Matt Levine, Columnist

The SPY Kids Are All Right

Also pulled bond deals, forgiven credit-card debts and adulterous CEOs.

August 9, 2019 at 4:00 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: Money Stuff will be off next week, back on Monday, August 19.

There is something magical about a lot of modern high finance, a mysterious process that can seem to create vast wealth from out of nowhere. And if you know anything about magic, you know that it requires certain … inputs. Occult inputs. For instance, at the creation of one of the most important modern financial innovations, the SPDR S&P 500 Index exchange-traded fund, a call went out for babies: