.

Epstein resembled Lyndon B. Johnson in this ability to forge father-son relationships with powerful mentors. Johnson cultivated a relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt while only in his late 20s. Newspaper magnate Charles E. Marsh, Sen. Richard Russell, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn all viewed Johnson as a protégé and in turn propelled him to the zenith of power.

Of course, LBJ was a genuine master of politics, so I imagined Epstein must have had some mastery of finance to earn the support of his senior mentors. I assumed this mastery involved either dominance of some obscure corner of finance or some superpower vision in seeing how the whole financial world works and how to exploit it.

I’ve heard Bannon talk finance before and came away impressed with his analysis of the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath. No slouch on financial matters, Bannon calls Epstein “one of the greatest financial minds in the world.” I expected a real heavyweight discussion.

It wasn’t.

Instead, I was astonished.

The man demonstrated no expertise in either finance or economics. When he wasn’t getting basic banking concepts and historical events completely ass-backwards, he was telling improbable tales and reaching for the same contorted medical analogies. Epstein butchered fractional reserve banking, the bedrock of a modern financial system, and told stories that would have required a disturbance in the space-time continuum to be true.

At the opening, Bannon asks Epstein about his position on the board of Rockefeller University.

“‘How do they pick a guy like you, a trader from—or basically some guy from Bear Stearns?’ he ...