Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits (18 page)

SAMSON WHITE BARELY
spoke a word of Spanish, but somehow he’d ended up playing the bongo drums in an Argentinean jam session. He knew none of the songs and understood nothing the band members around him were saying, but he kept the beat loyally, and hit the skins of the drums with the heels of his hands until they were swollen and sore, a wide grin on his face the entire time. After one song, a friend pulled him aside.

“Has anybody at this party asked you what you do, or where you work?”

Samson chuckled. “No.”

“Exactly!” the friend said. “Here, it doesn’t matter!”

Earlier that day, Samson and his friend had arrived in Buenos Aires for a nine-day vacation. Samson, who was nearing the halfway point of his second year at his Goldman Sachs mortgage job, had been looking forward to the trip for months. The first night, they found themselves at a house party at the home of a local musician, where they drank and played music into the wee hours with the jam band. In the ensuing days, they would eat massive amounts of steak, drink worrisome quantities of wine, and do something called the “Buenos Aires Pub Crawl,” an all-night tourist affair that was popular with foreign students, who paid 120 pesos for a ticket that allowed them to hop between different bars in the city, drinking shooters and beer at each one.

Samson needed a vacation badly. There were now just ninety-four days left on his bedroom countdown clock, and he was strongly considering quitting the day after his second-year bonus hit. His overall happiness hadn’t improved since the terrible winter of his first year, and he now felt sick every time he got up in the morning for work. Several weeks earlier, in his diary, he’d written:

Samson had spent months e-mailing people he knew who had left jobs on Wall Street in an attempt to gather advice for his next move. He browsed job listings on Doostang and other job sites, and looked into opportunities to work for a San Francisco–based technology education organization.

But what he really wanted to do, he decided, was start his own business. He’d been strongly considering the idea pitched to him months before by Colin, his fellow analyst at the bank, who was trying to rope him into doing a two-man start-up that would sell event and concert tickets through a mobile app.

Samson loved the ticket-app idea and thought it could succeed, but he couldn’t quite get over the fear that leaving Goldman would mean giving up his only chance at stability in a high-paying job. He worried about not having health insurance, about having to scrounge to pay his rent if his savings dried up, and about telling his colleagues at the firm that he was quitting—not to go to a prestigious private equity firm or a hedge fund, but to live a volatile existence as an entrepreneur.

“They’re going to think you’re fucking up,” an ex-Goldmanite friend told him.

“I know,” Samson said. “I hate that what they think matters to me, but it does.”

What bothered Samson more than the prospect of losing his Goldman salary and bonus was that leaving banking before his two years were up would be seen by many of his peers as an admission of failure. Samson took pride in the fact that he’d made it to Goldman, even if he hated his actual job once he got there, and he cringed at the thought of his Princeton friends thinking that he hadn’t been able to hack it on Wall Street. Even though Samson hated the superiority complex of finance, he had still bought into it subconsciously. Building a start-up, even a successful one,
did
feel less noteworthy to him than slaving away at Goldman, even if objectively he knew that wasn’t true.

Samson tried to drown out the voices of doubt ringing in his ears and focus on what was really important. He wrote in his diary:

Several thousand miles north of Buenos Aires, Samson’s friend Jeremy was also struggling with his happiness. After spending much of the summer getting rejuvenated in the Hamptons, he had settled back into his miserable routine at work. His boss, Penelope, was still treating him like garbage and subjecting her underlings to seemingly random freak-outs and blow-ups. Worse than those, though, was that Penelope’s brusque personality seemed to have infected several of the associates and vice presidents in the group. When Jeremy arrived, his team had been largely a genial bunch. Now, hardly a day passed without an analyst being chewed out publicly over a minor offense, or a support staffer ending up in tears due to the unprovoked rage of a higher-up.

Part of what scared Jeremy was that he, too, felt his personality changing as a result of his surroundings and the people he worked with daily. He’d come into Goldman as a soft-spoken, cerebral kid. But in less than two years, he had developed a shorter temper and was quicker to point out others’ mistakes in a way that was often unkind. He was still capable of sucking up to his superiors, but he had little patience for people whose intelligence he didn’t respect.

At first, Jeremy’s sharper, more unsparing personality was subtle. But as time went on, his friends and colleagues began to notice that something about him was different. Even Samson saw it once, during a lunchtime discussion of their weekend plans. Samson asked Jeremy what he was doing on Saturday, then got distracted during Jeremy’s answer.

“What?” he said.

“Dude, fucking listen to me when I talk,” Jeremy snapped.

Samson looked at Jeremy with raised eyebrows, apologized, then slowly went back to his desk. He and Jeremy had always been two of the most laid-back analysts in their class, and they’d bonded, in part, because they weren’t the type to get worked up over small things. But Jeremy, it seemed to Samson, had caught the Goldman bug as well.

To avoid being caught in the circular firing squad in his group, Jeremy had at first retreated to the safety of his desk, where he’d spend hours a day reading the
Economist
, the
Atlantic
, and the
New York Times
, while earnestly hoping that no clients would call.

But the oil market was still fairly active that fall, and Jeremy couldn’t separate himself entirely from the rest of his group. So he came up with a new coping strategy: Every time he felt himself growing angry, he would tell himself, “Don’t get mad. Leave.” And then, instead of letting his emotion spill out, he would spend a few minutes e-mailing a contact outside the finance industry, polishing his résumé, adding a name to his “Escape Routes” list, or doing something else tangible to try to find a new job. This way, he could channel his anger into an effort that would one day help him escape Goldman’s hothouse environment altogether.

That fall, Jeremy’s whispered phrase became a personal maxim. Every day, when the circumstances of his job or the petulance of his coworkers made his blood boil over, he would put his head down, massage his brow, and think to himself:
Don’t get mad. Don’t get mad. Don’t get mad. Just leave.

J. P. MURRAY SMILED
as the plane touched down in New York.

He’d just come back from the best vacation of his life—a weeklong, all-inclusive island sojourn in Barbados, during which he’d gotten far away from Credit Suisse, far from his church in Brooklyn, and the “live fast, die young” mantra he’d adopted in order to make it on Wall Street. In fact, the trip had been so good that his memory of it was already beginning to take on the hazy, mythic quality of a religious experience.

The trip had been made possible by a rule at Credit Suisse that required all employees to take a mandatory weeklong vacation every year. (Later, it was extended to two weeks.) The policy, known as “block leave,” had been instituted not to give burned-out employees a week away from the grind, but to catch traders who were engaged in irresponsible or illegal activity. By making all employees at the bank go off the grid for a week every year, the logic went, supervisors and compliance officers would have time to comb through their trading logs and computer for evidence of suspicious activity. The necessity of block leave had been hammered home by Jérôme Kerviel, the convicted rogue trader who lost more than $6 billion for French bank Société Générale and later told officials that the fact that he hadn’t taken any vacation days in 2007 “should have alerted the management” that something was wrong with his books.

Even though J. P. was a banker, not a trader, he was also covered by the mandatory leave, and he scheduled his for the second week of December. A friend of his had invited him to Barbados for an all-inclusive tour and resort stay. The trip coincided with the Barbados Food, Wine, and Rum Festival, which was held at the ultraexclusive Sandy Lane resort, and which drew famous chefs like Marcus Samuelsson and Tom Colicchio for a four-day festival of wine and rum tastings, cooking demonstrations, and live local music. J. P.’s group had spent the week going on charter boat rides, drinking free rum punch, swimming and snorkeling in a crystalline bay, and going on a personalized “jungle island tour.” For the first time in a year and a half, J. P. was able to put work out of his mind completely.

On his last night in Barbados, he met Melissa. She was half black, half Puerto Rican, with smooth skin, long hair, and a slim waist, and she worked as a doctor at a New York hospital. She was out of J. P.’s league, he thought, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of possibility he got when he looked at her. After a long night of wine tasting, J. P. pulled her aside.

“Hey, you want to take a walk?” he asked. “You can see the stars really nicely from just over there on the beach.”

Melissa smiled coyly, knowing what he was really asking, but she was game. They’d gone on a walk, followed by a starlight kiss, followed by a trip back to J. P.’s room, where they had sex—some of the best of his life—for what seemed like three or four hours straight.

J. P. had replayed the night over and over again on the plane ride. He knew work would be tough when he got back, and he would have to hold on to that memory, and the memory of the entire trip, to tide himself over until next year’s block leave. But despite the inevitable letdown of coming back to rain-drenched New York from a tropical paradise, J. P. was actually looking forward to getting back to work.

He’d gotten over the disappointment of his meager first-year bonus, and he had consoled himself with the fact that this year’s would probably be much better. The year 2011 was shaping up to be a good one in the markets—not nearly as good as the pre-crisis days, but the best J. P. had experienced since he was hired. Already, there was talk of increased deal flow, and of promoting a few of the third-year analysts to associate during the next bonus cycle.

But when he turned on his BlackBerry after a week of inactivity, J. P. got a startle. Among the hundreds of e-mails waiting for him upon his return was a farewell e-mail from an analyst in his class, a kid named Terrance Hawk.

It wasn’t unusual to get an e-mail from a departing colleague. The notes were invariably addressed to the entire division, and invariably contained platitudinous expressions of gratitude, along with contact details at a new bank, hedge fund, or private equity firm. But Terrance’s note had no new contact details, only a brief expression of thanks along with his personal e-mail address.

Terrance had been fired, J. P. surmised. But why? Terrance was an analyst in the health-care group, a hardworking Duke grad who kept his head down. J. P. knew him fairly well, and he wasn’t the type to make mistakes.

Despite the fact that the financial sector was recovering slowly from its crisis-era lows, it had been a very tough year for Credit Suisse. Regulations, slow capital markets activity, and increased capital requirements had eaten into profits, and like many other banks, the firm had been forced to lay off some employees. But J. P. felt certain that nobody he knew would get the boot. For starters, his division—the investment bank—was the most prestigious one at the entire firm. And even if bankers were laid off, first- and second-year analysts would surely be spared. Their labor was cheap, and the marginal savings to be gained from firing them would barely make a dent in the bank’s total payroll cost. For years, it had been an unspoken rule on Wall Street: you don’t lay off analysts. To do so was considered the height of cruelty, the closest thing Wall Street had to child abuse.

Later that night, J. P. called Terrance to get the scoop on what happened. Terrance confirmed that he had, in fact, been laid off, and he wasn’t sure why. All the HR representative had told him was that it was a tough time for the bank, and that they had to reduce the size of his group. Nothing to indicate that he hadn’t been doing a good job, and nothing specific about his performance at all.

J. P. was terrified. If Terrance was getting laid off, it meant that there would be more analysts laid off. And if they were laying off a certain fraction of the class, it wouldn’t matter that he’d made great strides since his disaster of a year-end review. All they’d be looking for was numerical data about who was in the bottom 10, 20, 30, or however many percent of the class. And those people would be gone.

J. P. took solace in the fact that his bosses had scheduled him on some long-term projects during his vacation—not something you do if you’re about to fire your analyst. And the following Monday, he came to work ready to work on his biggest project, a deal involving a midsized pharmaceutical company.

An associate came to his desk in midmorning, and asked for a walk-through of the model J. P. had built, the one they’d be basing the financials of the proposed deal on. J. P. talked him through step by step, fingers flying adeptly on his keyboard as he told the associate that yes, the multiple was in range, that yes, the bridge financing could—

The phone rang. He saw that it was from an unassigned number in the bank. He picked up.

“Hello?”

“Jean-Paul, it’s Elizabeth. Could you meet us in the conference room?”

J. P.’s heart dropped. Elizabeth, the COO of his division, was the woman who had fired Terrance, in just the conference room she was asking to meet J. P. in now. And she said “us,” meaning that there would be more than one person there, just as Terrance had said.

“I…uh…yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”

J. P. stood up from his desk, looked around, and headed to the elevators. He went downstairs and took a walk to calm his nerves. His heart was somersaulting, and his pulse had spiked uncontrollably. After one lap around the building, J. P. went back inside, and rode the elevator back up to the twentieth floor. He put his jacket back on his chair, then walked, terrified, to the conference room.

He knew it was over before he sat down.

“We’ve been going through some tough times,” Elizabeth told him. “And we’ve had to make some tough decisions. Unfortunately, your job has been impacted.”

Impacted
, J. P. thought.
What kind of sanitized, corporate HR bullshit is that?

J. P. left the meeting five minutes later, after having been told about his severance package (three months’ pay) and his other exit benefits (the services of an outplacement firm, which he knew he would never use). He went back to his desk and began stuffing his personal belongings into his Credit Suisse duffel bag. He wrote a farewell e-mail to his entire group, delay-timed it so that it would send at 6:00 p.m., and walked to the elevators.

At the elevator bank, J. P. saw Denise, the second-year analyst who had become one of his only real friends at the firm, and who had taught him much of what he knew about playing the corporate game as a black man.

“Where are you going?” Denise asked.

“I’m gone,” J. P. replied.

A look of panic crossed her face. “What do you mean, gone?”

He gestured to his duffel bag. “I mean, I’m gone.”

Denise began to tear up. Not wanting to make a scene, J. P. hugged her quickly, promised to meet up with her later for a drink, and left the building.

J. P.’s good-bye e-mail went out as scheduled at 6:00 p.m., and by 6:10 his phone was ringing off the hook. He took a nap, then went out with a friend to drink his disappointment away.

J. P. hadn’t counted on making it to his third year at Credit Suisse, but he’d been certain of making it to the end of the second year. He thought there was a rule on Wall Street—you kept your analysts for two years, then gave the ones who weren’t rehired for a third year ample time to figure out their next moves. But the basic rules had changed since the crisis. And J. P. had been caught unaware.

He wasn’t the only one. Across the financial sector, many analysts were being laid off that year as their firms struggled to cut costs and boost their share prices. One analyst who survived the cuts, a Goldman Sachs third-year, explained to me the effect the layoffs had on the psyches of the sector’s youth.

“You’re working with this constant fear,” he said. “You go to this bulletproof firm, it gives you a ton of options, and it’s really self-validating. And then all of the sudden, you have no options, you’re not getting paid nearly as much as you thought, and you might get fired. And then you start thinking,
Well, shit, I could be halfway through law school, and instead I’m in New York dicking around doing models and bottles, and at the end of it I won’t even have that much to show for it
.”

In the weeks following his abrupt layoff, J. P. had several interviews at other financial firms, but nobody seemed to be hiring. He knew that Wall Street was where he wanted to end up, but he was no longer sure how to make that happen. And with his options running out, he was seriously considering switching fields, or going back to business school and getting out of the workforce temporarily.

J. P. and I had lunch at a Thai restaurant in Midtown shortly after his layoff, and he was unusually calm about his situation. Getting fired seemed to have triggered something deep in his cerebral cortex. The guy who had once adopted Rick Ross’s line “Live fast, die young” as his motto was now thinking seriously about slowing down.

“Yeah, I want a job, but at the same time, I don’t think I should let economic ebbs and flows govern what I do with my career,” he said. “I don’t want my career to be a series of jobs I took just to have a job.”

After lunch, J. P. got on a bus to Philadelphia, where he was meeting some of his college friends and spending some much-needed time at home. And as he walked to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, I asked him how he planned to spend the weeks and months until he got back on his feet.

“I’m going to party a lot,” he said. “And I’m going to spend the days thinking about what I want to be when I grow up.”