Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I0B92FA | Format: PDF
Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits Description
Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money - as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers.
Young Money is the inside story of this well-guarded world. Kevin Roose, New York Magazine business writer and author of the critically acclaimed The Unlikely Disciple, spent more than three years shadowing eight entry-level workers at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and other leading investment firms. Roose chronicled their triumphs and disappointments, their million-dollar trades and runaway Excel spreadsheets, and got an unprecedented (and unauthorized) glimpse of the financial world's initiation process.
Roose's young bankers are exposed to the exhausting workloads, huge bonuses, and recreational drugs that have always characterized Wall Street life. But they experience something new, too: an industry forever changed by the massive financial collapse of 2008. And as they get their Wall Street educations, they face hard questions about morality, prestige, and the value of their work.
Young Money is more than an expos? of excess; it's the story of how the financial crisis changed a generation - and remade Wall Street from the bottom up.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 34 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 18, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I0B92FA
I read this book because I've long had a macabre fascination with the junior analysts and the banking "lifestyle" (which seems to mean the lifestyle of people just starting out after college who live in apartment shares and piss away all their money trying to make girls at clubs think they're rich). I work in financial services, but I came to finance later in my career. I've never worked in a bank, so I don't know what it's like, but my colleagues who have didn't have an experience resembling this.
The book is amusing in parts and a quick, easy read. My main objection to the book is that it doesn't feel serious. It comes off mainly as an excuse for Roose to do "research" by spending a few years partying and going out for dinner with his college buddies. Then at the end of it all, he can write a cautionary book of amateur sociology.
Roose's most interesting observation is not new: smart and talented but risk-averse college students go into banking after they graduate because it's an easy way to continue the achievement oriented lives they're used to, and because it saves them any hard thinking about what the heck to do for a career. The descriptions of the lives of first- and second-year analysts are entertaining, and the subjects are likable. At some point Roose even decides his college buddies are too likable, so he goes out of his way to attend the Fashion Meets Finance party so he can report back that in fact, yes, all the people he hasn't met are awful. And that's the key problem with the book: it seems like he's working hard mostly to reinforce all the prejudices he started with.
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