An i-bankers survival guide part 4

This post isn’t so much a follow-on to the earlier “survival guide” posts (see “An i-bankers survival guide part 3“), but with all that is going on in the world of i-banking and finance, you might have missed this well-written piece from The Times of London (below is just the opening excerpt):

After Lehman Brothers: desperate City wives

My nine-year-old asked me at breakfast on Monday morning: “What is the economy?” What a day to find out. I struggled to describe a kind of weaved knot in which every thread is connected to another thread, establishing clearly that we are all in this together. If you made a lot of money in the City, did you sew it up in a mattress? Buy a farm where you could live, grow your own food and educate your children yourself? Or did you invest it – in the City?

The size of a banker’s pile of money is like the size of anything else in a macho environment: you need the biggest one to show that you are good at what you do. The pile does not necessarily reflect personal greed, it reflects the need to be the best banker. It reflects how long and hard you have worked. One man I know who worked at Lehman Brothers accumulated stock in the company for decades and never got around to diversifying his portfolio. This week he saw his net worth drop from a paper high of about $100 million (£56 million) some months ago to virtually nothing.

Nobody at Lehman Brothers will be making a pile of money any more, real or virtual. Nor do they have an income. Or an office, a BlackBerry, a plane ticket to an important meeting out of town, a driver waiting downstairs. In Chelsea there were anguished shouts heard on the pavements at 6.30am on Monday, and people were breaking down in tears in Starbucks. A few Lehman employees heard the news over the weekend and collected their belongings on Sunday night so they wouldn’t have to face the press.

Harold used to warn us young folk: “don’t lever yourself to the business. See that guy? Everything is leased. The cars, the boats, everything. He’s already spent this year’s bonus, and it isn’t even here yet. Don’t put yourself in that situation.”

Amen.

MRM