Thursday, August 05, 2010

The road to serfdom > A blog entry by an ex-Goldman Sachser

Charlie Chaplin stands on Douglas Fairbanks' s...Image via Wikipedia
[...] If Wall Street investment bankers were dogs, they would flaunt their expensive collars and leashes as marks of status, [...] we were basically the trader’s little bitches, and any quant who’s honest with himself realizes that. In time, we quants developed knee callouses from genuflecting to service the traders, on whose profits our livelihoods depended. 

[...] The sad truth is: quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood WWII film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really matter much to the plot.

[...] Your entire worth as a human is defined by one number: the compensation number your  boss tells you at the end of the year. See, pay on Wall Street works as follows: your base salary is actually quite modest, but your ‘bonus’ is where the real money is. That bonus is completely discretionary, and can vary anywhere from zero to a manifold multiple of your base salary.

So, come mid-December, everyone on the desk lines up outside the partner’s office, like the communion line at Christmas Mass, and awaits their little crumb off the big Wall Street table. An entire year’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears comes down to that one moment. And the entire New York economy marches to the beat of that bonus drum. [...]  Read the rest of this interesting blog @ Adgrok

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