
My Time at Lehman - sakai
http://nickchirls.com/
======
rayiner
"Which, it turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its
simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople) could buy bonds at the
"market" price from intelligent hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same
crap at much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally considered
"sophisticated") pension funds and insurance companies in middle America. What
I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in
was simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors often
teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more
sophisticated investors..."

"'We are important providers of liquidity that create stable financial
markets. We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t do it,
someone else will.' These are the lies that people tell themselves so that
they can buy larger homes."

Both of these things are completely true, and that's why American public
policy is having such a hard time grappling with Wall Street. We try to
rationalize the state of affairs by pointing out all the ways that Wall Street
has an "unfair advantage" but the fact of the matter is that: what do you
expect in a free market system that rewards every marginal advantage other
than wealth to flow from less sophisticated people to more sophisticated ones?
We like the idea of letting everyone transact freely, but we are uncomfortable
with the "winner take all" implication of that policy.

Wall Street: 1) Hires some of the brighest people in the country (e.g. 40% of
the author's class at Yale); 2) Aggressively weeds out that impressive pool by
forcing out all but the most promising people within a few years; 3) Trains
them rigorously and maintains a level of institutional knowledge transfer that
tech companies can only dream of.

Why are we surprised that they disproportionately get the better end of every
transaction?

~~~
crazygringo
> _simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors often
> teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the
> more sophisticated investors..._

Exactly. Wall street and investment have wonderful effects -- funneling money
towards companies that can use it in amazingly productive ways. It provides an
incredibly valuable service.

But the flip side is exactly this, that pension funds, ordinary investors,
etc. wind up getting screwed.

I, for one, don't realy see the problem with Wall St. in itself, but rather --
who on earth is allowing the managers of pension funds to "gamble" with their
money like this? Why should retirement accounts get invested in anything but
government bonds and index funds? Employees get duped because they "trust"
their company to take care of their pension, or "trust" their financial
advisor to give them good advice.

At heart, I think it boils down to a fundamental misguided notion, prevalent
in America at least, that investment is good, that you can grow your money,
that you can outwit the stock market -- when the reality is, that for 99% of
people, investment is just playing the lottery, and over the long run, Goldman
etc. is going to win, because they're smarter than you. Just like, in the long
run, the lottery always wins.

~~~
harryh
If you're investing over the long term and can afford to ride out the shocks
then historically speaking stocks have always out performed bonds. That's not
gambling.

It's not a zero sum game between you & Goldman. In a growing economy everyone
can win by investing.

~~~
nissimk
While cash securities markets (i.e. stocks and bonds) are not a zero sum game,
derivatives markets (i.e. futures, options and all kinds of swaps) are zero or
negative sum by definition. Also, derivatives markets are far larger in size
[1]. There are always 2 parties to each transaction and one makes the money
that the other one loses. The additional transaction fees that go to the banks
and various other operations providers make it negative sum.

[1] <http://www.isda.org/statistics/recent.html#2010mid>

Also see:

[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/worldwide-
derivatives...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/worldwide-derivatives-
market-estimated-as-big-as-1-2-quadrillion-as-banks-fight-efforts-to-rein-it-
in.html)

~~~
skywalk
Can we stop quoting the underlying notional size when comparing size to equity
markets? If you know how a derivative works, it's well understood that quoting
the notional to represent size just doesn't make sense.

To put it simpler, a terminated CDS contract does _not_ mean there is a loss
of wealth equal to its notional, whereas a stock price going to zero in the
equities market literally means you just lost the complete amount you
invested.

Not to sound offensive, but I've heard this comparison way to many times and
it just doesn't add up in terms of prices - most swaps, for instance, have
their fixed leg in the single digits in relation to their notional.

~~~
nissimk
That's certainly true for interest rate swaps, but credit default swaps are
actually quite similar to stocks. For example when Lehman filed and the stock
went to 0, the CDS settled at 91.375 [1] meaning that the protection seller
had to send 91.375% of the notional value to the protection buyer. Yes, in
most cases there is no credit event and even in many credit events the
impairment to the debt is much less than 90%, but also most stocks don't go to
0. This case is a good example because the maximum market cap of Lehman stock
was 60 bln [2], but the CDS market moved 270 bln in the credit event (see
[1]).

[1]
[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aLkOZnNcDmSQ)

[2] [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/lehman-
bro...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/lehman-brothers-
collapse.asp)

------
jwb119
I worked at Lehman from 2004-2008 in investment banking and on the bond
trading floor and I think I have a little more balanced view.

Yes, there are people on wall street that hate their jobs. Yes, there are
people obsessed with money. That's easy to point out. But there are also some
people that are there because they like working with their friends and making
big bets, and getting proven wrong or right. It's actually similar to the
culture of being a contrarian that I see in SV. And as to the point where the
guy felt shorted by a million dollar bonus, wouldn't you feel shorted if you
made the company 10x that in profit on your trades, and all your friends at
other firms that made 10x got a bigger check than you? That's human nature,
not something specific to wall street, even if it's easy to throw up your
hands and say how shocking it is because of the amounts involved.

Anyway, I don't mean to be overly harsh on the article. It's possible my
additional time there put some blinders on, and I still have a lot of friends
that work on the street (a good percentage of whom actually like their jobs).
It was really interesting to get Nick's perspective, and it's especially
awesome that it's from someone else who has jumped over to startups from wall
street. Just throwing my 2 cents in.

~~~
nilkn
> wouldn't you feel shorted if you made the company 10x that in profit on your
> trades

That guy didn't make the company all that money entirely on his own. Lehman
supplied the capital, they get the bulk of the profit. That's how it works.

If he wants the truly big bucks (as if a million isn't), then he should trade
his OWN money. But of course he probably didn't have anywhere close to enough
to do so.

~~~
rayiner
> That guy didn't make the company all that money entirely on his own. Lehman
> supplied the capital, they get the bulk of the profit. That's how it works.

Capital doesn't sit there and make money by itself. The allocation between how
much of the profit the bank gets versus the trader is itself a market
transaction--if the bank low-balls traders consistently, they'll just go to
another bank. If the supply of traders who can do that is low relative to the
amount of capital available to invest, bonuses will go up and traders will
take a larger allocation.

~~~
nilkn
Yes, that's true. In fact, that's true of all employees at all companies (just
replace "trader" with "employee" and "bank" with "company").

However, we do not know that this trader was underpaid relative to other
traders. All we know is that he was unhappy with his bonus. Once you join the
Manhattan rat race, you'll find all sorts of ways to be unhappy with your
bonus no matter how big it is and regardless of whether you are paid the same
relative to your peers or not. In Manhattan, the sky is the limit as far as
apartment prices go, for instance. If you want a place just slightly nicer or
in just a slightly more ideal location, after a certain point that might be an
extra million right there. There's a culture of making everyone constantly
feel poor, especially after a transition in the 1900s where it became hip to
live in the city rather than out of the city.

------
jnewell
I cringed when I read this headline on HN because I too worked for Lehman
between 2006 and 2008. I felt the same way Nick did even around the same time
(wanting to go back to making "real things"). However, lately I feel like I
have come back somewhat full-circle. Many of the issues he complains about is
rampant in almost of every industry.

For example, Groupon was basically taking advantage of unsophisticated small
businesses. How much brain power in SV is devoted to tricking people to click
on ads, "covert users" or become addicted to Zynga-style games? How many
things are sold only because that company has the strongest name-brand even
though better versions exist? Could you have sold the product for less than
the customer paid and still make a profit?

You are almost always taking advantage of a customer in some ways but still
providing a service or product that the customer ultimately wants. WS is just
easy to pick on because they are the most blatant about this practice while at
the same time protected by the government.

~~~
rayiner
Bingo! All the interesting, financially-remunerative jobs these days for
ambitious young people are bullshit. Not in the sense of not creating value
(because I think there is value created in these industries), but because they
are all open to criticism of this sort in one way or another.

Are you a rocket scientist? You probably make your money directly or
indirectly from the military industrial complex. Are you a doctor? You'd make
much less money if the AMA didn't artificially restrict the supply of doctors.
Are you working in Silicon Valley? Your product is either based on ads, or is
a side-project of some company that makes all its money on ads (e.g. Google,
vis-a-vis Glass or self-driving cars).

It's not worth worrying about this shit. Do something you find interesting if
not morally fulfilling, and try to make a lot of money doing it because we
live in a country where your kids can't see a doctor unless you can write the
checks.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Why do people get paid six figures right out of school?

Easy, the people hiring them think they'll make them a lot more money than
that.

------
tomkarlo
I worked at Lehman for 4+ years (left in 2008) and while I didn't feel so
negative about work (I was more senior than the OP) I definitely was in a spot
where I knew that if I kept at it for another 10-20 years -- no matter how
much money I made -- I would feel like I wasted my time.

I went back to tech, and now I have a job where I'm still well paid by any
reasonable standard, and I really enjoy what I work on and who I work with.
Given how much of our lives we spend at work and thinking about work, it can
be a mistake to overvalue compensation as an element in our career decisions.

~~~
mynewwork
I'm always curious when I hear things like "Lehman for 4+ years" because,
based on the numbers thrown around on HN and blogs like this, it seems likely
you could have a net worth over a million dollars.

While not the "F You" money many here dream of, it still seems like a few
years on wall street would give you a nest egg that would make it easy to live
comfortably on any other salary (whether that's tech or teaching or
bartending).

Do many of wall streeters who left after 5ish years do that? Or do most of
them blow all their money? I think being under 30, a millionaire and having
$PRESTIGIOUS_FIRM on your resume would be a pretty good setup, even if the
work itself sucked.

~~~
tomkarlo
That's not generally how it seems to work. For junior bankers under 30
(analysts and associates) you're making good money, but not such great money
that you're putting away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year after your
expenses and taxes. I can't recall ever hearing of someone saying, "I've
worked 5 years, I've saved $500K, but instead of making $500K next year, I'm
going to retire."

Also, the lifestyle (and partner, and kids) that you end up with while making
banker money means that $1M is not remotely "quitting money", because it won't
last long enough. I'd guess most folks would talk about $25M or $50M min for
that in the industry, and you're not saving that anywhere below MD. Bankers
have banker wives, banker mortgages, and their kids have banker tuitions. (One
of my bosses had an $8M mortgage on a $12M home. That's ~$30K in mortgage
payments a month... no way he could quit) I'm not saying anyone should feel
bad for them, just the whole idea of "save up $1M and quit" doesn't make any
sense in reality.

Finally, there's a lot of pride/ego/image folks have in their job and their
job title, for better or worse. Even if it ruins their life. I didn't love
being a banker, but I can't deny it's not fun telling folks you're an
investment banker.

(Also, it's worth pointing out that people don't go work 100 hour weeks for
years on end just so they can quit with $1M. They're doing it to have $10M or
$100M.)

~~~
mynewwork
I absolutely understand that $1M doesn't seem like much while on wall street,
as I said in my original comment it's not early retirement / "F You" money.
For the purely money-driven clearly they keep working and living the
lifestyle.

But for the people who do leave, as you did, and the blog author, and
presumably the others considering which foul acts are better than going to
work each day, I have to think their lives are still on a much easier
trajectory. If you have $500k and hate your life, you can easily take a year
off to figure out a new plan, go to grad school without worrying about cost or
lost wages, start a company, etc. If you hate your job as a dishwasher you
probably don't have a lot of options, but as a wall streeter, it seems like
you should be able to walk away at any point and still be better off than 95%
of Americans.

I guess I just wonder how many people do take that opportunity. $500k makes
you a BSD in most of the US, but if you've only ever known prep school, ivy
league then wall street, I suspect the idea of living and working elsewhere
sounds repugnant.

~~~
tomkarlo
Yes, but you're forgetting that this is a business where pretty much the
_only_ reason you're there and successful is because you're either enormously
ego or money driven. Otherwise you just wouldn't last. Lots of people don't
last very long regardless.

Someone who will work 100+ hours a week -- despite being able to make $200K at
a regular 40 hour a week job -- is not the kind of person who "takes a break"
because they have a little cushion in the bank. These are incredibly hard core
people who spend every minute of their day figuring out how to be just a
little bit more successful than they are right now. Their goals are to make
millions _per year_.

I've worked with people who were worth more than $2B and up and would pretty
much cut your heart out with a spoon if it meant an extra $100 in their
pocket. As another banker pointed out, that's part of why they're worth $2B,
and we're not.

------
danielna
I have a strange sense of sadness for my friends who are "stuck" on Wall
Street. Strange because it's weird to feel sad for someone making $250k+ per
year, but I've heard their first hand accounts of how much they hate their
jobs. If you're the type of person who can step back from the ego-driven
culture of investment banking I feel like everyone reaches the same meta-
conclusions that Nick did. It's just unbelievably hard for them to step away
from the money.

I mean, I'd like to think I would be able to make that choice and that purpose
and meaning would ultimately trump a large paycheck. But nobody's putting
$250k+ in my pocket so it's genuinely hard to say.

Kudos to Nick for leaving. It took guts.

~~~
pekk
Step back from the ego-driven culture of investment banking, into the ego-
driven culture of startups. Hmm...

~~~
motoprog
ding!

------
bjhoops1
"... of my class of 1400 graduates from Yale, forty percent took jobs in
finance."

This reminds me of an interview with the President of Iceland, where they let
their megabanks fail.

Speaking of the downside of having a huge banking sector, he said "... since
then you have seen a great growth period in the Icelandic IT sector, the high-
tech sector, the manufacturing sector, because they could suddenly get the
engineers, the mathematicians, the computer scientists."

Really interesting interview. [http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-
grimsson-icelan...](http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-
iceland-2012-4)

------
retube
I was at Lehman in 2007-08 and saw first-hand the firm implode. But what
interests me was this statement:

"I would spend days attempting to understand the intrinsic value on structured
bonds collateralized with physical jet engines or commercial real-estate
scattered across various regions of the country."

Everybody bangs on about how complicated and opaque products like derivatives
and asset-backed securities are... yet the most complex product of all no one
bats an eyelid at: the share (or stock). The pay-off of a derivative can be
modelled by a mathematical formula (and if not a closed-form solution than via
a Monte Carlo distribution) but the pay-off of a stock - that's quite
different. Modelling future company cash flows is not trivial.

------
anonymoushn
The submitted URL is to the front page of the blog. The URL for the individual
post is <http://nickchirls.com/my-time-at-lehman>

------
lifeisstillgood
_The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some
worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in
Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to
home on our block returning the money._

I think I like his parents :-)

~~~
nchirls
Indeed, they're quite wonderful and I'm very lucky :-)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
:-)

I remember living in Wood Green, a vaguely rough area of London, where people
put the sofas they no longer wanted out in the front garden in case someone
else did.

Anyway, we were getting rid of an Ikea box-case-thing, and stuck it outside,
and a kid of say 11 asked if he could have it, and took it off on a toy truck.

He came back and pushed a card through the door saying thank you (it would be
"just right to keep all my toys in"). I am pretty sure his mum made him write
it, (long story) but we kept that card in the back of various drawers through
maybe two house moves because it was an unexpected example of politeness and
parental guidance.

One of the crazy things that social media might sort out one day is that i
would strongly consider recommending that kid for a job, or university, simply
on the strength of that one act. No idea who or where he is of course but
there we go.

------
samcrawford
I too joined Lehman as a graduate in 2007. My experience was different; I was
based in the London office and was in a back-office role (IT Infrastructure).
I also worked there as an intern in 2005-2006 (or "Industrial Placement" in
Lehman-speak).

I have to say I enjoyed my time there. I primarily worked as a developer in a
non-developer team, but was continually encouraged by management to pursue
this work. This led to work with development teams in other regions, which
really helped expand my horizons.

When I started making money from my website (independent of Lehman and
unrelated to finance) and wanted to start it as a business, I had to approach
legal and my division's MD for approval. They were completely supportive and
again encouraged this work.

The downfall of Lehman was a sad but strangely exciting time for me. I
remember staying up all night on September 14th watching the number of remote
access sessions running, and suspected those users were doing the same as me
and watching Bloomberg for an announcement. The following days and weeks saw a
lot of interesting events take place, particularly from an infrastructure
point of view. Barclays and Nomura (who bought different regions of the bank a
few weeks apart) both rushed to connect their infrastructure to Lehman's,
which resulted in some curious situations I'm still reluctant to mention
publicly!

The most interesting part of it was the transition to Nomura for me. I stayed
on there until mid-2010. It was a very different environment to Lehman. Our
small team was given vastly expanded responsibilities to build out key
services and infrastructure lost during the bankruptcy, and our team truly
operated like a startup for about 9 months. We toiled tirelessly with teams in
other regions to get services online before deadlines, and got a real sense of
achievement out of it.

As things at the day-job settled down, my website became a startup and it was
time to join that full time. Again, management was very supportive
(incidentally the same management as at Lehman).

I look back on my time at Lehman/Nomura with fondness and truly believe my
time there gave me experience I couldn't have received anywhere else.

------
jdross
Not to be too self-promotional, but this is literally the problem we're
solving at Addepar.

15 years ago the power shifted from banks to hedge funds, and then in 2008 it
started shifting to investors. But they still don't have the tools to
understand what's going on.

If you're interested in solving problems like this in an engineering-led
company, please email me. I'd love to talk.

~~~
orangethirty
What are your plans to deal with this?

~~~
jdross
There's a whole lot we don't discuss on the website, which is focused towards
current target customers of the tool we've built vs. our broader goals to
bring transparency to the financial world.

First we've built a (we've been told) very powerful tool to quickly group,
filter, sort, and compute standard financial metrics on a portfolio.
Importantly, we don't care where you own your securities. It can be holdings
from financial accounts, operating companies, homes, art, private options,
manually brokered CDSs, whatever. Shockingly, our customers like to pay us a
fair amount of money for this tool alone!

On the back end this wasn't easy. We have to normalize the incredibly varied
(and often inaccurate) information from banks, third party data providers,
excel spreadsheets and other systems. Reconciliation, all day.

Second, if facebook has a friend graph, we're creating the financial graph by
aggregating ownership across all sources for our customers to analyze and
report on.

At a high level, the financial world (shockingly) lacks a standardized way of
communicating information about ownership and transactions. There are complex
and specific protocols like SWIFT and FIX, but no standard way of saying "this
is what I own, this is what I used to own, this is how it's changed, etc."
Banks each make them up with hundreds of unique data formats, often sent with
COBOL-style headers. It's 30 year old technology.

Long term, we'd like to open this open both as a data format for representing
financial data and as a set of APIs for building tools to interact with
financial data.

To use another analogy, if you wanted to make a phone game in 2004, you had to
build a phone. Then the iPhone came out. If you want to make a program to
analyze portfolio risk in 2013, you need to build out relationships with an
entire network of banks, data providers, and customers. We want to be the "app
store" for those tools.

There are a million other ways to make a platform like this valuable, but I'll
save some of the juicier (and more strategic) ones for personal conversations
if you're interested :)

~~~
orangethirty
Always interested in meeting smart people like you. Shoot me an email. I'm
very into securities analysis.

------
a_p
Investment bankers make money because they are allowed to borrow enormous sums
of money (leverage) to invest. In other words, they are allowed to gamble with
the money of others with very little consequences. There is no other industry
where a company would be allowed to take on that much debt. It's like the old
joke: How do you make a million dollars? Start with _n_ million dollars! Even
if you do make money in finance, your contribution to shareholders is probably
a lot less than it would be in another line of work. Here [1] is an excellent
write up about it.

In 2008, Barclays had over 43 times as much assets as they had equity
(leverage ratio) while GlaxoSmithKline had a leverage ratio of 5. In 2011, GSK
had a return on assets (money made from assets at its disposal) of 15%.
Barclays had a ROA of 0.25%. GSK had a return on equity (ROE) of 67.2%, while
Barclays had a ROE of 6.1%. In the same year, Barclays Capital (investment
bank part of Barclays PLC) had a ROE of 10.3%, but had a leverage ratio of
_55_ and a ROA of just 0.18%. If you paid Barclays Capital employees the same
salary as GSK employees, the pre-tax profits of BarCap would have doubled.
_That_ is why bankers pay should be limited — their ROE would be better
although their leverage ratios are still way too high.

TL;DR version: If you want to work in a field where you generate real value
instead of gambling with someone else's money, find a job where you _make_
things. The world doesn't need more inappropriate math models of finance (no,
the market is not always rational and large volatility is more common than you
think) — it needs real research.

[1] [http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-
charts/economics/uk/banker...](http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-
charts/economics/uk/bankers-dont-have-talent-just-lots-of-borrowed-
money-57728)

~~~
rrrrtttt
I don't know the numbers but I'm not sure using 2008 data gives a fair
picture. If the ROA of Barclays would have been consistently so much lower
than that of GSK, the capital would simply gradually move to GSK. Banks are
not _allowed_ to borrow money, their creditors _want_ to lend them money.
(Presumably because TBTF lending is perceived to be a safer business than
risky development of pharmaceuticals.)

------
plg
some will read this and think: "disgusting. thanks for the honest appraisal of
what it's like... and it's disgusting."

Others will read this and think: "holy crap man, the people that are screwed
by the company still make just under a million! I totally want to work on wall
street. I'll be rich"

It's a jungle out there

~~~
patrickgzill
When Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker he was shocked over the number of people
who contacted him, asking for advice on how to get into investment banking.

~~~
GFischer
I read Liar's Poker, and the above article.

I probably wouldn't like the environment at such bank. But yet, making U$
20.000 a year, a million dollars is the stuff of dreams - 50 years at my
current salary.

The freaking lottery here in Uruguay doesn't give a million dollars !! (the
current Cinco de Oro pool is U$ 125.000)

PD: Yes, I'm quitting as soon as I get something else that pays the bills. I
neglected to stay up to date in tech and am struggling to get a good job on
the open market.

------
PeterisP
"When you’d rather have someone shit on your face than go to work, it’s
probably time to leave." sums up the article.

------
dsdjung
I remember a friend who was telling me that only reason this wall street thing
works is because there are enough not-well-informed people who will continue
to feed money into the market for other well informed people to profit from.
It is about people being in a market that they know very little about in a
hope of making some riches.

------
pisarzp
Great article. I had similar thoughts when I quite my Investment Banking
career.

What I was surprised by in the bank is how many people think that the money
make other people respsect them. They forget though, that most billionaires
are respected for the things they created, not money they made. Money is just
the by-product.

------
mgkimsal
"In what possible reality can someone receive a million dollars and feel as
though they got fucked?"

It's _all_ relative. I've got friends living in $500k homes, and they still
feel the need to keep up with the neighbors, at great expense. Keeping up with
the Joneses is a sure way to be perpetually on edge.

But more to the point, a person in a company like that might get $1m, but
knows the people around them got more for doing less, because they had a
better boss, or knew someone who knew someone. I don't think the dollar amount
specifically was what pissed that person off as much as knowing how much of a
political game the whole thing is.

------
larsonf
"In what possible reality can someone receive a million dollars and feel as
though they got fucked?"

The reality where if you play for the Yankees you do not care if you beat the
Jamestown Little League Allstars.

------
bravura
Not exactly related, but nonetheless interesting:

A blog post by Doc Faustroll (@faustroll on Twitter) on the strain of being
evil, including reference to Dick Fuld of Lehman

"Fuld at least had something of the physiognomy of the raptor, of the beast of
prey, a kind of last remnant of aggressive character."

[http://congruenz.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-strain-of-
bein...](http://congruenz.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-strain-of-being-evil/)

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving

The mask of an evil demon, smeared with opulent gold

In sympathy I see –

Bulging veins on the forehead, expressing

the strain it is to be evil.

-Bertolt Brecht

------
biznickman
"When you’d rather have someone shit on your face than go to work, it’s
probably time to leave." What's unfortunate is that money is capable of
convincing people to stay around in situations where they may even come close
to such a state of mind.

While I'd like to say that I'd leave well before, everybody has a price, and
it sounds like Wall Street is willing to pay it.

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elango
The government needs them, who else is going to buy the bonds issued by these
Governments. For example, in India , only 19(as of Jan 12) fat ass financial
companies are authorized to buy Indian Government bonds at primary market, and
if few of them had to collapse, who would buy it (less competition -> less
demand -> low value)

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hkmurakami
_> What this bizarre reality really meant is that I couldn’t be myself._

Ugh.

In my experience, this is one of the most painful situations to be in (I've
been in one myself, obviously). Pretending like you're someone who you're not
(or worse yet, _feeling_ that you have to dance this dance) is unexpectedly
draining and demoralizing.

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incision
This reads a bit like a hyper-condensed version of Liar's Poker [1].

1: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/039333869X>

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leoh
So awful, being a trader. It seems like they destroy themselves to destroy
others.

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growlerphone
fascinating writeup

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nazgulnarsil
zero-sum all the things.

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ttrreeww
Welcome to modern day capitalism in America.

