Confessions of a Cat-holic (203)

At Morgan Stanley, the interns were spoon-fed with insider gossips and unspoken tales of Wall Street legends. It became known to us that the banks would often take the interns to strip clubs to lure them to come back to the firm. Other banks would encourage the sales to take their clients to night clubs to close business deals. It was not uncommon for a banker to indulge in paid sex or orgies even after receiving their bonuses. Not long ago before I interned, the trading floor was still predominantly occupied by men and it was totally fine for these hormonally driven traders to subjugate their female subordinates with verbal abuse. Sexual harassment and sexist comments were okay in banks, apparently. It was legitimate to poke fun of a female co-worker's facial appearance and sex appeal with dirty jokes.

Again, Lehman Brothers prepared me for none of these. Apart from overhearing that Goldman asked an intern to eat 50 burgers within an hour as a wager, I didn't realize that my competitors from the financial industry could be that lustful. Lehman only offered clients free tickets to Sam Hui's concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum. Nothing unusual, in fact, I would say that Lehman was too old school. They wouldn't even take clients to the China Club in Hong Kong. Even my boss Kitty Cheung said that Lehman was too "cheap".

I started to read up on Wall Street. Was I too innocent? Was I assuming too much? Apart from reading the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, I also subscribed to Financial Times and CNN. I watched CNBC news and Bloomberg to catch up with market news occasionally. But they talked nothing about these shady insider stories. I finally found this site called wallstreetfollies.com and started to pay attention to all the intrinsic stories related to every business deal coming out. Second guessing all financial deals as an act of conspiracy became my new norm.

I asked myself again and again: Was I still missing something after working at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers? I knew none of what Morgan Stanley taught. All of a sudden, I felt enlightened and exposed to things I didn't notice before, almost as if I had always been oblivious to my surroundings. I lived in New York. I worked in two banks before landing at Morgan Stanley. I talked to people from the industry. I was more groomed to be a sales than anyone else in my circle. Wall Street was no NGO or social corporate, obviously; it was no SoftBank. But was Wall Street really that outright evil? I had yet to find out.

If what I was told at Morgan Stanley was true, my gender alone could be the biggest reason why I was not fit for a sales role. I wouldn't be able to take my clients out to a brothel, let alone withstanding all the sexist jokes in an old boys' club.

Vic Garber said during a luncheon of the orientation week that ripping off stupidity was basically the survival game for Wall Street. Morgan Stanley reaped profits because the market rewarded intelligence and punished follies. Stupidity was what left money on the table. That sounded really like the motto of Goldman Sachs, not sure if Vic was trying to match his competitor.

I started to realize that the financial industry ran on a business model that depended on the ignorance of even the smartest ones. Year after year, these elitists from all the top schools, MIT, Stanford, the Ivy League schools, UChicago and Duke, joined these financial institutions without a clue of how they got churned up and overworked to squeeze profits, supporting the common assumption that capitalism should ultimately capitalize on others' oblivion.

Nevertheless, I was receptive to what Wall Street would offer. Born with a dominance of water elements, I still aspired to be a treasury sales, providing liquidity and flow to the market as a liaison between traders and institutional investors in Asia, despite naive speculations that I would never make it given my lack of gold in my 八字. Many people thought that I was climbing a steep slope, but hey, even real estate and MBS within finance could entail earth elements.