Even in this time of mortgage crises, bear stock markets and exploding commodities prices, you still hear a lot about Wall Street Fat Cats. Like all cliches, this one has a lot of truth as well as a lot of misinformation in it. If you look, for instance, at the leaders or former leaders of the big investment banks, like JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, the once-mighty and feared Bear Stearns and the like, you will see about the same amount of body fat as on the Boston Celtics. The only part of the top tier that is fat is of course their wallets, which are still sclerotically, morbidly obese. We all know the statistics about the widening differential between what CEOs made even through the 70's versus the average worker and where that number stands now--it has grown exponentially, in case you were in hibernation or doing an extended sleep study at a minor university. But there is another brand of fat cat on Wall Street, and the story of how they got that way, while not a pretty one by any means, is also illuminating in terms of overall trends in our society.
The next levels down on Wall Street are the people who actually get things done as opposed to ordering them done. The top guys are sometimes known as BLD guys, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which are where they do their work talking to major investors or clients or fellow CEOs, but just as in Hollywood, they eat very little and work out a lot. The worker bees of all ranks, however, spend most of their time in meetings with other worker bees from their own or other hives, producing and closing the transactions that produce the fees that pay the bills and big bonuses. These meetings tend to start early and run late. Before the introduction of the time clock in chess, one of the major attributes of any first rank player was a capacity known as Sitzfleisch, or the ability to remain in a seated position for inordinate amounts of time without losing patience or concentration. No time clock exists on Wall Street in the same sense as chess. A sense of urgency is always abundant--this is New York City, after all, but there are very few real, as opposed to imposed, deadlines in that world. Because of the amounts of money involved in everything that goes on there, a sense of meticulousness and making sure the pieces fit together correctly was, until the world of sub-prime mortgage securitization imported its own Lewis Carroll standards of logic and mathematics, a standard recognized and accepted by those who worked in the trenches (with apologies to the great author of the sub-prime mortgage broker's handbook, aka "Jabberwocky"). Part of this came from the survival instinct, but part also from a recognition that precision and care were central to the enterprise. Alcoholism during the 20th century was the primary province of housepainters, printers and lawyers, because of the extreme precision required and the practical penalties involved in violating those standards. A misplaced decimal point, a leakage of blue from the chair rail trim onto the wall of a Navajo white formal dining room, the word "not" left out of a critical provision of an agreement or brief, all spelled personal doom. More than likely people who compile computer code have replaced printers, but otherwise things are pretty much the same.
One thing people do when they are nervous, or bored, is eat, whether they are hungry or not, so the following description of the typical day of a Wall Street worker bee and presumptive fat cat may provide meaningful insight into how they get that way. It starts with breakfast when the meeting begins. If the meeting begins at 9, the average person will already have had something to eat before arriving at the office, be it cereal, fruit, toast or whatever. On entering the conference room, we find that a large side table, which will feature throughout the rest of this narrative, holds bagels, cream cheese and butter, Danish pastries, full size and cut in half, crumb cake with an inch thick layer of streusel topping made of butter and brown sugar, sliced melon, strawberries and milk and cream for the coffee and tea. The world of traders is different from this--a friend told me when he moved from the preferred stock desk at Merrill to the one at JP, he learned for the first time that it was inappropriate to have cold pizza for breakfast at work, so he had to start eating it at home in order not to lose his groove.
The meeting commences, and at around 10 the catering staff removes breakfast. At 10:30 they bring in miniature Danish and miniature bagels, more butter and cream cheese, sliced fruit, juice and fresh coffee and tea. As the meeting goes on, those in attendance meander consistently to the table to sample the wares. The plates--paper, plastic or even china--may have gotten smaller between breakfast and second breakfast, but the tension and pressure and whatever discord has shown up in the room all provide a stimulus to the appetite.
At 12:30, the staff removes the mini-meal and brings in lunch. Sandwiches of all sorts, wraps with ham, cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, mayonnaise, Russian dressing, pitas stuffed with ham or tuna salad, potato salad, cole slaw, pasta salad, all these burden the table with a collective weight about to be transferred from the inanimate to the barely mobile. Sodas, chips, pretzels, chocolate chip and macadamia nut white chocolate chip cookies the size of personal pizzas contend for space, sometimes requiring a separate cart along with the latest fresh urn of coffee and pot of tea. The meeting grinds on and usually someone remarks about how little progress seems to have been made, imploring the other communicants to step it up and get down to business. Before the staff removes lunch at about 2:30, virtually everyone will have made a trip back to the table, surveying and picking at what's left, which is usually plenty, because the original profusion of food was so enormous. Frequently the return trip to the conference table will involve half a sandwich, which requires some chips and yes, half a cookie the size of Madison Square Garden.
By 3:30 or 4, inertia will have set in and all the promises to each other to bear down and make headway have fallen to mid-afternoon torpor. The pages of the documents are turned more slowly, and various people start asking questions about what was decided before lunch, necessitating a reversion to the earlier set of master text and everyone's notes. Obviously only one thing can move this mass forward now--and sure enough the caterers show up with more soda, more coffee and tea more cookies and now brownies and perhaps individual petit fours or other amuses bouche to fire the sugar gun again and launch the crew forward.
At the end of the day, the only exercise our friends will have had consists of walking to the food table or beverage/cookie cart and shifting over and over again in their comfortable padded swivel chair, rocking back and forth and sideways. An Everest of food will have been consumed, and then one of two things happens. In the perhaps more benign version, people will agree that the timetable is slipping and so what's required is to go until 9 or so. Naturally enough this turns into ordering pizza, most normally with extra cheese, sausage, pepperoni or all of the above at around 7:30 or 8.
The alternative is that a consensus is reached either that a good amount has been accomplished or that nothing much got done at all. Each of these conclusions has as an attendant necessity breaking up the group and reconvening at 9 the next morning to do it all over again. What this does in turn is liberate each set of parties to the deal so that they can go to a steakhouse, have several martinis to take the edge off the day and psychoanalyze the motivations and behavioral oddities of the other parties to the transaction, enjoying all the while some rolls and butter, a slab of well marbled beef or salmon fillet with Hollandaise on the side, cottage fries, creamed spinach, red wine and a wedge of key lime pie plus an after dinner drink. At this point the question is not how fat cats are made, but how they are able to get through the conference room door without breaking the frame.
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Page created: November 1, 2009