Funny Michael Lewis column on recession advice for financiers includes:

No, if you want to win the recession, you need to find a hole and crawl inside it, until the shooting stops. This hole is called a HEDGE FUND.

Look around. Note how many of the really shrewd people have recently decided to abandon the big firms for which they have happily worked for many years, and sneak off to some small corner of the financial universe.

Last week, the two guys who ran the distressed-debt desk at Citigroup just disappeared inside their own firm. The team doing the same thing at Bear Stearns Cos. vanished inside Tudor Investment Corp. Even the guy who kept Goldman Sachs Group Inc. out of the subprime mess fled, and raised money for his own fund.

Would that guy be Michael Swenson ‘89? Alas, it seems more likely that the reference is to Swenson’s fellow Goldman trader, Josh Birnbaum. So, Birnbaum rather then Swenson is more likely to have been the source for the Wall Street Journal piece. Why would Birnbaum leave and not Swenson? Being married with four kids makes you risk averse, for starters. And, by all accounts, Goldman is a nice place to make a career. With any luck, Goldman will reward Swenson’s loyalty.