Summary
Industry Season 4 is back to business in “Habseligkeiten”, which feels like a step down in terms of pure artistry but is clearly assembling the pieces for further drama down the line.
If Henry and Yasmin’s extremely toxic and bizarre marital life constituted a bit of a break for Industry Season 4, then Episode 3, “Habseligkeiten”, is HBO’s drama getting back to business. There’s notably less clever artistry here, and it isn’t as focused an actor’s showcase, though everyone, including Marisa Abela and Kit Harrington, is really good in it. But it’s one of those functional, very necessary early-season episodes that will presumably yield ripe dramatic fruit down the line.
Refreshingly, there are only two core storylines here, though they’re admittedly tangled up in a knotty thicket of demented personal subplots, some outgrowths of seasons-long development, and others newly germinating. At the most high-level view, though, it’s fairly simple and easy to keep track of, at least if you can parse some of the more complicated financial jargon. I’m not totally confident in that regard, but I reckon I’ve got a good enough idea to communicate the gist, as we’ll see.
The Tender Problem
Okay, so, Henry Muck is now the new CEO of Tender. And Tender is on the cusp of merging with IBN-Bauer, a fictional — as far as I can tell — European mega-bank with roots extending all the way back to the Reich. There are a couple of problems with this, though. The merger requires government approval lest it be seen as anticompetitive consolidation; there’s a scandal threatening to break thanks to Jim Dycker and FinDigest, and two of IBN-Bauer’s legacy board members, an aristocratic Austrian mother-and-son, have GDPR concerns.
These problems have become Henry’s, since Whitney is too aloof and self-satisfied to take any of them seriously, which means they have technically become Yasmin’s, since she’s hovering around the office as a paid consultant and doing all the meaningful work while the men take the credit. Classic.
“Habseligkeiten” is very much about Yasmin’s unconventional way of getting things done, which can’t help but be juxtaposed with Harper’s angrier, more frantic, but equally successful approach. But more on Harpsichord in a minute.
The Austrian Dictator
On Yasmin’s advice, she, Henry, and Whitney travel to Austria to reassure the board members, which involves sleeping in the lap of Austrian luxury. There’s a funny beat later on when Yas realises the paintings in her room are Adolf Hitler originals, which is a pretty neat summary of the kind of people we’re dealing with here.
The primary obstacle is Moritz, a fascistic faux-intellectual with a searing SubStack and too much of an ego to be brushed aside by Whitney’s “we’re-in-charge” rhetoric or Henry’s “yay, democracy” spiel. Moritz doesn’t really believe in democracy, or acknowledge the presence of democracy in any ostensibly democratic Western nation, which Whitney finds tedious and Henry finds genuinely off-putting (I genuinely have no idea what his politics are). So, once again, it’s up to Yas to improvise her way through the problem.
In the meantime, she engineers a very intensely weird threesome between herself, Henry, and Haley, pretty much against Henry’s wishes, as what I can only assume is a power play. Yas knows that Haley almost slept with the journalist who’s asking Tender difficult questions, and while she pretended to be supportive about it, I do imagine she’s using it as a way to exert some control over Haley. Not that she seems to mind. Henry’s less sure, though, especially when he learns that Yas got Moritz onside by convincing Henry’s uncle to give him a column in his national newspaper.
Money Laundering
You’ll recall from the premiere that Harper and Eric are now in business together. Their new firm, SternTao, is the kind of bold, risky short-only venture that Harper thought she’d get to run under Otto Mostyn, but they’re severely lacking in clients, staff, and resources, which has Harper extremely close to the bone. Eric lounging around their new office in a robe doesn’t make her any more reassured.
Thanks to Jim, Harper has the inside line on Tender’s supposed money laundering, which makes them a big option for shorting since their current share price is astronomical, but there’s a pretty big conspiracy waiting in the wings to ruin them. If someone is to invest big money in Tender’s stock price crashing, fortunes will be made for all.
But this means gathering enough evidence to prove that Tender is up to no good, since an article or two with no compelling arguments won’t kick up enough of a stink to upset the share value. So, what Harper and Eric are up to in Industry Season 4, Episode 3 is digging up as much dirt on Tender as they can.
Team-Building
This investigatory process doubles up as fleshing out SternTao’s ranks. The first recruit is Sweetpea, whom Harper enlists to help her investigate a lead Eric found in Tender’s documentation — a humble residential address in Sunderland that is being used as a satellite office. Despite a brief, angry encounter with Rishi, whom Eric and Harper also have doing legwork for them, Sweetpea agrees to help.
The Sunderland address contains a man in his bedroom whose job is to sift through a ludicrous amount of transaction receipts from obscure African payment processing platforms, which Tender is using to continue to make a profit in “grey markets” despite having publicly distanced itself from the same. The transactions are all bucketed according to price, not nature or point of origin, and then explained away under a broad “consumables” umbrella. Tender is laundering money, and now Harper is halfway to proving it. Sweetpea also agrees to come on full-time, albeit on the guarantee that Harper sees the fund through, which her previous history suggests she probably won’t.
And despite this bit of success, there’s still enough evidence to suggest that Harper’s not doing especially well. She’s extremely hostile to Eric and unwilling to open up to him personally, tanks her fling with Kwabena over him being late by 15 minutes, and is utterly obsessed with working all of the time as, in her own words, “a matter of life and death”. That doesn’t seem like a cocktail conducive to success, but we’ll have to see.
SternTao is making moves, if nothing else. Kwabena is brought on as a trader, and at the end of “Habseligkeiten”, he, Harper, and Eric go to see Kenny, now working for a big bank, to place a short. I think we can probably guess what that short might be.
