This article from Bloomberg about how the cut in investment bankers' bonuses are affecting their lives was published a while ago, but I still can't get over how funny it is. Not that I am amused by the misfortune of others, but quite simply, I am amused at how unfortunate they think they are. Here are some excerpts:
Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.
“I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”
...
The malaise is shared by Schiff, the New York-based marketing director for Euro Pacific Capital, where his brother is CEO. His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a-year Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.
“I can’t imagine what I’m going to do,” Schiff said. “I’m crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand.” He wants 1,800 square feet -- “a room for each kid, three bedrooms, maybe four,” he said. “Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?”
...
“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”
...
Scheiner said he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.
Now, you can imagine why you will never have enough money. The animal in us always want what we can't have. Being human is having the discipline to control that urge.
How many times do I have to emphasize the insanity of the job as an investment banker? Let me be clear on this. I have no personal vendetta against investment banking. But does it not make you wonder that if all that soulless money-chasing is worth it? For starters, I think that question is moot. The real question is, is there a way to make money without losing your soul?
When some people think about Wall Street, they conjure up images of traders shouting on the stock exchange, of bankers dining at five star restaurants, of CEOs whispering in the ears of captured Congress members.
When I think about Wall Street, I think about its stunted rainbow of pale pastel shirts. I think about the vaulting, highly secured, and very cold lobbies. And I think about the art passed daily by the harried workers, virtually unseen.
Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me. What started as a summer internship led to a seven-year career. During my time on Wall Street, I changed from a curious college student full of hope for my future, into a cynical, bitter, depressed, and exhausted “knowledge worker” who felt that everyone was out to screw me over.
The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore it, or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.
When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows.
While there are many on Wall Street who come from wealthy backgrounds, there are also many people from very humble backgrounds. In my experience, it is often those who do not come from privilege who are the system’s fiercest defenders.
When I was a summer intern, we met with various executives who’d tell us about their careers and pitch us on the firm. The aim was to sell the firm to everyone, even though only a few of us would ultimately be offered full-time positions at the firm. It had an element of redundancy to it, since we were clearly already interested in the firm, or we wouldn’t be there at all. The effect of these talks, then, was to make a competitive situation even more competitive. Welcome to Wall Street. One executive described the firm as a “Golden Springboard.” If we began our careers there, his reasoning went, there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go. The executive was right. Background becomes irrelevant once you have “made it” to Wall Street. Once you’ve gotten in the door, you’re one of “us.”
Once hired, the cultural indoctrination begins in earnest, especially for those recent grads who begin their careers in “analyst training programs.” These programs are exclusively for college and graduate students, are often several months long, and are custom-tailored to the department you’ll ultimately join. The Sales & Trading analyst program is more competitive than, say, the Technology training program. And while most of the training is job-specific, there is also an air of finishing school. A trader friend of mine was instructed not only in the mathematics of the financial markets, but also in wine tasting and golf. You are trained, but also you are groomed.
The grooming is not all fun and games and country clubs. Most of the message revolves around how hard everyone works, and how hard you are expected to work in turn. Wall Street views its own work ethic as legendary. Sixty-hour weeks are standard. An ex-boss of mine used to brag that for one six-year stretch he never took a sick day or a vacation. The streak ended when he contracted strep throat, refused to go to the doctor, and eventually had to be hospitalized (at least so he claimed).
While not everyone was as manic as my boss (Wall Street has more than its fair share of laziness and incompetence), even those who feel less committed to the job still buy into a concept of “face time.” It’s not right to leave your desk before a certain time. An ex-colleague of mine used to ask anyone who’d pass by his cubicle before 7pm on their way out the door, “Oh, half day today?”
This dueling masochism/machismo brings with it a tremendous superiority complex. People on Wall Street truly believe they work harder than anyone else. When confronted with the stark reality of, for example, a single mom working two jobs, the response is usually some variant of, “Well, if they’d only worked as hard as I did in school . . .”
But the key to truly understanding superiority on Wall Street is by looking at how it’s measured: with cold, hard numbers. Numbers can be amplified by honest work, but they can also be amplified by betrayal, manipulation, and cheating. And when everything is a cold cost-benefit analysis, why wouldn’t you break regulations—provided you knew the profits you stood to make would dwarf the fines you would pay should you get caught?
On Wall Street, the best-paid employees actively seek out their “market value” by interviewing and cultivating job offers at competing firms. Once they’ve secured an offer, they go back to their boss and try to land what’s called a “counter-offer.” If the new firm is offering to pay $300,000, the old firm may counter that offer with $400,000.
But even in this game of betrayal, a little bit of lying will optimize your results. You can solicit a counter by handing in a resignation letter. But to resign and then accept a counter is to admit you’re a mercenary. This will get you labeled a “high flight risk.” No, playing the game correctly to maximize money means pretending the game is not about money at all. A more strategic route is to explain, “Well, this offer just fell into my lap, I really don’t want to leave, so is there anything you can do to help me out?”
Of course, manipulation isn’t only for tricking your bosses—it extends to the clients as well. On Wall Street, it is not frowned upon to “rip the faces off” one’s own clients. If the client is dumb enough to get hoodwinked, that means the client didn’t work hard enough. He didn’t do his “due diligence.” In other words, if I screw you, you only have yourself to blame. That is the “zero-sum game” of trading.
But perhaps the zenith of Wall Street fitness is the unpunished cheat. Around the holiday season, inter-dealer brokers will send gifts to the traders, trying to curry favor with bottles of wine or champagne. Inter-dealer brokers are brokers who allow Wall Street banks to anonymously trade with one another, since the last thing you want to do if you’re Morgan Stanley is let Goldman Sachs know your position, though you may still want to trade with them. But there is a catch to the gift-giving: according toFINRA, Wall Street’s self-regulatory agency, the brokers are only allowed to spend a maximum of $100 per trader. On slow winter days, the traders would Google the bottles of wine, trying to determine which vendors had cheated. Often they would find that, yes, this vendor breached the limit. The response to the cheat was always the same: a smirk, and an approving nod. It’s not about who cheated. It’s about who cheated successfully.
This attitude extends to higher stakes games as well. Take the case SEC v. Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. According to the SEC, in 2007 Citigroup sold their clients a portfolio of assets (mortgage-backed securities, as it happens) that Citi was actively betting against. The SEC therefore charged Citigroup with securities fraud; it’s been reported that the fearsome regulatory agency won’t settle for anything less than a $285 million fine. Looks bad, right? Well, yes, unless you consider that, according to Forbes, Citigroup allegedly made $160 million on this one deal (investors lost $700 million). Citigroup looks like it’s going to lose $125 million! But how many similar deals have gone un-prosecuted? If the answer is one, Citigroup is back in the black; if the answer is, as surely it must be, more than one, then Citigroup is doing very well, thank you.
This is why paying fines when you are caught breaking the rules is simply deemed “the cost of doing business” on Wall Street.
Poker is extremely popular across Wall Street, and provides an instructive lesson. The book Poker Winners Are Different by industrial psychologist and poker adviser Alan Schoonmaker presents a scenario where a player notices his best friend’s “tell”—that is, the best friend has a habit of showing when he has a good or bad hand. The book then poses the following dilemma: should you (a) tell your friend, (b) win a bit of money from him, and then tell him, or (c) exploit your friend, never telling him. The correct answer: screw your friend. Schoonmaker, who used to do “management development” work at Merrill Lynch, writes that winners will “do whatever the rules and ethics allow to maximize their profits.” This behavior is heralded in poker and it’s heralded on Wall Street. Despite what may be emblazoned on plaques or in mission statements, the ethics of Wall Street are purely about winning at any cost.
If they didn’t know it going in, Wall Street employees quickly learn that even their company is an enemy. To the firm, employees are a cost to be minimized, or a producer to be exploited. You also learn that you must never show gratitude for your bonus. To appear satisfied with your compensation is to admit that they paid you more than they had to, so you must feign outrage no matter what. What happens to a culture that discourages gratitude?
But most people on Wall Street do not feel gratitude anyway. It does not matter that their compensation is enormous compared to the average American—that is not who a Wall Street worker is comparing themselves to. They are looking at the compensation of the top sales person, the top trader, or, at the very top, the CEO.
What this environment did to me is that I began to see everyone as a threat. From that idiot two cubicles down from me, to the moron on the other end of the phone (the client), to—more than anything—the faceless, imagined people on government assistance who I assumed (incorrectly) were what was causing such large percentages to disappear from my paycheck.
Many of the adverse reactions to OWS have been along the lines of, “They’re just jealous.” Of course the Wall Street critics think OWS is about envy. Envy is part and parcel of their daily lives. When you are living in a culture of envy, you see envy everywhere you go. Why wouldn’t you think envy is at the core of our movement, too?
The envy and hostility of Wall Street leads many to a common goal: to amass enough money so as to enact your revenge. This end goal is called fuck-you money.
At one point in my career, I was being recruited by a hedge fund. During the recruitment process, one of my interviewers frankly described the fund’s founder—his boss’s boss—as a “spoiled brat billionaire.” My interviewer related a story about a meeting between the hedge fund and an executive at a company the fund wanted to work with. At one point, the visiting executive made statements the fund founder didn’t like. The founder turned to the visitor and said, “So, you came here just to try and fuck me over?” The visitor quickly stormed out in a rage. But the founder wasn’t satisfied just yet. He followed the man out of the room, into the elevator, shouted the entire ride down, and then yelled at him in the lobby until he finally left the building. When the founder came back upstairs to greet his shaken employees, he said, invigorated and beaming, “Wasn’t that fun?!”
This is Wall Street’s equivalent of the American Dream: to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.
Despite the toxicity I’ve described, Wall Street is not a collection of 1 percenters maniacally laughing at the 99 percent they have crushed under their boot. No, Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.
I am far from the only Wall Street employee ever to feel chewed up by the system, even as I worked to perpetuate it. Another ex-Wall Street employee described feeling like a “hyper-specialized pawn” who “worked all the time with little control” of her life, and “little personal satisfaction at the end of the day.” I, too, felt manipulated, and why shouldn’t I? That was the game, after all. I felt overworked, demotivated, and I was clearly doing nothing to help the world.
I was able to leave once I decided that my happiness was more valuable than money. This is no great revelation to anyone at Occupy, but to someone who lived and breathed the idea that money was everything for seven years, it was not so easy. The true key to getting out was taking off my blinders: meeting others who were outside Wall Street’s bubble. This was a long process that involved a lot of psyching myself up in order to quit. Wall Street is not an easy place to walk away from. But after a year of planning, I finally submitted my resignation. I now teach computer programming at several venues, including Girl Develop It, which is a group that provides low-cost classes to women (men are welcome, too) in an environment that strives to be non-intimidating.
It is hard to contrast the joy of community I feel at Occupy Wall Street with the isolation I felt on Wall Street. It’s hard because I cannot think of two more disparate cultures. Wall Street believes in, and practices, a culture of scarcity. This breeds hoarding, distrust, and competition. As near as I can tell, Occupy Wall Street believes in plenty. This breeds sharing, trust, and cooperation. On Wall Street, everyone was my competitor. They’d help me only if it helped them. At Occupy Wall Street, I am offered food, warmth, and support, because it’s the right thing to do, and because joy breeds joy.
I was privileged enough to make it in the door on Wall Street, and to get bonuses during my time there. But I never felt as fortunate, or joyful, as I did the night after the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Liberty Square, when we had our first post-raid General Assembly. When the thousands of supporters who filled the park necessitated three waves of the people’s mic. When our voices together echoed not just down the park, but up into the sky as the buildings caused the sound to ricochet off their glass walls.
And so I say to my friends who still dwell behind the Wall: come join us. The spoils of money can never match the joys of community. When you’re ready, we’ll be here.
Everyone is talking about the Goldman guy who quit, he wrote this (reactions here):
"I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.
Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons."
This strikes me as economically naive. Is it at least possible that the culture at Goldman has changed (I am not myself committing to any assessment here of GS) because profit maximization dictates such a shift? What are a few possible models?
1. Income from trading has risen in importance, relative to income from clients, and if you can do well trading you will make money, whether or not you are a jerk.
2. Greater competitiveness lowers levels of service quality for efficiency wage-like reasons. GS can no longer play the role of high mark-up, precommit to high-quality, monopolist.
3. We have moved to the “used car” equilibrium. You know they are screwing you over, or trying to, but leaving for the guy next door simply replicates the same basic incentives so you stay put and fight back best you can.
4. The current interest rate spread means they don’t have to try too hard.
Anything else? Those are possible mechanisms, not factual claims about the world. In any case, I am suspicious of his impulse to blame it all on a sudden shift in the moral propensities of the people he was working with.
Clients know in principle that every time they do a trade with Goldman, Goldman makes money. But they don’t know how much money Goldman makes on those trades. And Goldman is extremely good at structuring deals which can’t easily be replicated by combining various liquid derivatives. In turn, that gives Goldman pricing power — so much power, indeed, that in some instances the bank will go so far as to insist that if the client attempts to get independent pricing for the contract in question, then the whole deal is off.
Smith has been in this business for 12 years, and he’s done extremely well by it. And to a certain extent, if the people who work for him are constantly asking how good a deal is for Goldman, rather than how good the deal is for Goldman’s clients, then that’s because of the example he set. What’s missing in his op-ed is any sense of mea culpa, any sense that he was at all part of the problem.
There’s a strong smell of faux-naive coming from Smith’s op-ed. “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing,” he writes. “Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.” Here’s a question for him: back when he made videos for Goldman urging candidates to join the company, were the people who got promoted those who had ideas and did the right thing? Or were they the ones who made lots of money for the firm? To ask the question is to answer it.
Apart from the serious ones, here is a chart from Alphaville which is more lighthearted in nature (Click to enlarge):
First and foremost, I would just like to throw it out there that I am far from being dead. This is by far my longest absence in the last two years. I will explain why in the near future, but until then, here are some pickings from the recent weeks.
I have written before about the tough lives of investment bankers (here, here and here) and also about the fat paychecks.
Just a
couple of days ago, an ex-employee at Goldman Sachs wrote an op-ed in the NewYork Times, exposing a glimpse of what he thought was a toxic culture that was
prevalent at Goldman, which I am sure could be easily extrapolated to other
investment banks on Wall Street:
“To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of
the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks
about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most
important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue
to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out
of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with
what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture
was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around
teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our
clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and
allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about
making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something
to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look
around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love
working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the
belief.”
Yeah, if you
think that investment banking has always been a cutthroat business, well, it’s
not. “Teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right
by our clients” may sound like a bunch of hogwash now, but investment banking
was borne out of a need to match savers with creative people who are in need of
funding. And Goldman Sachs was the defender of the bullied back then, and far
from being the bully. If you don’t believe me, read “The Culture of Success”.
It is a well-written documentation full of insights into Goldman Sachs’ history from its inception
until its IPO in 1999.
With the huge readership of the New York Times, nothing less
than a furore was expected from the public as well as Wall Street. For starters, there is parody of the op-ed going around with Darth Vader choosing to leave the Empire.
The op-ed
even got a reply from the CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, and President, Gary Cohn:
In a company of our size, it is not shocking that some
people could feel disgruntled. But that does not and should not represent our
firm of more than 30,000 people. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.
But, it is unfortunate that an individual opinion about Goldman Sachs is
amplified in a newspaper and speaks louder than the regular, detailed and
intensive feedback you have provided the firm and independent, public surveys
of workplace environments.
Blankfein goes on to admit that Goldman Sachs is not
perfect, and is working on improving its culture, if you believe him:
We are far from perfect, but where the firm has seen a
problem, we’ve responded to it seriously and substantively. And we have
demonstrated that fact.
I don’t know what to make of this statement. From an analyst’s
standpoint, it appears to be intentionally vague. They have definitely responded
to “this problem” by issuing this reply as damage control. I don’t necessarily
see a sense of true self-reflection, realization and most importantly,
repentance. Forgive me, but it seems very hard to trust a man who claims to be
doing “God’s work”.
As for the survey, it is hard to justify a survey result
that claims that 89% of the employees at Goldman Sachs are satisfied with the
jobs. When a company is filled to the brim with like-minded gold-chasers, it
would not be unexpected to see that they are completely satisfied with being
where they are. It is merely a diversion from the crux of the matter, which is
the toxic culture at Goldman. Job satisfaction was never in question at
Goldman. The survey should in fact ask, “Why did you join Goldman Sachs?”, and
I can bet you a nickel that more often than not, the answer would be something
along the lines of “BIG bonuses”.
This culture of seeking big bonuses is now so entrenched
that pretty much any worker at Wall Street feels that they are entitled to it.
Bonuses are no longer seen as a privilege, but an entitlement. This will be the
topic of discussion in the next issue.
I soon discovered that I did not land myself a job but a 24/7 personality referred to as the investment banker. I was like a doctor on call.
My day would typically start by waking up early morning to chat with a client in Hong Kong. And I ended the day staying up really late to chat with the one from US. In between, my life was interspersed with mundane tasks of presentations and photocopying, with miniscule doses of financial engineering and power games.
Let me explain.
Investment bankers are experts at calculating what a business is worth. To arrive at this figure, they use something known as the Discounted Cash Flow method.
For the uninitiated, this is a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of an investment opportunity. It is such a sensitive tool that, by just changing a variable or assumption, you would be able to get a completely different figure. You could value a company at Rs 100 crore or Rs 1,000 crore.
It actually was up to me!
This made me feel supremely important, despite the fact that I had to pore over coma-inducing spread sheets.
And, of course, when you discuss mergers and acquisitions, you only meet with the big brass. Getting a handshake from these guys and having them listen to my every word and detailed analysis would set my adrenaline soaring.
Our job also entailed raising capital (money) for companies. This was not much fun. I had to dress up a company and then present it to private equity investors or venture capitalists and even the public, if we were floating Initial Public Offerings.
Basically, we had to sell a company, whether we truly believed in it or not. Often, I found myself pushing deals with clients that I knew would not work. I became a salesman to the core.
Investment bankers also excel in paperwork. Whether it was a prospectus for an IPO or whatever deal, we had to ensure that the figures were accurate and the language legally perfect. We had to scrutinise every word and then make hundreds of photocopies (alright, I am exaggerating, but only slightly).
And, if it was merger or acquisition that we were working on, the paperwork assumed such gigantic proportions that a room had to be hired -- called the data room -- whose sole purpose was to store the photocopies.
There were periods when I managed to catch just four hours of sleep daily.
Whoever said that investment banking is not about money but about the game of acquiring it (a popular saying among investment bankers) was lying through his teeth.
It makes you wonder how you sleep at night. Well, if you are an investment banker, you don't have time to worry about such things. You are basically too tired to think about moral hazard. Whenever you leave work, you can only think about sleep. And the year-end bonus.
What I loved about the job was the money.
The salaries and bonuses were obscenely luring. (A fresh MBA, with absolutely no job experience, could earn between Rs 3,00,000-Rs 6,00,000 per annum (the latter if you are from a top-notch business school like the IIMs).)
The salaries gave purpose to my life and the bonuses (which could go up to three to five times the annual salary) made up for the crap I had to put up with. And, yes, believe me, there was lots of crap.
Let me tell you something about the bonuses.
Like I mentioned earlier, it can be breathtakingly inflated figure. To get it, you have to do two things.
The first: Work like a dog to contribute to the profits.
If you are passionate about teamwork, investment banking is certainly not the place for you. It is more of a dog-eat-dog culture. You are on your own. Since you are paid according to the deals you cut, it works out to be a very individualistic environment with everyone jockeying for a large slice of the bonus cake.
The second: Suck up to your boss.
That's right. Be a sycophant, even if he is insufferable.
Smile at him.
Say the right things.
Nod when he makes a good point.
Don't disagree too much when he does not.
Grovel at his feet.
Your bonus is not going to be calculated according to some predetermined formula. It is solely dependent on your boss' whims and fancies.
Back in the day when I was growing you, everybody who was somebody wanted to grow up to be an actuary. We were all told that being an actuary was like going to the promised land. The pay is amazing, and it is pretty much the most challenging job in the world. What better way than this to tell other people how smart you were.
Just say "I am an actuary", and pretty much every one who could understand what the word meant would go gaga over it. But that was back in the day. In our world today, at least before the 2008 financial crisis, being an investment banker was the new actuary.
When you think about an investment banker, you think about a suave gentleman/lady in a suit on weekdays, and sipping margaritas (or whatever) in Iceland on weekends.
Here's a chart showing why so many people want to become an investment banker, courtesy of THEiBanker.com:
It's a little small to fit into the column but you can click on the chart to enlarge it.
Some people know they want to work in finance from a young age. True, it’s rare but when you meet them in a bank you’ll recognize it. More often than not they’re very sharp. Everyone in the team will either love or hate them. There is no in between. At a junior level (i.e. analyst / associate) they are typically the guys who make far fewer mistakes in presentations and models, digest information and data the quickest and generally appear to feel most at home in the building. It is almost a given that they’ve breezed through their finance studies in university. Some of them probably could have joined a bank straight from school rather than attend university.
When these worshippers of finance walk across the trading floor or past the Head of M&A’s office they’ll fight hard to keep a stupid smile from manifesting itself. They cannot help it…the trading floor is like a playground for them…the Head of M&A’s office like a throne. And if receive a nod of acknowledgement from the man inside that office they may rush to the bathroom, lock themselves in a stall and cry out of joy for the job they consider a blessing. They probably hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Spring!) in their heads when they walk around the bank on a busy Monday morning. Or perhaps Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – the part where the entire ensemble comes together in joyous harmony.
For these special souls, the enjoyment they derive from reading the Financial Times on a Friday morning is tantamount to a sustained mini ejaculation.
Emphasis mine. However, sometimes, the price they pay is huge:
The people in this group are those who’ve planned the mission from day 1. They have given themselves two or three years to immerse themselves in that world, work like a horse, learn as much as possible about finance, hone their presentation and Excel skills, add some eyebrow-raising bullet points in the resume / cv and get out before it’s too late.
Once the tour of duty comes to an end they tend to head back to university for graduate studies, launch a start-up, spend a year backpacking around Latin America flirting with locals and smoking some good shit, set about writing an ebook they’ll make available for download on a personal blog for $39.99, move into an Ashram in Uttar Pradesh and massage each other thinking it will lead to enlightenment and practice minimalism, etc.
Sadly, only some of the people who swear an oath to the tour of duty on that very first day fulfill their mission. Everybody reading knows what I’m talking about. To those in the business: how many times have you told yourself, ‘just one more year…just one more bonus’? To those who have friends in the business: how many times have you heard them insist they’ll soon leave their job? Most end up MIA (missing in action). Once behind enemy lines and captured people slowly forget the original plan, easily overshadowed by the perks of the job. That is precisely what happened to Carlos, a friend of a friend.
He was on a two year plan. So he said. Six years later – though you’d think it more like 15 years looking at his face and what’s left of his hair – he still insists departure is imminent. A few months ago I ran into him in a lounge in New York. Rihanna’s What’s My Name started to play and he began to dance. You could call it that…if you were looking through a kaleidoscope. In some parts of the world he’d get violently beaten with a dead monkey and have his head shaved with a butter knife for looking that bad.
He used to dance with a modicum of style. But after sitting on a chair crunched over a computer 12+ hours per day modelling on Excel for six years a few screws go loose.
Economists very often say that interest rate is the "price" of money. Reading all this would make you think otherwise. Why are we after money so badly? What would we do to get money? Just recently, I watched an interesting movie called "In Time". It is very hard to spoil the movie for you, especially since the elements are not entirely unpredictable for an ardent movie buff, but the concept was pretty interesting nonetheless.
It is set in a future where time has become the currency and not money. Every single person has a nano-chip embedded in them which shows how much time they have to live. And that is the currency for any transaction they wish to make. Check out the trailer:
It kind of begs the question, why do they have to try so hard to live? Is it just pure instinct? Or is there a higher purpose? What would you do if you had all the time in the world? Or all the money in the world?
For those of you who think that investment banking is all jet-setting glamour, don't be naive. Here is an account of the life of an ex-investment banker (What life?):
"In the first year I would work from 9.30 am till 3am, every day. You keep telling yourself, this is going to get better. But it doesn't, not really.
"Compared with my years in university I have learned so much more in the past two years, so much more. Then again, given my 18-hour work days, these were actually four years. Basically M&A teaches you to truly understand a company; to analyse it the way a doctor would with a human body. You build models of how the company operates, where it might improve in the future, and how. It's genuinely stimulating work.
Really, read through the whole article. Here is more:
"I used to be the kind of person who enjoys life, who gets up in the morning eager for another day. The past two years I found myself changing. I lost my interest in politics, in sports … I began to wonder: what's happening to me?
"My flatmate is in finance too. I've seen him coming home crying, from exhaustion, from something that happened to him. Why are we doing this to ourselves? My sense is that the majority of the people in finance have an urge to prove themselves. And banks offer a platform where they can do so. I feel there's a particular kind of insecurity to many bankers, a form of neediness and a deep desire to compensate. Love?
"Many people in banking try to project an image of perfection, and banks play to that, trying to make you look perfect and feel invulnerable. It's very easy to get hooked to that life, to become addicted to work and the money. I am sure it would have happened to me, had I done this work for too long.
"Imagine. 25 years old, and in my first year I made £45k plus a 70% bonus. So over 75k, one year out of university. That is quite something, let me tell you. But within six months you get used to it. I would spend £250 on a night out, and think nothing of it, spend £100 on dinner and genuinely think to myself: well, that was not too expensive.
"This was a lesson: it doesn't really matter how much you make, because your lifestyle and expectations move up with your income.
The Barclays chief executive has imposed a "no jerks" rule at the bank.
Bob Diamond said "jerk" bankers were epitomised by an infamous 2002 episode in which six Barclays staff ran up a £44,000 alcohol tab over lunch at a London restaurant.
"Everyone gets stressed from time to time but no one should ever not be nice. You know what a jerk is when you see it," he said.
In an interview with the Times, Diamond said the rule applied to bankers considered to be prima donnas, too greedy, too ostentatious or poor team players. He said he had already kicked out 30 staff for breaking his new ethics rule.
