Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits (13 page)

“A SIX-INCH TURKEY
on wheat, please, and could you cut it in half?” Samson White asked the Subway sandwich artist.

Samson, who had just started his second year as a Goldman Sachs mortgage analyst, was watching his calories, and he planned to eat only three of the six inches now, and save the rest for his next meal. He’d been forced to adopt a hardcore diet by a bet he’d made with two of his Goldman colleagues back in June about who could lose the most weight before Labor Day. Samson, who had started the contest at 226 pounds, was supposed to get down to 200; if he didn’t, and the others reached their goal weights, he would have to buy each of the winners a round-trip plane ticket to any destination in the world. To avoid having to pay up, Samson had been working out like a fiend, logging five or six miles a day on the treadmills in Goldman’s gym. He’d already lost about fifteen pounds, and was on pace to reach his goal and win the bet.

It helped that Goldman, like many Wall Street firms, gets relatively sleepy in the summer, as executives escape to their homes in the Hamptons and the capital markets slow to a crawl. That summer, there was some economic activity—mainly, a brewing calamity in Europe, where the European Union was threatening to fall apart and bailout talks for struggling countries were in a perpetual state of flux. But unless you were an interest rate trader or dealt with European clients, there wasn’t a ton of work to go around.

When not doing cardio workouts, Samson spent much of his summer thinking about his next move. He was still disenchanted with Goldman, and still not sure he would stay on for a third year after his second was up. The countdown clock on his bedroom wall had dipped into the two-hundred-day range, and Samson often considered whether, when it struck zero, he might actually pull the trigger and quit, even if he didn’t have a backup plan. He hated most of his colleagues—found them dull, petty, and frustrating to be around—and he’d long ago lost the desire for becoming a Goldman lifer. But the thought of leaving the well-paying womb of “Mama Goldman,” as some employees called it, still made him queasy.

Recently, another second-year analyst named Colin had begun asking Samson if he’d ever want to launch a tech start-up together. Colin was an incurable hustler, and he often came by Samson’s desk to pitch him on his latest half-baked business idea. But Colin’s latest idea had become an obsession. It was a mobile app that would do secondary-market ticket sales for concerts, sports games, festivals, and other events. He had done some research into the ticket industry and thought that there was a lot of money to be made by undercutting giants like StubHub on fees and offering a better mobile purchasing experience.

Samson laughed at most of Colin’s business plans, but the more he thought about the ticketing app, the more he thought it sounded brilliant. He often read tech blogs, and he was curious about what it would be like to try starting a company. He liked the idea of taking a chance on an unproven idea and the romanticism of betting the farm. Building a start-up would allow him to put his financial skills to a use that didn’t involve padding Goldman’s bottom line. It would get him away from his bosses and colleagues, who were making life increasingly unbearable. And maybe, for once, it would let him feel good about his work.

While Samson was contemplating a career switch, Jeremy was sunning himself in the Hamptons.

Jeremy had gone in with more than a dozen other first- and second-year Goldman analysts on a house share in Westhampton, a tony beachside enclave roughly two hours from the city. Every Friday, the young Goldmanites and their friends and significant others would pile onto the Long Island Railroad or the Hampton Jitney and head to the beach, where they would swim and drink by day and head to clubs by night, before coming back to sleep on floors, couches, and air mattresses sprinkled throughout the four-bedroom house. Packing dozens of people into a relatively modest house wasn’t the over-the-top experience many older and richer Hamptons summer home owners had, but it kept their costs down to just over $1,500 a person for the whole summer, and it allowed them to invite their friends to “my Hamptons house,” which was half the fun.

Jeremy loved his weekends in Westhampton. He could drink on the deck, overlooking the bay, or play pickup basketball in the driveway, all while surrounded by his favorite classmates. And to top it all off, he’d met someone. She was a Morgan Stanley analyst who had come out to the Hamptons with a Goldman friend one weekend, and the two of them had hit it off. They’d gone to a venue called the Southampton Social Club together, listened to an eighties cover band, hooked up afterward, and spent the entire weekend by each other’s sides. (Eventually, they began dating, and stayed together for the next year and a half.)

Jeremy welcomed the distraction from work. He’d never truly forgiven his most antagonistic boss, Penelope—the one who resembled Julia Roberts in looks and Genghis Khan in personality—for making his life miserable that spring. But he’d spent more time working for her on several subsequent assignments, and as he saw her work, he came to a realization that made him feel less hostile toward her: she was deeply insecure.

Sure, Penelope was a great self-promoter, and she’d assembled an all-star book of clients that included some of the biggest hedge funds and pension funds in the world. Some high-ranking people at Goldman thought she was indispensable. But Jeremy saw something poking through her resilient exterior: fear. He saw that after the financial crisis, Penelope, just like him, just like Samson, just like everyone at Goldman Sachs, was concerned first and foremost about protecting herself.

At the height of his anger that spring, Jeremy’s behavior toward Penelope had bordered on sabotage. He would shuffle his feet on projects to create more work for her, and speak to clients he knew she was fiercely protective over. Once, after she ordered him to go to the lobby to pick up a pizza she’d ordered for the group, Jeremy gave the delivery guy a $30 tip on a bill of $20, and charged the entire $50 to Penelope’s personal credit card. But the realization that she was being cruel because she herself was scared of failure had softened Jeremy’s antipathy.

Jeremy and I saw each other several times that summer, and each time, Penelope was the primary topic of conversation.

“Do I really want to be sitting around for three or four more years doing Penelope’s bitch work?” he asked me during one chat.

Jeremy had by that point begun thinking about what to do the following January, when his second bonus hit. He knew he would have options—coming from Goldman, you always did—but he didn’t want to take just any other job. He wanted something that would be entrepreneurial, that would allow him to take the things he loved about his Goldman job—selling, solving problems, working with large companies—and transport them to a new, more humane endeavor.

In late summer, Jeremy and Samson came up with a plan to try to piece together some of the fragments that had shattered during their individual existential crises, and get some guidance on what to do next. The plan involved hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Jeremy had done shrooms once in college, but Samson had never touched any drug harder than marijuana. Jeremy assured him that it was a gentle experience, and Samson agreed to give it a try. So, on a Saturday morning, they convened at Jeremy’s apartment, made two peanut-butter-and-mushroom sandwiches, and went to Central Park to spend the day tripping.

For the next six or seven hours, Jeremy and Samson lay in the grass, contemplating their lives and the world around them. Samson, who was having his first-ever hallucination, spent much of the morning watching ants move on the ground and thinking about the complexities of life as an insect. What were bug societies like? Did they feel happiness and sadness? How did they pick their leaders?

After Samson’s bug-watching session was over, he and Jeremy returned to more familiar topics: money and capitalism. Their conversation wandered to the observation that money was a unit of account for your labor, and nothing else. It had no inherent value apart from the work that you did, and it meant nothing more than that you had performed some kind of work in order to get it. (They later assured me that these points sound more incisive if you’re on shrooms.) They also discussed the limits of capitalistic thought, and the need for mindfulness in a busy and transactional world.

“I feel like people in New York don’t know how to relax and just
be
,” Jeremy said.

“Yeah,” Samson concurred. “People here always have to be doing something or going somewhere. Like, just
be
.”

Near the end of their day, while still lying in the grass, and periodically marveling at the shapes of the clouds overhead, Samson and Jeremy began discussing work.

“Dude,” Jeremy said abruptly. “Are we crazy to think there are better things we can be doing with our lives than Goldman?”

Samson laughed. “Yeah, we’re crazy, but
everybody’s
crazy. We’re all just hiding it.”

The trip wasn’t exactly
Easy Rider
, and it didn’t soothe anybody’s nerves. Even in the fog of hallucination, it seemed, neither Samson nor Jeremy had been able to escape Wall Street and the obsessions it wrought.

CHELSEA BALL,
the freckle-faced Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst, looked down at her hands, which had been taped by her coach an hour earlier. She glanced out at the dingy floor of the boxing gym, where several of her friends were drunkenly cheering her on. She looked at her opponent, a tall brunette in the red corner. She felt her head spin.

Chelsea had never boxed in a real match before. But recently, as her job had slowed down, a colleague had convinced her to take up the sport. She joined a gym, signed up for her first fight, and started training with an old legend of the New York amateur boxing scene. Her coach gave her a nickname—“Wrecking Ball,” a play on her last name—and began getting her ready for the fight.

The regimen had been brutal. She’d had to lose about ten pounds to make weight, and spent the days leading up to her debut running in her sweatsuit and consuming nothing but popcorn and water. As a result, she was beyond tired when it came time for her match, and she didn’t know if she could stay standing through all four of the allotted two-minute rounds. But she was determined to put up a good fight, if only to notch one small victory in a year that was shaping up to be the worst of her life.

In March, she’d broken up with Anton, her long-term boyfriend from Georgetown. She’d decided she could no longer swing the monthly trips to D.C. to see him, and as she spent more time in New York, she began to yearn for singledom again. The breaking point had come during a night at the Patriot Saloon, when Chelsea began flirting with a guy in a blue button-down shirt. He bought her drinks, they danced together all night, and she felt, for the first time in many months, real attraction. Nothing physical ended up happening, but the sensation was enough to signify to Chelsea that her relationship with Anton was no longer working. She’d called him the next day to deliver the bad news.

With the burden of a long-distance relationship off her shoulders, Chelsea poured herself into her work on the muni bond desk at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. But that, too, was largely a disaster.

Ralph, her boss, who was known by Chelsea and her fellow analysts as “the Mad Hatter,” was still an odd, tumultuous manager. He had overseen several recent projects of Chelsea’s, and each time, he made it clear that he was more interested in protecting his job and his turf than producing actual results. He also had a bad habit of assigning Chelsea multiple small projects, then demanding that she take care of them all immediately.

“Ralph, I can’t do all three of these things at once,” she’d told him once, after he’d assigned her yet another stack of tasks at 8:00 p.m., on his way out the door. “You can yell at me if you want to, but if you realistically want me to accomplish one of these three things, I can’t do it like this.”

That was the most confrontational Chelsea ever got at work. Most times, she simply let out her aggression after work at the boxing gym, imagining that the speed bag she was punching was Ralph’s head.

Chelsea got her first bonus that summer. She knew it would be bad, since Bank of America Merrill Lynch had struggled that year (and every year since the crisis), and since Ralph had conducted her review. And while she considered herself a decent analyst, she knew there were many analysts who were smarter than she was, for whom Excel models and swaps calculations came more easily. So she wasn’t totally surprised when she landed in the bottom bucket, with a bonus of $25,000—bringing her yearly compensation to $95,000.

A disappointing bonus wasn’t unexpected, but it was annoying. She knew Ralph considered her a sloppy worker, but she also knew that he was no stickler for details himself. She had hoped that someone further up the chain would recognize the impossible situation she was in and decide to give her a break. But with no such break forthcoming, Chelsea had simply shrugged it off and put her head back down on her projects.

She had been thinking, even before her bonus hit, about leaving the bank after her second year. She hated working under Ralph, and her lofty idealism about the work she was doing had dissipated into a mass of frustrations with the minutiae of individual projects. The slow municipal bond markets meant that she had gone to fewer client meetings recently, and without the regular reminders of who was on the other side of the bank’s transactions, she found it hard to conceive of these deals as ones involving real people, with real-world consequences.

Chelsea’s dilemma was common among the Wall Street analysts I spoke to. Despite Wall Street’s reputation for craven profit seeking, many of them had come into finance with high-minded aspirations of making the world a better place. Much of their eagerness was a product of the recruiting pitches of Wall Street banks, which often played up their philanthropic and community service work in an effort to assuage the consciences of college students with moral reservations. But once they got to Wall Street and began working, that do-gooder façade often melted away, revealing the moral vacuum underneath.

It wasn’t that working on Wall Street was inherently immoral. For most analysts, it was exceedingly rare to be asked to rip off a client, or concoct a bald-faced lie about a deal. What Wall Street was, I heard over and over again, was completely amoral. It had no regard for whether a given deal represented a net good or a net loss for humanity. All that mattered was the revenue. If a bank could make ten billion dollars by spreading malaria vaccines throughout Africa, it would do it in a heartbeat. And if a bank could make ten billion dollars by spreading malaria itself? Well, the idea might at least be floated.

Chelsea had gotten jaded about the morality of finance early in her career, when Bank of America took a number of its summer interns to a community service day at a local school. The group was tasked with doing some basic landscaping—pulling weeds, planting trees, arranging soil beds. It was an easy enough assignment, but Chelsea found, to her amazement, that no other interns were willing to lift a finger to help.

“I have never seen more people disgusted to get their hands dirty in my entire life,” she told me. “There were like two hundred kids just standing there, looking at their BlackBerrys and being like, ‘I really want to get back to the office.’ I was like, ‘Are you guys kidding me? Is this a joke? You’re out in the sun, doing something good for the community, and all you guys want to do is go back and sit at your desks?’”

That narrow-mindedness turned Chelsea off most of the people she knew at her bank, and made her hesitate before recommending investment banking to people a year or two below her in school. To her, the great tragedy of Wall Street wasn’t that it was evil and greedy, but that it was fundamentally boring, a place populated by the kinds of uncurious corporate drones who had no lives outside of work, who watched CNBC out of personal interest and considered Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investor letter the ne plus ultra of high literature. It was those people—and not insider-trading felons, book-cooking CEOs, or sneering plutocrats—who made her want to run screaming from the finance world.

Whenever Chelsea contemplated building a career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she thought about Wendy, a vice president in her group. Wendy was a notorious workhorse, and she routinely pulled hundred-hour weeks, which was typical for a first-year analyst but unheard-of for someone who, like her, was in her mid-thirties, with a husband and a toddler, and who commuted from the New Jersey suburbs every day. Wendy’s work ethic had become a concern during her pregnancy, when she insisted on staying at the office past midnight even during her third trimester. At one point, Ralph had even stepped in, ordering her to leave at 7:00 p.m. every night. Wendy had grudgingly complied, and had her baby several weeks later. But after a three-week maternity leave, she came back and hadn’t let her foot off the gas since.

Chelsea admired Wendy’s work ethic, and her refusal to be put on the “mommy track” after her pregnancy. But every time she thought about following in her footsteps, she recoiled. A life spent in constant go mode, and a career that consisted of subordinating her every worldly desire to other people—to
these people
, no less—was not what she wanted.

Later that summer, I met Chelsea and several other analysts in her group at a bar in Murray Hill. It was pub quiz night, but none of them wanted to play. They were all more interested in gossiping about their third-year plans. Chelsea’s best friend at work, who worked in a related fixed-income group, said she’d be making at least $150,000, including her bonus, if she stayed for a third year. Another fixed-income analyst said he was going to try and re-up for a third year as well. But Chelsea, who rested her chin in her hand on the bar, couldn’t muster any enthusiasm at all.

“I don’t mean to act like a rebel,” she said, “but I don’t want to stay.”

The other analysts looked at her curiously.

“I know I sound like an asshole,” she continued. “I just really don’t want to be here.”

That disenchantment stayed with Chelsea as she got her subpar bonus, and—in an attempt to find some other sources of happiness—took up boxing. She’d poured every emotion she had into her training, and more than once left a workout in tears, having spent the previous two hours channeling her deepest frustrations and feelings of inadequacy into punching as hard as she could.

Now, in the ring for her first match, she was trying to drown out her work-related anxiety and focus only on the brunette in the opposite corner. The bell sounded, the referee signaled the start of the match, and Chelsea felt herself snap into focus.

During the first two rounds, the brunette got in some good blows. Chelsea was nervous, and it showed—she danced around, avoiding her opponent’s jabs and not landing many of her own. But in rounds three and four, she finally gained her footing and began to let loose. She got in some solid body shots, avoided the brunette’s big swings, and, in the fourth round, landed an uppercut that nearly broke the opponent’s nose. At the end of the fourth round, the fight went to a decision, and the referee decided in Chelsea’s favor by a handy margin.

Chelsea’s friends in the crowd roared. They chanted her nickname—“Wreck-ing Ball! Wreck-ing Ball!”—over and over again, as the referee raised her hand in victory. After the match, they took her to a local bar, where they bought her tequila shots and toasted her success.

The next day, after eating a huge meal and sleeping off her hangover, Chelsea looked for a place to put her first-ever boxing trophy. It was roughly three feet tall, and it would dominate her sparsely decorated bedroom. But Chelsea didn’t care. She hoisted it up, placed it on her bedside table, and smiled.
I still have value
, she thought.
I’m still good at something.