Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- ``New Jersey Man Clips Penis in Vacuum Mishap.''

As recently as 1998, this headline on the Bloomberg was born to attract a crowd on Wall Street. That one sentence was equipped to win any battle of financial news stories, and it did. On the day the story broke, May 15, there was no shortage of harder news: mass riots in Indonesia, a spike in U.S. inflation, Sandy Weill's announcement that he would like to buy Fidelity.

None of that news interested Bloomberg readers so much as the tale of the New Jersey man sucked into his own vacuum cleaner.

And so, if you had asked me which of the thousands of news stories that flashed across Bloomberg screens in 2006 would be among the most read, I would have given you a list of the bizarre and the macabre. The story of the woman whose farting grounded a commercial airliner, for instance, or the news that cocktails at the Kentucky Derby were going for $1,000 a pop.

What these most-read story lists capture is the sort of news readers are drawn to when they happen to be sitting in front of Bloomberg terminals -- which is to say, when they are at work. And when Wall Street people are talking on two phones at once as they glance at three screens, what they are generally looking for is something to jar them out of their state of abstraction. Something, anything, to cause them to stir in their seats and remind them, however briefly, of their five senses.

Most Read

But times have changed, apparently, and the change is reflected in this recent list of the most-read news items of the year. Of the 30, only an airplane crashing into a Manhattan building, the foiling of a U.K. terrorist plot to blow up commercial airlines, the suicide of a former National Football League player, and the news that there was a video to be seen of a Brazilian MTV hostess fornicating on a beach distracted Wall Street from money.

But even that suggests a false breadth of attention, as the man with the MTV hostess was a Merrill Lynch banker, and both the plane crash and the bomb plot obviously implicated Wall Street lives. Of the 30 Bloomberg stories most read in 2006 there was really just one in no way connected to Wall Street, the news that former Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters had shot himself.

Shareholders in Wall Street firms -- where Bloomberg readers tend to work -- might see this as a step in the right direction. It's good to know that the time once spent discussing the pros and cons of inserting one's penis into a vacuum cleaner is now spent dwelling on financial news.

Look Closer

Upon closer inspection, however, it wasn't the useful financial news that captured Wall Street's attention. You can count on one hand the stories that might move markets, or affect business: three items about the Federal Reserve and a pair of stories about giant corporate acquisitions.

News that implicated Wall Street jobs and paychecks, on the other hand, drew huge crowds: Goldman Sachs's bonuses, Morgan Stanley's bonuses, Credit Suisse's trading losses, commodity traders' losses, commodity traders' booming pay -- the list goes on.

In a year filled with breaking news on the war on terror, wild fluctuations in energy prices, the collapse of American support for the war in Iraq, the demise of Tony Blair and the Republican Party, and changes at the helms of the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department, a story of more interest to Bloomberg readers than any of these was the report that HSBC's New York branch might get rid of as many as 20 bond traders.

In this list there is both mystery and pattern.

Follow the Paycheck

The pattern -- and the thread is fine, but so brightly colored that it shouldn't be ignored -- is an overwhelming interest in a particular kind of financial news story: stories that implicate, in one way or another, what Wall Street people might be paid at the end of the year. The Bloomberg reporter who wanted to be most-read might best spend his or her time digging not into the market forces affecting Wall Street's business but those affecting Wall Street's employees.

The mystery is Amaranth. Amaranth was far and away the topic of greatest interest to Wall Street. And it was obviously big news -- the largest trading loss in financial history, or at any rate that anyone can recall.

But Amaranth's collapse was a surprisingly antiseptic event. The characters were small and the themes dull. The story offered no obvious lesson, apart from the obvious one that no one should gamble away $6 billion on the direction of natural- gas prices.

The event didn't ripple through the financial world in the same way, say, as the collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management. And for all these reasons it didn't engage the general reader. Amaranth proved that it's possible for a trader to blow $6 billion of other people's money and still bore the average American.

Amaranth Appeal

This didn't bore Bloomberg customers. Just about any story written about Amaranth attracted Bloomberg readership, and five of them made Bloomberg's list of the top 30.

The angle that appealed most wasn't Amaranth's effect on markets or investors. Nor even, really, the inner workings of the Amaranth mind. For instance, a riveting article, mostly ignored, explained how natural-gas speculators such as Amaranth's Brian Hunter may have been relying on the (wildly inaccurate) 2006 hurricane forecasts generated by a 26-year-old rookie at Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science.

That story was of relatively little interest to Wall Street readers.

What Wall Street readers wanted from their Amaranth stories was the answer to three simple questions: Who won, who lost and, above all, how much? The interest in Amaranth, in short, seems to have been the first cousin to the interest in Goldman Sachs's bonus pool. After all, the $6 billion lost by Amaranth didn't simply vanish. Someone on Wall Street was on the other side of those trades. Goldman's bonus pool came from somewhere.

(Michael Lewis, the author, most recently, of `The Blind Side,' is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The views he expresses are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Michael Lewis in Berkeley, California at mlewis1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 11, 2007 00:08 EST