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'We are Wall Street - we are smarter and more vicious than [dinosaurs]'

5 points by shrikant 17y ago

dasil003 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
Adam503 17y ago
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-excess--a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-ex...
nailer 17y ago
A lesson: always think your quote through before speaking to journalists lest you accidentally pronounce yourself smarter than reptile with a walnut-sized brain.
zbyszek 17y ago
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.

5 points by shrikant 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

Adam503 17y ago

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

nailer 17y ago

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

zbyszek 17y ago

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.