Damn It Felt Good to Be a Banker - October 12, 2008

Author's Note: This is review/recommendation of a book you should buy only after first purchasing mine.

Unless you've been in a cave on Mars for the past two weeks you've been reading a lot about Wall Street. Watching Hank Paulson shit his pants in Congressional hearings, hearing about Dick Fuld getting knocked out by an irate trader at his gym... Waiting and wondering when the biggest financial clusterfuck since the Great Depression is going to ease.

Don't hold your breath.

I've got three bits of advice. One, shut off your computer and reroute your mail so you won't be tempted to open an investment statement for the next year or so. Two, buy up a good stock of liquor - a shopping cart's worth, as Nick Cage does in Leaving Las Vegas (you won't want to do much driving... everybody else on the road will be liquored). Three, buy a copy of Leveraged Sellout's Damn it Feels Good to Be a Banker and starting reading about how all this shit came to pass. Well, at least the half of it Wall Street caused. Might as well laugh at the mess. There isn't much else to do.

DIFGTBAB is a satire and it is ridiculous - vicious cartoonish descriptions of now extinct uber-banker types Tom Wolfe used to call "Masters of the Universe" in Bonfire of the Vanities. But damn if it isn't accurate and laugh out loud hysterical. Some old fuck, I think Faulkner, said "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism." If that holds, then LSO's proving here, maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally, that satire paints the clearest picture of the animals a writer skewers. If you're going to make fun of the ridiculous, why not be ridiculous?

And he is. From the descriptions of the various types of gold-digging trophy wives to the obsessions over clothing, having an Amex Black card and working for the most "prestigious" firms on the Street, LSO nails - hilariously - every closeted insecurity of the breed. But it's not just biting sarcasm. The guy's a great writer, with an amazing wit, and the book is packed with brutal insights. The bit on bankers liking simple, dumb music speaks a hundred volumes to the narrowness he's mocking at every turn. The hierarchy of business schools he describes, with the attendant paranoia it fosters in the "lower tier" graduates is a pretty spot-on description of the surface meritocracy one might say caused the blind reliance on financial models in part leading to this mess. Hiring purely by academic credential will get a firm, well, academic analysis. Hard to imagine anybody but a pure egghead would think the risk accruing from the obvious malfeasance and lax oversight in the mortgage lending industry could be nullified with a mathematical model.

You want a brutally funny, scathing look at the incompetents who - amazingly - insured defaults on the mortgages on all those empty McMansions you might have driven by lately? Want a look at the ex-Masters of the Universe who got taken for a ride by a pack of street-level mortgage brokers, speculators in non-recourse venues, loan sharks like Angelo Mozillo and the twice-as-clever-as-they-were securitizers in their firms who grabbed buckets of bonus money as they knew the house of cards was teetering? I'm sure a lot of people think this book is terribly timed, and not very funny at the moment. Those people are crazy. Damn it Feels Good to be a Banker only got funnier in the past two weeks.

Why get mad at Wall Street when you can laugh at it? We all need some humor and this book delivers it in spades. Go out and buy a copy. What else are you going to do with the money, invest it?

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 10:24 PM

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Comments

Have you seen the promo vid? I think most will eventually agree that LSO's release couldn't have been timed more perfectly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROlDmux7Tk4

PL: Oh, yeah. I didn't want to lard the page up with another video screen, but that thing is simply the gold standard for promo videos. The dude chugging the Grey Goose and Red Bull from the bottle and the consultant in the Patagonia vest are classic.

Posted by: Alex at October 13, 2008 09:05 AM

"The hierarchy of business schools he describes, with the attendant paranoia it fosters in the "lower tier" graduates is a pretty spot-on description of the surface meritocracy"

Sounds like another profession you and I are well acquainted with.

PL: In fairness to the B-schoolers, knowing your way around a good b-school network is worth about 3485675X the value of uber-facility with a Bluebook.

Even now.

Posted by: Kevin at October 13, 2008 11:35 AM

His name is Henry Paulson. His name is Henry Paulson. His name is Henry Paulson...

PL: Hank, Henry, Curly, Mr. Clean, Sizzle-chest, Cueball... It's all good.

The only thing that poor bastard wants to be called in short order is "retired."

Posted by: Bill at October 13, 2008 08:18 PM

I've been super busy with career the last 1.5 months, so haven't had much time to read enough.

Obviously different people have different viewpoints. Here is a link a friend forwarded me to a funny comic (and one person's opinion) on the banker situation to the tune of "feels good to be a gangster" : http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2952

I've got no opinion one way or another right now -- been buried in work, and haven't had enough time to remotely follow it other than knowing (1) a huge problem exists and (2) there was a bailout passed recently. Thought the link was interesting though.

PL: Wasn't that important. Some crazy guy named Neel is buying a couple hundred billion dollars of paper with our tax money and Bush is buying a few banks. I think something happened with a trillion euros in Europe, too. They're on the metric system over there, so I don't know what that translates to in dollars.

I'll check the link. Thanks.

Posted by: lkjsdf at October 13, 2008 10:05 PM

I picked up the book today as I fond myself in B&N and I honestly cannot put it down. Being in business school makes the subject matter 1000x funnier, although that isn't a prereq to really enjoy it. I can't recommend it enough, especially for the readers of this site.

PL: I think it's bigger than just a B school thing. The guy has a great eye for details that flesh out a great, broader social commentary.

Posted by: Ryan at October 13, 2008 11:35 PM

Thanks, I picked this book up today at Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately those ass hats don't have HHIFA yet. bastards.

PL: Thanks. I'm going to pull into one right now and see if they have one.

Posted by: Rhett at October 14, 2008 03:32 PM

As good as the Leveraged Sellout book is, the blog is comedic gold on its own, thanks to the comments. There's nothing like the clueless knee-jerk reactions of people who don't realize that they're the punch line.

I'll be interested to see where a lot of these guys end up when the job losses finally shake out. Being an I-bank associate doesn't exactly leave you with a skill set that's terribly useful outside of the financial sphere, other than utter mastery of Excel keyboard shortcuts (I should know; I was one and I know quite a few guys who still are), and the fact that most of them are young, spoiled, and incredibly egotistical won't help at all.

Poor Dick. He's not a bad guy. A bit lacking in the personal responsibility department, perhaps, and a terrible public speaker, but actually a class act and a real smart guy one-on-one; met him a few years ago, although I'm 99% sure he has no idea who the fuck I am at this point.

PL: Dick was dumb to allow himself to appear first and alone. He should have hired a rock star PR guy and told Congress, "Call Jimmy Cayne and Stan O'Neal first or along with me and then I'll come."

They'll filter into hedge funds and private equity. Some will go home and become stockbrokers. Some who did well will go into other businesses or just live off their bonuses until the next bubble appears.

Posted by: Vladimir Zhirinovsky at October 14, 2008 11:10 PM

Oh, I meant the "His name is Henry Paulson" as a reference to that scene in Fight Club where they chant Robert "Bob" Paulson's name.

PL: Ahhhh, sorry about that.

Posted by: Bill at October 15, 2008 07:14 AM

Nah...hedge funds & PE are mostly making cuts these days. Some of the big banks have been moving higher-level people to Russia and the UAE, but not many. You're right about the brokers, based on what I hear from friends in NYC. Heard there was a Lehman guy walking around Wall Street a few weeks ago with a sandwich board that read "Experienced MIT grad for hire" - no joke.

But this is by far the best thing I've found in the financial news in quite a while:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVUE96d.HKyw

And this:
http://www.portfolio.com/html/assets/AndrewLahdeFarewell.pdf

PL: American kids should start learning foreign languages.

By the way, on the Lahde thing, some guy had you beat. I held back your comment so I could put it after I posted my intro the piece. Sorry for the delay...

Posted by: Vladimir Zhirinovsky at October 17, 2008 08:43 PM