Thursday, April 16, 2009

Bankers make shit out of money

I’m not yet one more of those pathetic fuckers that come in the aftermath of the financial crisis to promulgate what everybody already knows: We are fucked. Nor am I an economist or a pundit that pokes around in the open wound to tell you just HOW BADLY fucked we really are.
I am not among those cheap folks. I was above that rat pack. I was a fucking banker.

I quit my job a full year before the financial crisis unfolded. Was I particularly smart? Did I see something others didn’t? Nahh. I was just blessed with infinite luck. I left the house while it just started cracking and smoking, and I left that goddamn house with a fat, fat check.

Now, I am not in the mood for a profound and diligent analysis of all the things that went wrong with the markets and the mortgages. You heard that crap before. I’ll give you a hands-on 101 why the system was rotten from the bottom up, not only from the top down.

What I know for a fact is the following:
* We were paid shitloads of money
* We were really, really paid shitloads of money
* The only way to maintain that flow was to poker.

And poker we did. Right out of business school, after an initial few months spent in various forms of traineeships, we were handed out blank checks and a tap on the butt: “go, get your meat”. We didn’t have years of industry experience, nor did we acquire the wisdom provided by decades of wisely managing rock solid assets such as bonds or treasury notes. We were simply given money and a license to make a killing. In pretty much any asset class. How could you then, possibly, expect the poorest of our class (junior bankers and financiers – still in the six figures) to go for the save assets? We wanted to make money, and we wanted that goddamn money now: That thousand dollar suit. Mine. Those 500 bucks shoes. Mine too. That fucking gorgeous hot blond at the bar. MINE. I tell you only so much: we were hungry, greedy, and horny. A bad, bad mixture.
That, my friends, is the 101 of the bubble. And it won’t stop anytime soon. In a year, two, or maybe even three, when the banks will be salvaged, when the roaring from DC will have vanished, banks will, once more, revert to the business schools to hire their hungry crowds of MBAs. And THE SHOW MUST GO ON.

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