About a year ago, I had dinner with quasi-client, someone I’d seen professionally but, because I was trying monogamy out, could only see as a friend at that time. We were talking about sex work, and I’d said that I was concerned about near future. The subprime lending chaos had yet to break, but something was in the air.

At that time, I’d said that I was concerned about two things: that the overwhelming majority of my clients were in hedge funds and private equity, and that there was this unspoken understanding that they were making more money than they deserved. Even they acknowledged this. And I knew that this lack of diversity within my client base reflected my rates. Only the freakishly overcompensated could afford them.

As we talked, I said that I was fairly certain there would be a wave of retirements and rate reductions among high-priced whores in the near future. I had a feeling hedge funds and private equity would get called out. And I had a feeling finance, as an industry, was going to take a hit. There was just too much excess, too much hubris, too many vastly extravagant parties. History has a certain reliability in its repetition.

Then the sub-prime mortage lending crisis hit. I had dinner with that client again this summer and said again that I felt like something was going to happen. Sure, none of us had clients who’d be directly affected by the subprime lending fiasco, but it had that feel of a trickle-up effect, like waves from a neutron bomb. And while I was a monogamous retire-ette at the time, I had a feeling the lending crisis would kick the legs out from under our most reliable client demographic, being the overcompensated financier for whom sex is most readily a commodity.

He (an overcompensated financier with unusual self-awareness) asked, “So what do you think will happen?”

“Women will have to bring their rates down,” I said. “Or quit.”

“Like you?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Then I heard about the carnage. Boys aren’t getting their bonuses. Lay-offs are cutting wide swaths through the industry. Morale is getting low. Everything about this points to a shift in the pendulum. What was once viewed as fabulous decadence will now be viewed as moral corruption.

History repeats itself.

*

The other day, my client contacted me to say that I was right.

And then I read this post.