
'We are Wall Street - we are smarter and more vicious than [dinosaurs]' - shrikant
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/04/30/217381/we-are-wall-street-we-are-smarter-and-more-vicious-than-dinosaurs/
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Adam503
Here's the real story from a former UBS trader from the UK Independent...

American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

Fine wines, lobster lunches and million-dollar salaries – life as a Wall
Street shark was thrilling at first. But amid the extravagance, Philipp Meyer
was sickened by a moral deficit at the heart of America’s financial system

"I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the
balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk.
One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the
lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard.

Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried
it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half
of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been
too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this
before the bank considered us properly trained...."The financial markets
operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish,
self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to
proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to
push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-
interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s
cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist....The fact
is, I became pretty good at making this argument myself. Until a roommate of
mine, a guy named Mark Brewin, asked me: “So is that really what you want to
be? A selfish animal?” “It’s not like we have a choice,” I said. “No,” he
said. “You always have a choice. It’s just easier to pretend that you don’t.”
Ouch. The strangest thing was, this thing I’d wanted for so long, this chance
to become wealthy, was causing me more internal conflict than anything I’d
ever done. I began writing a second novel, about a kid from the provinces who
comes to Wall Street and is both drawn in and horrified by the culture of
excess.

I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as
you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff
like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks,
Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like
Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not
traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy
was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few
desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred
dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port.
There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to
my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it
wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t
really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior
guys could get nicer stuff - Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out
with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a
dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.

What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption
for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink
most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000)...."

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-
ex...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-excess--
a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html)

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dasil003
Translation: "We are more entitled and delusionally grandiose then you. Even
though we don't produce anything and we don't solve any fundamental problems,
the fact that we make money is a service to you. Paper profits equal
prosperity, why can't you peons understand that?"

~~~
nfnaaron
Yeah, you spend a million trading two pieces of paper, and you have two pieces
of paper.

You spend five bucks making a hat, sell it for ten, and someone has a hat to
shade their head. Or a hammer. Or a car. Or a pencil. Or a computer. Or a
defibrillator. Or a softball. Or a picture frame.

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zbyszek
_Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing
landscaping?_

I suspect so. They are tasks where goals are long-term and less quantifiable,
and where the financial rewards are modest, so someone motivated by the
adrenaline rush and high wages of Wall Street may well find it tough. Also,
plants and small children are less easily impressed by all that swaggering
braggadocio.

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nailer
A lesson: always think your quote through before speaking to journalists lest
you accidentally pronounce yourself smarter than reptile with a walnut-sized
brain.

