The lives of Wall Street's young guns
Every year young, ambitious business school graduates dreaming of wealth and power come to Wall Street. But with job losses mounting in the midst of the financial crisis, things have changed. Amy Scott reports on the world of Wall Street's upstarts.
After working 80-90 hours a week for an investment bank, Sean Moore decided a life on Wall Street wasn't for him. He left his job in the summer of 2007 to travel in Africa. He's now a DJ and aspiring writer in New York. (Courtesy of Sean Moore)
More on Wall Street
Amit Chatwani's book "Damn it Feels Good to Be a Banker," a satire on young Wall Street culture, came out just weeks before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Now the author says the book serves as something of a tombstone marking a bygone era.
TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: It's been said that Wall Street is a young person's game. Each year hundreds of college and biz-school graduates show up in New York dreaming of wealth and power. And what a game it's been.
But thousands of jobs have now vaporized in this financial crisis. A lot of the computer screens on Wall Street might as well be flashing the words "game over." Bonuses have shrunk. Financial firms have cut back their campus recruiting. And the young Masters of the Universe in training may be an endangered species. Here's our New York bureau chief Amy Scott.
Amy Scott: A few years back a video popped up on YouTube. It seemed to epitomize the young banker culture in New York. A 23-year-old financial analyst named AJ sipped a $200 cocktail surrounded by women he called "arm candy."
Video: Thursday night's the night that we ball. I mean, we go top down. Models and bottles.
Models and bottles. Back then young bankers were pulling in record bonuses and dropping the cash on nightclubs and condos.
Amit Chatwani: It's very much been like a work hard, play hard, ball hard kind of thing.
That's Amit Chatwani. You might have noticed how both of these guys used the term "ball."
Chatwani: It's just basically behaving like a rap artist.
Chatwani is not a banker. But when he moved to New York after college he lived with a bunch of finance guys. He set out to satirize their antics on a website he calls Leveraged Sell-Out.
Chatwani: You know, I was just around this culture of egregiousness. You know, you're making maybe like 90-100 grand a year, but you're kind of acting and living like you make like five million. And that's the culture that I thought needed to be captured.
He eventually did that in a book called "Damn it Feels Good to be a Banker." It described an era when 23-year-olds straight out of college made annual bonuses in the high five figures. Guys like Sean Moore. He did a two year analyst program at one of the former big five investment banks.
Sean Moore: You know you go in, and you meet a couple people in your group who are doling out the bonuses and you get a piece of paper and there's a number on it. And I remember just sitting there and staring at this piece of paper and just saying like "Holy [BLEEP]," like, "this is going to my bank account."
The next year, that number was even bigger. This was at the peak of Wall Street payouts. Moore says he did have a few nights out like AJ in the video. One time he and some friends dropped a few thousand dollars buying bottles of liquor at a club.
Moore: But, you know, people who are in the work know exactly what you're going to be doing Monday morning. You're going to go sit in your chair and look at Excel for eight hours and then you're going to print some pitch books and send them to a banker, for the most part. So I think anyone in banking would say they're not necessarily living the dream.
And that's the downside of banker life. Moore says he probably worked 80 to 90 hours a week for a year and half straight. Analysts do all the grunt work behind mergers and acquisitions. Kemper Ohlmeyer worked at another big investment bank, though on the hedge fund side.
Kemper Ohlmeyer: The reason so many bankers, especially the young ones, are such caricatures, is because they have so little free time outside the banking world. So they make the most of it. You go get a Hamptons house during the summer because you want the four weekends you're going to get for the entire summer to be great. Time becomes the scarcest commodity for a banker.
Sean Moore wanted more of it. At the end of July 2007, he left his Wall Street job and has lived off his savings ever since. He did volunteer work in Ghana, took DJ lessons. Now he's writing a book about his experiences. And the world he was a part of isn't at all how he left it. Just weeks after Amit Chatwani's book came out, Lehman Brothers collapsed. Layoffs on Wall Street are forcing a lot of young people to reconsider their ambitions. Generous severance packages and savings help them do it. Matt Fiordaliso lost his job last summer at a hedge fund. He signed up for cooking school.
Matt Fiordaliso: It was going to be finally my opportunity to do something that was enjoyable to me. Eventually I would have loved to own my own restaurant or something like that.
But then an offer came through. A job helping investors value mortgage-backed securities. In the end Fiordaliso says staying in finance was too good to pass up.
In New York, I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace.
Comments
Comment | Refresh
From Boston, MA, 01/11/2009
You have to remember that these are kids, really. They are mid 20's to early 30's. There is no family, yet. They have no other aspirations, yet. They are living a dream of becoming one of the "Master of the Universe". Glamorous NYC! Glamorous job! Sure the hours s*cked but from the sound of the stories they truly loved their job. My only hope is that they have either an exit strategy, or a career path to a more sane and reasonable life. I'm turning 40 this year. If I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now I am pretty sure I'd go a lot bigger in my youth.
From marion, OH, 01/09/2009
I guess if your working 80 hours a week then you should get double your salary. I work 50 a week but get overtime as bonus. Working 80 hours a week is no life. Just remember no amount of money can buy time.
From Nashville, TN, 01/09/2009
Amy Scott's, "The Lives of...Guns". Boy what a sad story, to work 80 hour weeks on Excel and get 5-figure annual bonuses with so little time off. I'm in my mid-fifties and I've worked far too many 80-hour weeks, still doing it. And I've never received a 5-figure bonus. In fact, over the last 10-years most years my companies have given no bonuses at all as we've watched our jobs go to Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Asia, Eastern Europe, and China. And I do real work making real things that people actually buy and use. Hope your savings last a long time, maybe you need to get to the level of the rest of the United States.
Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Marketplace reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.
You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.