American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
... do I really need a third-rate rehash of Michael Lewis, when every financial journalist out there has repeatedly pointed out how well Liar's Poker holds up for the current debacle? Happy to hear I'm wrong.
This story is similar, but a little different. If you finish reading the article, I think you will find the author has something interesting to add to the conversation.
That's a good attitude to have.
"the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite - the baddest of the bad-asses."
Sounds like a bunch of baloney to me. I never heard of traders being categorized as "derivatives traders" and "non-derivatives traders". There are tons of derivatives contracts out there, and no one knows how to trade all of them proficiently. What I have heard is traders being categorized as "equity derivatives traders", "fixed-income traders", "commodities traders", etc. I once worked at a hedge fund for an equity futures trader. He loved to bash bankers more than anything else... but he also bashed other traders, especially FX and metals traders, who he considered sub-human morons...
Last but not least, I have never heard of an English major trading derivatives. Never. English majors do corporate finance, not derivatives...
[1] former roommate was FX trader, coming from a background in bartending and ski lift operation. Last time I saw him he was renting bicycles to tourists.
This shit is just like Python vs. PHP vs. Perl vs. .NET vs. Java vs. ...
And really, it's boring to do a cultural expose of Wall Street financiers at this late date. It's already been done to death. It was already done to death twenty years ago. We know how people act when they get that kind of godlike money. They important part is how they get it and what the effects are for the rest of us. The interesting thing now is that there's a crowd of powerful, connected, and ambitious people figuring out what to do next. Kinda scary, eh?
This wasn't some multi-national corporation stuck with working with Phil Gramm in order to make a killing in some scheme. UBS went out and actively sought that idiot, and gave him a position of responsibility and leadership.
I have little doubt any multi-national that went out and sought Phil Gramm to lead them was also taking all this decadence to entirely new levels.
You can see this from day one, really. Freshman year in college, while the engineering, arts, and science majors were running around soccer fields doing team-building activities... the commerce majors were getting drunk aboard a lavish yacht on loan from an alum. Go figure, I suppose this starts pretty early.
A close friend of mine was a commerce major... he transferred out after a year to pursue math - he couldn't take the ridiculous egos (and he's a cocky bastard to boot) and the "eye on the money, fuck the plebes, we're better" mentality that his peers seemed to have.
I was pursued by Morgan Stanley and Barclay's for a while for a college internship - I decided to go elsewhere, but even for technical roles, and even before I was offered a job, they were boozing us up and booking expensive restaurants and clubs in town. Glad I stayed out and did a meaningful job instead.
I got the impression there that "commerce" was the end-all-be-all, and that econ majors are the people who actually study this business thing (as opposed to be awesome, network, and be awesomer, and get drunk).
And from the resumes I've seen, a business degree will leave open some pretty uninspiring opportunities. Usually low-end stuff -- assistants with titles other than 'assistant'. Perhaps in Canada, it's different.
Really, how naive are we supposed to believe he was? He was a Wall Street trader but hadn't thought capitalism all the way through to the fact that gasp! factories get closed?
The Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 1999 repealed a big chunk of the Glass Steagall Act, commercial and investment banks were allowed to consolidate.
Since 1999, bankers and traders have been the same thing. That why the entire financial system just came down on our heads. There was no separation these different entities. No firewall between the speculators and the life savings of retirees.
I can't speak for everyone who works in the financial services industry, but when I was in London working at a hedge fund, the word banker denoted someone who did corporate finance (e.g., M&A, IPO's, etc), not someone who works at a bank. All the traders I have met in my life loathed investment bankers, so calling them bankers is the surest way to infuriate them.
Like you said, in the old days, banks did not do trading. Back then, everyone who worked at a bank worked in banking indeed. These days, banks do everything. In fact, a few years ago Goldman Sachs was generating most of its revenue via trading, not via investment banking deals. Therefore, denoting someone who works at a bank by banker is saying absolutely nothing because the guy could be a banker... or a trader, a broker, a quant, etc etc etc.
What I meant when I wrote that traders and bankers are entirely different beasts is that their cultures are totally different, though they might work in the same bank. Traders like to think they're much smarter than bankers, they work less hours, they don't work during the weekends because the market is closed, they cultivate a culture of aggressiveness, and they can be quite rude. Bankers on the other hand have to schmooze clients, obey more social norms, work 90-100 hours per week, put facetime to impress their bosses, and stare at Excel tables until their eyes bleed..,
This feels like bullshit.