“Why isn’t the report ready yet? I need it by one!”
Jamie Richardson comes out of his boss’s office and returns to his three computer screens. He doesn’t say anything but the look of exasperation on his face says more than any words could. It’s 12.45 and five hours since he arrived at his desk, Jamie still hasn’t had breakfast. He sits down in his Aeron chair, and glances at his inbox. Sixty five emails are sitting unread. There are 3 voicemails waiting on his phone, and he’s a pile of bank transfers to authorise. Such is the life of the underling.
Jamie works in Dublin for a top Wall Street investment bank. Once one of the most prestigious banks in the world, It was taken over when on the verge of collapse in during the meltdown of 2008. Like the vast majority of Wall Street employees, his is not a glamorous job. He does not make the million dollar bonuses. In a world where the term “wall street bonus” is a dirty word, Jamie represents the other side of the argument. For every one of the traders who nearly destroyed the global financial system and then picked up a multi-million euro bonus, there are thousands like Jamie who work for an average wage, and get a very average bonus, if any. It’s a side of the bonus row that has not been heard, until now.
Like most people working on The Street, as Wall Street is known among its drones, these days, Jamie does not have an MBA from Harvard or Wharton, or Smurfit for that matter. After a degree in medicinal chemistry from Trinity College Dublin, he realised that he would have to pursue a PhD to go anywhere in the science world, and after four years of slaving over Petri dishes and Bunsen burners, he knew that wasn’t for him. He also knew that he wanted to get out into the “real world” and start earning. €80 a week from the local Spar was no longer enough. At the height of the boom in 2004, banking was the obvious career. After speaking to a recruitment agency he was put forward for a handful of interviews. None were quite like the interview he did for this firm.
“When they called me for an interview, they asked me to come in at 6.30 in the evening which seemed a bit odd to say the least. When I arrived in, the first thing I was asked was what I liked most about golf (he is a keen golfer). The role I was being interviewed for and the talk through my CV all came later.”
He survived the interview and was made an offer. It wasn’t the only one he got, but it was certainly the most intriguing. He jumped at it.
Day 1 in a new office job usually follows a fairly simple structure. Arrive in the office, be met at reception by your new boss, get shown around the office, shake a few hands, drink some coffee, go home around 4.30. Jamie found himself sitting at a desk with more computer screens than he knew was possible to hook up to one computer and the phone ringing. It was 8.30am. He finally got out around seven that night.
“The attitude in there was really ‘sink or swim’. There was little on the job training as such. I basically had to work things out and ask questions as I went,” he said.
“Survival of the fittest” is the way another employee describes it. “It’s a tough job and not everyone can hack it. I know of at least 3 people who were gone within 2 weeks. They (the firm) put a lot of pressure on you and you have to deal with it,” said the employee.
Jamie did deal with it, and still does. The day starts at 6am, he’s at his desk by 7.30 – 7.45 every morning.
His job is to complete the trades a company trader executes. For example, a trader might sell 5,000 shares in Apple with a delivery date of January 2nd 2010. Jamie’s job is to deliver the 5,000 Apple shares to the person the trader is selling the shares to (the counterparty) on January 2nd 2010 (the value date). It sounds like a relatively straightforward task but the deal described above is replicated thousands of times a month, as are much more complex trades. The deal above is about as “vanilla” as it gets.
After he checks his email, he usually goes downstairs to get breakfast which he brings back to his desk (everyone’s desk has some sort of cup or plate on them, lunch at your desk is the norm). This morning though is one of those days when breakfast is an afterthought. A mail came in from Tokyo during the night. A senior manager over there wants a trade report for the last quarter ASAP (nobody says “as soon as possible” – it’s too long), and they copied his manager on the mail. This means his boss will want the report long before it is sent to Tokyo. These kinds of things tend to be relatively common occurrences. That doesn’t make them any easier. The “big dogs” in investment banks tend to want the world yesterday. That is the nature of the business at their level. People at Jamie’s level provide the info that allows one big dog to eat another. They just hope they aren’t eaten too.
Jamie and his team produce a stream of reports for management as a matter of course. The report the man in Tokyo wants isn’t one of them. Trade details have to be downloaded, value dates have to be correlated and the data has to be sorted. The report should include “Vanilla Interest Rate Swaps” but not “Butterfly Interest Rate Swaps”. “FX Forwards (G10)” should be included but “FX Forwards (emerging)” should be excluded. The only way to do this is manually on the biggest Excel Spreadsheet I’ve ever seen. Actually 3 spreadsheets totalling 180,354 lines of gibberish. Numbers are interspersed with dates, company names and currency signs. Finally the report is cut down to a mere 65,000 lines. After he goes through it with his manager, Jamie emails the report to Japan. A one word “thanks” which has been “sent from a Blackberry © wireless handheld” is received back almost before the mail had left Jamie’s screen. It’s now just after 1.30 in Dublin – 10.30 at night in Tokyo.
Lunch is a sandwich at the desk. While eating Jamie cleans up his inbox (Outlook is permanently on the screen on the left), checks for any news on Tiger’s sabbatical from golf (middle screen), and ignores the trade data on the right hand screen. After lunch the golf news is replaced by an excel spreadsheet.
The day ends around 7.30. Jamie’s team works mainly with the London and Tokyo markets so he doesn’t have anyone in the States on the phone in the evening. He is going home for a pizza or something similar. And a beer. Before he leaves I ask him if this was a normal day. He breaks out into the broadest grin I’ve seen from anyone in the building all day.
“Normal? There’s no such thing as ‘normal’ in this world.”
Last year Jamie took home €27,000 gross, plus a bonus of €16,000. This year his base has been reduced to under €25,000. He pays rent of €500 a month plus bills. He is like a lot of people getting through the Great Recession as best they can, holding onto their job for dear life and keeping out of trouble. Unlike most people though, he is working for a firm in an industry which has been hung upside down from a lamppost by politicians worldwide.
In the UK, Lord Myners, the city minister has called on bankers to “return to the real world” on bonuses. The Labour government will introduce a 50% super-tax on City bonuses at the next budget. The move has been widely welcomed. In the US President Obama has rounded on Wall Street for its bonus culture.
The argument is simple: the banks brought the world to the verge of financial meltdown last year and had to be saved by the government. They plunged the world into the worst recession since the 1930s. Therefore everyone in the business should be punished.
It is a perfect argument. Cogent, easy to understand, and populist. No politician would dare to go against it.
People in the business take a different view. Lord Griffith is a former economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher and now works part time for Goldman Sachs. Speaking at an event in St. Paul’s Cathedral about morality in the marketplace, Griffith said that bonuses were a good thing.
“If we said we’re not going to have as big bonuses or the same bonuses as last year, I think you’d find that lots of City firms could easily hive off their operations to Switzerland or the Far East.” The comments set off a wave of disgust amongst the press and people not working in investment banking.
Jamie doesn’t necessarily agree with Lord Griffith, but he heartily disagrees with the public anger as well.
“What people forget is that we (bankers) aren’t all multi-millionaires. The vast majority of us are working long hours for not much money. There is a myth that we all get bonuses of 700k (the average bonus in Goldman Sachs) and above.
“The bonus isn’t something that allows most of us to buy a new yacht. It’s something that allows us to pay the rent every month. A friend left here after two years to go back to college. She is working as a waitress at weekends. She told me that per hour, she’s making more as a waitress than she was here.”
It sounds absurd, but Jamie does have a point. As he logs off his computer and turns off his three screens, I glance around the floor. At least half of the desks are still occupied. Most would be on a wage comparable to Jamie’s. If the money isn’t what we are all supposed to think it is, if the stress is so high and he has a boss that has no hesitation in chewing him out in public, why do it?
He shrugs. “You know, I’ve asked myself the same question, and I honestly don’t know. I guess it’s just what we do.”
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