Habseligkeiten
Season 4
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
What’s the German word for a transgressive corporate threesome in a Nazi’s castle?
Photo: HBO
Pop culture loves a loanword, and German is arguably the GOAT when it comes to words so hyperspecific in mood and meaning that they cannot exist outside their culture of origin. Schadenfreude, obviously. Zeitgeist is useful. And I personally enjoy kummerspeck, which is the German term for the weight you gain from sad-snacking. (The literal translation is a humdinger: “grief bacon.”)
This week’s episode of Industry introduced me to habseligkeiten, which is explained to Yasmin as “the possessions closest to your soul.” At least on paper, habseligkeiten are the objects carried by fleeing refugees or the shards of sea glass in a child’s pocket; it’s a word associated with the less fortunate. And come to think of it, that’s how the Bauers see themselves, now that their 300-year-old bank is being taken over by Tender, a company with a short history of making cottage-industry porn possible. What does this family, who dominated European finance and, yes, bankrolled Hitler, take with them as they retreat from progress and neoliberalism?
In “Habseligkeiten,” we find mother and son — Johanna and Moritz — holed up in a Tyrolean schloss with their heritage gilets, their dodgy politics, and a few small landscapes by a mediocre painter who once destroyed the world. The Bauers are the first of two hurdles Henry needs to clear as Tender’s new CEO if he wants the erstwhile payment processor to succeed as a commercial bank. The other is the U.K.’s Prudential Regulation Authority, the arm of the BoE that needs to approve the IBN Bauer merger and issue Tender with the U.K. banking license it intends to seek down the road.
By Henry’s side throughout is Yasmin, who has joined Tender in a deeply embarrassing consultant role. It’s not that she’s bad at it per se. It’s that no one has any idea why she’s there. At her best, she serves as Henry’s personal life coach, boosting him before a meeting with Jenni Bevan to win support for the merger. At her worst, she’s forced to say things like “I don’t have the expertise” when asked simple questions, because, let’s face it, she doesn’t have any expertise. She doesn’t even have the seniority to offer Hayley — now her husband’s assistant — an evening off.
Yasmin is something of an expert in massaging male egos, though, and, by coincidence, that’s what the moment calls for. IBN Bauer’s board has approved the Tender merger, and the Austrian regulator has signed off. But Johanna and Moritz, suddenly fearing their own irrelevancy, would like to raise, once again, the issue that these upstart Silicon Valley types aren’t exactly trustworthy when it comes to protecting client privacy. (Industry doesn’t bother to engage much with whether or not this is true, so I’m guessing it’s at least a little true.) Yasmin argues that the louder Moritz complains, the worse it will be for Tender with Labour’s PRA, which is skeptical of the white-knight, “bank of the people” story being sold.
So the gang — Henry, Yasmin, Hayley, Whitney, and Ferdy — head to Europe for soft diplomacy over schnitzel. But Moritz doesn’t live in Vienna; he lives in a time machine set to the Age of Absolutism. The maid who greets them is wearing a dirndl, and over dinner Moritz confesses that he really misses when Europe had a central authority. Whitney and Henry laugh at him, confident they can push the merger through without his buy-in, which they basically do. “Habseligkeiten” is less satisfying than the previous two installments of season four, partly because it doesn’t leave us far enough from where we started.
Still, the dinner is an unpleasant study in power and self-delusion. Moritz is a fascist and a sinophile, and the real reason he doesn’t want to sell his bank to Tender is that Whitney’s last name is Halberstram. Whitney and Henry are rightly offended by Moritz’s antisemitism, but the real reason they mock Moritz at dinner is that it thrills them to take something that someone doesn’t want to give them. This is Whitney and Henry’s bespoke, millennial, start-up-infused version of modern machismo, which German will hopefully soon provide a word for.
Yasmin doesn’t really get it. She agrees to stay in Austria to smooth things over with the Bauers while the men return to London to meet with Labour and the banking regulator. But you know who would 100 percent jibe with the Tender Boyz’s M.O.? Harper. Her nascent shorts-only fund is operating out of Eric’s hotel suite while they try to work out the fundamentals. Who will be their trader or their forensic investigator? How much do they share about their personal lives? Is it chill if Eric brings his daughters around or works in his dressing gown in the evenings?
Technically, you can’t run a shorts-only hedge fund if you have no funds to hedge, so Eric spends most of “Habseligkeiten” begging for cash from family offices and high-net-worth individuals — clients with more appetite for risk than, say, the BT pension fund. Stern Tao hosts a breakfast to reintroduce Harper and Eric to investors who already know them too well. They weren’t impressed by Harper’s petulant gating email, and they’re surprised Eric has corralled them for croissants when he doesn’t have a team in place. The meeting is going south quickly when Harper announces she intends to short Tender, a market darling she deems a dead man walking, without substantiating. At that point, even Eric seems ready to walk out.
Is Harper right about Tender? Probably. Does she know she’s right? It’s more of a hunch, lightly corroborated by James Dycker, the Fin Digest reporter who slept through Journalism Ethics. The two appear to be in regular, if mutually unsatisfying, communication with each other. Jim wants Harper to share hard intel on Tender. He believes the company is still processing porn payments via its new acquisitions, but his editor doesn’t have the budget — or, frankly, enough belief in Jim — to send him on a reporting trip to Accra. Harper wants Jim to run the name of her new firm next to the flashy sound bite that Tender is overrated without giving him anything in return. Eventually, Harper comes clean to Eric about the “tip” that pointed her in the direction of Tender in the first place, and even Eric — a man who gaslighted his beloved mentor into believing he was suffering from memory loss — sees the allegations of market manipulation that lie down this particular road.
I’m very much digging Industry’s new season, but tonight I hit my personal limit of how much I can be whacked over the head with the fact that this year there is plot as well as motif. It pained me to hear Yasmin use the word narrativize conversationally with her husband on the subject of how his addictions will play in the press. After Tender receives Jim’s request for prepublication comment, Whitney, who runs on spin and hubris, tells Henry to ignore it: “The story ends where we say it ends.” We get it — the professional storytellers who make Industry think story is a powerful tool.
Eric is our journeyman, though; when he picks up the ball, he at least says something unexpected. How hard is it to take down a blue-chip stock, Harper asks Eric. He tells her that it takes more than a good story. You have to prove your story, then shout it from the rooftops with a megaphone. Because if a pyramid scheme like Herbalife can beat back a crusading billionaire like Bill Ackman, chances are that Tender can survive a finance reporter with bad finances — Jim lost it all to Sam Bankman-Fried — and a supposed finance wunderkind (h/t German) who can’t hold down a job.
Not to worry, because Sweetpea is on the case, too. She’s still employed over at the misogynist cesspool that is Mostyn Asset Management, but we get hints that she can’t survive there much longer. Rishi outed Sweetpea’s OnlyFans account, but in this week’s episode, Harper makes a cryptic mention of a Siren leak, too. Sweetpea summarizes her Tender findings this way: At the time of its IPO, the company was making dirty money off porn and gambling; now, its EMEA sector is driving profits. It’s a totally different growth strategy, but the shift isn’t reflected in the company’s balance sheets or the stock’s rating. It’s almost like it can’t be true. (Which reminded me of something Jonah told Whitney in the season premiere: “Sometimes the next thing is just to continue being very good at the thing we’re fucking doing.”)
Bolstered by Sweetpea’s findings and Eric’s encouragement, Harper spends the rest of the episode trying to prove the story of Tender’s malfeasance. She wastes hours combing through spreadsheets, calling up every one of the company’s Ghanaian acquisitions only to end up rerouted to Tender’s Dublin call center, where the call is never answered and the chorus from Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” threatens to eat away at her sanity. At Eric’s insistence, Harper takes a 90-minute break to meet Kwabena, which, thank God, is enough time for Eric to simply look up the address on the footer of the Tender spreadsheets. Weirdly, Google Street View shows a semi-detached “shithole” where he was expecting to see a depressing corporate park.
Harper and Sweetpea take a field trip to Sunderland and find a man named Geoffrey typing away in a box room at the top of his mother’s house. He’s doing remote data entry for Tender, taking every transaction that originates in Africa and inputting it in a spreadsheet that obfuscates whatever service was being rendered in the first place. By the time Geoffrey is through — and there are more Geoffreys in more corners of the U.K. — no one knows who spent what where, just that Tender processed the payment. Sweetpea gets such a rush from the fieldwork that she agrees to come aboard the foundering ship of Stern Tao. And Harper, who doesn’t care how long Stern Tao lasts so long as she can die being right, feeds the intel to James. His first Tender takedown was softened by lawyers and editors, but it planted the flag, albeit with the toothless headline “Tender, Investigated.” How can anyone silence him now that they’ve got Geoffrey?
But there’s a wide gulf between what’s true and what ends up in the newspapers, as “Habseligkeiten” repeatedly reminds us. It’s true that Moritz is a dangerous kook in a silly vest. But if you open Lord Norton’s paper that week and turn to the “Comment” section, you’ll see his ideas in print under the seemingly harmless headline “The Case for a Benevolent Dictatorship.” To Yasmin, who arranged the column behind her husband’s back, it has no menace or meaning. It’s just a link that Moritz can send to the Harrow Boys WhatsApp group to prove that he’s still alive.
In the “News” section of that same paper, a story runs announcing Jennifer Bevan as Labour’s next leader, a sentiment that probably wasn’t true until someone wrote it down. The PM’s chief of staff is conspicuously holding that paper when he drops in on the meeting between Tender, the PRA, and finance minister Lisa Dearn (Dept. Q’s Chloe Pirrie). If Jenni, the future of Labour, is pro-Tender, then the PM risks appearing anti-business if his PRA handicaps the merger. At least, that’s what the papers could print. Despite being billed as the head and heart of the new and improved Tender, Henry actually freezes in the meeting with the regulator, shell-shocked by a single reference to his failure at Lumi. It doesn’t matter; this isn’t the room where decisions are made. Later, there will be a business-section headline as Tender joins the Footsie: “Major Milestone for U.K. Fintech.” Says who?
On the other side of London, another meeting takes place. Stern Tao has finally fleshed out its ragtag team to include Harper’s quasi-boyfriend, Kwabena, and — believe it, because it’s true — Kenny. Kenny! Kenny, whom Eric fired on a hangover, ricocheted to Goldman and can now be found taking trades at Deutsche. (This series leaves no man behind!) They’ve come to short Tender, using investment they won at the doomed breakfast, plus £10 million from Eric, which he claims is enough to bankrupt his family office if they lose it.
That Eric’s willing to kick so much of his own money into the kitty should be evidence enough to Harper that Eric is serious about the success of Stern Tao, but she spends most of the episode berating him for suddenly taking an interest in his daughters. At her insistence, they agree to take zero interest in each other’s personal lives, to the limited extent that said personal lives exist. She also says that the success of Stern Tao is “life or death” for her, but what could be more personal than that? Harper believes her moneymaking superpower is a reckless drive to succeed and that personal relationships impede her recklessness. But she never slows down to consider the premise. Is her recklessness her unique selling proposition, or is it just the reason why she’s had four different jobs in four seasons?
Which brings us to the ménage à trois — for some things, only a French loanword will do — between Hayley, Yasmin, and Henry, which exists at the opposite end of the boundary-setting spectrum. It was so nauseating to watch Yasmin run around Tender being Henry’s cheerleader that it was almost a relief to see her ditch the pom-poms and become her old manipulative self again. For her part, Hayley does make some subtle overtures. She flirts with Yas at Henry’s 40th in last week’s episode. She confides in her about Jim following her home in the season premiere. And she shows up at his boss’s door after-hours to have a conversation that could have been an email.
It’s Henry who takes (minimal) convincing. “You’re all I need,” he whispers to his wife, 15 seconds before he invites his PA to go down on him. When Henry and Hayley kiss, Yasmin looks briefly upset, perhaps at how easy it was. She takes a seat and lights a cigarette. Earlier in the episode, Harper warns Eric not to turn a person’s trauma into a causal story for how they are in the world. But how can anyone watch Yas watching her new husband have sex with a child from Calabasas, surrounded by Nazi habseligkeiten, and not see the hurt? Domming used to look fun on Yasmin; this year, she calls to mind Ghislaine Maxwell.
Even her husband has the nerve to accuse her of “enabling” behavior because what happened doesn’t “feel right” to him. Give me a break. It doesn’t feel “right” that you slept with your employee while your wife-cum-consultant sat nearby? There’s a German word for what ails you, Henry: angst.
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