Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits by Roose Kevin

Author:Roose, Kevin [Roose, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

IT BEGINS IN June—the lunch-line gossip, the frantic refreshing of message boards and tap-tapping of Bloomberg instant messages with friends across the Street, the amphetaminic all-nighters in a last-minute attempt to suck up to the boss. Every June, young Wall Street loads up like a spring, pregnant with anxiety and hope. And then, when the time is right, it simply happens—the annual earthquake known in the corporatized language of HR as the “compensation communication period,” but referred to by everyone in finance by its real name: bonus day.

Every summer, young analysts at Wall Street firms are notified about the amount of their annual bonuses, and placed in top, middle, and bottom “buckets,” according to their performances over the previous year. (The exception is Goldman Sachs, which gives its analyst bonuses in January.) Bonuses for analysts are nothing like the eight-figure executive bonuses you read about in newspapers, but they are still hefty sums for twenty-three-year-olds. A top-bucket first-year analyst at a profitable firm might make a $75,000 bonus on top of a $70,000 base salary, for total comp of $145,000. A bottom-bucket analyst at a struggling firm might get $10,000 on top of that same $70,000 salary, for a haul of only $80,000. Because bonuses often make up more than half of an analyst’s yearly pay, and because mergers and acquisitionstyh promising in the process of getting these bonuses, analysts are ranked in relation to their peers, bonus season amounts to a combination of Christmas and Judgment Day. Analysts who land in the top bucket are often assured of a third-year offer; analysts who land near the bottom are often given a subtle hint to start looking for new work.

J. P. Murray, the churchgoing Haitian-American analyst from Philadelphia, was expecting a pretty good number. In the year since J. P. had joined Credit Suisse’s health-care banking division, he had grown immensely as an analyst. Complex modeling skills were now second nature to him, and his industry knowledge ran deeply enough that other analysts and associates often came to him for help. Like everyone else in his position, J. P. spent between eighty and a hundred hours a week at his desk. But he’d made a conscious decision to fill the other, nonworking hours of his weeks with the kind of lifestyle he’d never imagined getting to live—the kind of over-the-top, hyperactive life his favorite rappers talked about in their songs.

“On Wall Street, you can have two out of the three: a job, a social life, and sleep,” he’d explained to me. “I’m picking the first two.”

So on the rare nights he wasn’t working, he hit the town. He went to birthday parties, house parties, clubs, nonprofit fund-raisers, networking events, gallery openings, and any other event with an open bar and a high likelihood of finding attractive women. J. P. felt, at times, like he was mastering both facets of young Wall Street life—working hard and playing hard. He wasn’t getting much sleep, and he had been forced

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