Confessions of a Cat-holic (207)

At the end of the HR compliance session, Vic came into the office after Amanda picked up all the signed documents from us. He added that the interns should only listen to his instructions like he was the commander-in-chief and that we should never ever read any of the books out there that intended to smear the firm's reputation.

Holy shit, was I missing something? I acted calm on the outside, but I just couldn't help digging onto the pieces of fragmented information here and there. Apparently, there had been more than a dozen of books and fictions out there in the market badmouthing the firm Morgan Stanley.

More and more I discovered, like I was falling into a rabbit hole. There was a book that came out in 2004/2005 right before I interned, and it was written by an ex-Morgan Stanley banker on securitized products group, exactly the same division I worked for. I couldn't find that book anymore and I believed Morgan Stanley might have burned them all, as written on one of the remarks in its book reviews. There were "barbarians at the gate", "house of Morgan", "all the devils are here", "den of thieves", "when genius failed", "the smartest guy in the room", "conspiracy of fools", "crash of the titans", "against the gods", etc. There were a few that dedicated to only Morgan Stanley, aka "blue blood and mutiny", and Deutsche Bank, aka "dark towers". The list was endless. I could go on and hypothesize that the financial industry was nothing but a conspiracy scam.

Life had taught me that I should only believe what I had seen with my own eyes, and sometimes we could not even trust our own eyes. I always knew people liked to talk shit about things. Sometimes, it was slandering; other times, it could be a warning. But I was never naive enough to believe that a good transcript would land me a good job at a good company with good pay and a good promising future. I was never that simple-minded.

Our internship program started in mid June, which was a bit late. The IBD internship program, on the other hand, started three weeks earlier than us. Within the first week of our internship, there were talks among the interns that some guy from IBD was hospitalized for a heart attack. Apparently, IBD was the epic center (重災區) of all the casualties in the financial industry. Sales and trading was better. It was no coincidence that the IBD department invested tons of money on super aggressive college recruitments for analysts. The turnover rate for junior bankers was about 100% because of the burn out: 95% of the junior analysts could not make it to associates by promotion; only 5% or less still persevered after all the workload and pressure from overworking, but they usually had to take on a career break in the name of b-school entry. But the money and prestige still kept many young driven graduates knocking its door. The banking industry was never short of good and qualified candidates anyways, with unlimited supply of associate level candidates from HBS, CBS, Wharton, Stern, and Stanford Business School year after year.

This culture was not unique to Morgan Stanley. By talking to my friends and peers from all the bulge bracket investment banks, I realized that Goldman had the worst hours, and the leanest pay. But they had that halo and prestige that many people longed for. The same shit happened at Citibank, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Bear Sterns, and Lehman. The word was that these younger bankers often had to resort to drugs and marijuana during those toilet breaks; over a long period of time of substance abuse, some of them died from overdose. Others might engage in sex orgies, sex marathons, or sado-masochistic sex for extreme pleasures. Women might suffer from miscarriage, while some even carried their work to the labor room to impress the boss. Sometimes, it could be a guy's thing: they wanted to go to Volar and hit on unlimited supply of girls who were ready to take the bait. Sometimes, it could be a girl's thing: girls wanted the company profile to look glamorous to bait more suiters. It was demand and supply, as simple as that.