Greatest Hits of 2013

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “Ulysses”

Once again, O Dearly Beloved, it is time to look back on the year just ending to see if we can draw any useful lessons. As usual, I am drawing a blank. I tend to find such annual retrospectives uninteresting, since in my experience that which is meaningful in life does not come prepackaged in neat, calendar-year-sized chunks. Nevertheless, through the page ranking magic of Google Analytics, at least I have the ability to share with you those ten posts which you, My Most Attentive and Discerning Audience, have anointed the most popular of my works in Anno Domini Two Thousand and Thirteen.¹

This is the seventh year I have maintained this site, with greater or lesser diligence as the spirit moves me and non-blogging obligations allow. Seven years is a long time in any relationship, as marital psychologists and Tom Ewell alike can tell us. We will see in the coming year whether you and I can sustain our little pixellary romance, or whether like all good things this relationship must come to an end. I make no promises other than to be myself.

But do not think of that now. Look back on 2013 and revisit the year’s greatest hits, as determined by you. Enjoy.

THE CANON, 2013 Edition:

1) Curriculum Vitae (March) — Your clear favorite. A career précis for young investment bankers which lays out the path from wet-behind-the-ears tyro to grizzled old veteran in corporate finance and M&A, with summary descriptions of the roles and responsibilities at each step along the way. Any silly young fool who wants to join my industry after having read my scribblings over the past seven years should absorb this piece as a final gut check. If you still want to become a banker after that, well, then you are beyond my emendation.

2) The Invention of Leisure (November) — Goldman Sachs, Great Vampire Squid of yore, confused many an observer when they recently instituted a policy which for all intents and purposes appears to treat its most junior investment bankers as a species of near-human. I explain why this is neither as humane nor as sustainable as it may appear, and remind my attentive readers that, in my industry, “it is always the human beings who are taken out behind the woodshed and shot first.”

3) Go Ask Alice (September) — In which Your Ever Patient Guide to Financial Markets uses the occasion of an impending IPO for an obscure ornithologically-themed message service to explain, for the umpty-goddamnedth time, just how initial public offerings work. I’m sure it had no effect on the bullheaded financial commentariat this time, either, but I published it anyway. Call me stubborn. I’ve been called worse.

4) Mr. Indispensable (May) — Wherein I propose with animated language that the Grand Poobah of überbank J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, be stripped of his Chairmanship for having done an absolute crap job at it. A few of you read it, but absolutely none of you did anything about it. Story of my life.

5) In Praise of Jargon (April) — In which I take the occasion of a sneering, uncomprehending excoriation of business jargon to “reach my hand across the gaping divide between those who work for a living and those who cannot understand why they have to to proffer a little gentle education.” I also seize the opportunity to take a few cheap but deserved potshots at British English, while I’m at it. Chomskyan giggles all around.

6) Go Ahead, Live a Little (May) — Do investment bankers take sabbaticals? Hell. The fuck. No. This piece explains why not.

7) To Whom It May Concern (August) — “Most of what happens to individual investment bankers can be boiled down to being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time.” Luck favors the prepared, but preparation is no guarantee. Good luck, children.

8) A Photograph, Not a Circuit Diagram (January) — Wherein Your Humble Correspondent attempts to puncture some recent hysteria about bank accounting and explain that, no, the impression it conveys that banks are scary, opaque, and complex is exactly correct, salutary, and entirely the point. I suspect my missile sailed far over the heads of its intended target, but hey, it gave me a chance to string together some more words. As I do.

9) Skin in Which Game? (February) — Apparently unsatisfied with picking twitter fights with economists, financial commentators, and other riffraff, a certain author and aficionado of heavy rock lifting and public attention decided to attack Yours Truly for the veil of pseudonymity which I bear in this public forum. I responded with a balanced explanation of my longstanding rationale, which no doubt failed to satisfy the aforementioned interlocutor. Upon reflection, I discover that I could not give a rat’s ass whether it did or not.

10) Our Glassy Essence (October) — Wherein Your Friendly Would-Be Epistemologist turns his skeptical eye upon scientists, specifically those who claim that science has killed philosophy. I explain that no, Philosophy is not dead, but rather is sneaking up behind Science at this very moment to kick it in the balls.

* * *

Finally, lest you think me concerned solely with popularity, here are a couple more cognate posts published this year which the procrastinators and neurotically obsessive among you might find entertaining, notwithstanding their failure to pierce the top ten. Given the weakness in the overall market, I’m afraid this is all the bonus most of you are going to get this year. And no, you can’t sell it for three years.

Bonus Twaddle, Time Wasters, and Suchlike:

10 Reasons I’m Not Posting Anymore (August) — About as detailed an explanation as My Loyal But Disappointed Readers will ever receive for the paucity of my posting in this opinion emporium, sadly. Innumerate, too.

Wherein Your Droll, Semi-Victorian Bloggist Jumps the Shark (January) — Some eager young beaver from the seething cesspit of the cultural avant-garde—Brooklyn, New York—interviewed me on behalf of his bearded, literary, plaid-shirt-wearing audience for some inexplicable reason. While the experience is unlikely to get me to trade my lion skin for skinny jeans and a goatee, you might find it amusing.

Pip-pip, and all that. Happy 2013.


¹ As I have explained before, the Google Analytics data is necessarily incomplete and potentially unreliable, as they miss the actual eyeballs harvested by each respective post from the far greater numbers of people who simply visited the home page of this humble opinion emporium when they were first posted. But let us presume, entre nous, that this ranking is fit enough for purpose here, shall we?

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Parting Glass

Georges de la Tour, The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1640

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

— Voltaire

Curatio funeris, conditio sepulturae, pompa exsequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia mortuorum.

— St. Augustine, Civitas Dei ¹

* * *Michel de Montaigne writes of the duty we owe to princes:²

We owe subjection and obedience equally to all kings, for that concerns their office; but we do not owe esteem, any more than affection, except to their virtue. Let us make this concession to the political order: to suffer them patiently if they are unworthy, to conceal their vices, to abet them by commending their indifferent actions if their authority needs our support. But, our dealings over, it is not right to deny to justice and to our liberty the expression of our true feelings, and especially to deny good subjects the glory of having reverently and faithfully served a master whose imperfections were so well known to them, and thus to deprive posterity of such a useful example. And those who out of respect for some private obligation unjustly espouse the memory of a blameworthy prince, do private justice at the expense of public justice.

One could say the same about parents, with minor modifications. Part of growing up is becoming aware that one’s parents are human beings, with all the flaws attendant thereto, not the omnipotent and omniscient gods of our infancy. This, speaking from my personal experience, can be quite a blow, especially if the revelation is received early enough in one’s life.

My father was a brilliant engineer, troubled by his blue collar origins. He struggled to make his way through life with, as he put it, one foot in the world he came from and one foot in the present. His family did little to help him. My mother was brilliant, too, in her own way, and struggled with different demons incubated in the privileged upbringing of her family. Their marriage early produced me, too early really for a man and woman not far removed from childhood themselves. It did not last long. I was raised an only child of divorced parents who struggled separately to be parents, and who only partially succeeded. The timeline and details do not matter here—for my life is not a commonwealth I share with others to whom I owe a duty of honesty, outside my immediate family—but suffice it to say I became estranged from both my parents. Age and distance, sadly, did not improve our relationships.

My father died many years ago, succumbing finally to the demons he never fully escaped. My mother died within the past two weeks. I have not been overwhelmed with grief, for estrangement acts as a kind of grieving itself, sapping the heart of love, delight, and admiration in slow anticipation of the final separation of death. I am sad she is gone, of course, because she was my mother. You cannot help but love your mother, no matter how worthy you think she may have been as one.

* * *They say as you grow older you become your parents. I am no spring chicken, but I have not seen this yet. Of course I have some of their flaws (or at least those flaws I am aware of) in addition to my own, but I have spent a great deal of effort trying to become a better man and father in reaction to the mistakes I saw my parents make. Let us say, then, that one grows in reaction to one’s parents, good or bad. My efforts, good or ill, will be judged in time by my own children.

In the meantime, I have made peace with my parents in my heart. If nothing else, they meant well, and they tried to do what they thought was right. We can ask little more, even of ourselves.

I am not here to render public justice. And as for private justice, there is only love.

But since it has so ordered been
A time to rise and a time to fall
Fill to me a parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all.
So good night and joy be with you all.

— Traditional, The Parting Glass

Goodnight, Mom and Dad. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.


¹ “The arranging of funerals, the conditions of burials, the pomp of obsequies, are rather a consolation for the living than any help to the dead.” (Trans. Michel de Montaigne, “Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us.”)
² “Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us," The Complete Works, Trans. Donald M. Frame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 10.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Holiday Weekend Interlude

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

— Mary Oliver, “The Kingfisher”

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Turning to Fresh Tasks

Carson River, Nevada, via the U.S. Department of the Interior

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

— Robert Frost “The Wood-Pile”

How many wood-piles, carefully cut and stacked, will we leave behind once we finally turn to the last of our fresh tasks? Perhaps it is not such a small thing to warm a forgotten corner of a frozen swamp with the decay of our life’s work. There are worse legacies to offer.

Happy weekend.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Invention of Leisure

“Get a job.”

— Famous chorus from a popular song

O Dearest and Most Beloved of All Indiscriminate Internet Content Consumers (that’s you), I fear Your Humble and Most Retiring of All Econoblogosophists (that’s me) has some terrible news to impart:

Goldman Sachs has finally and irrevocably jumped the shark.

And no, I reluctantly interrupt your quiet enjoyment of reality television this sad evening not because the favorite whipping boy of every published journalist and his or her small dog has decided to stop ripping the faces off muppets, repackaging toxic waste for sale to blind widows and orphans on life support, or kicking German Landesbanken in the testicles for the sheer joy of listening to them shriek in agony. No, in each of these respects I believe the Ur-Squid of the Western Capitalist World is still now as it ever was: unrestrained, unrepentant, and not just a little bit naughty.

No, whereof I speak (although Lloyd would rather I were silent) is the horrible, earth-shattering, mind-boggling reality that Goldman Sachs—evil poster cephalopod of tendentious, horse-semen-throwing pseudo-Marxist demagogues pontificating from the decaying soap boxes of musico-cultural mouthpieces long past their prime, relevance, and peak circulation levels¹—has apparently decided to treat its junior professional employees like human beings.

I know, I know. I will pause here a moment to let you collect your dentures from the floor.

* * *

The sad and shocking truth is that Goldman Sachs has apparently decided to require its cannon fodder (excuse me) valued junior professionals² to do something so shocking, so transgressive to the norms of civilized society in the concrete canyons of Wall Street and the City of London that I am loath to describe it here without due warning: take Friday nights and Saturdays off. There is other nonsense associated with this new policy, which admits of few or no exceptions, like uninterrupted week-long vacations for Analysts and Associates and a prohibition against gaming artificial weekend idleness by telecommuting via Blackberry, smartphone, or laptop, but I will not sport with your intelligence by elaborating upon it. The material point is these clowns seem hell-bent upon preventing their junior investment bankers from engaging in one of the few, hallowed activities which has differentiated them from their slacker cousins and co-graduates of elite universities who have traditionally enjoyed their weekends fresh out of school by trying not to contract virulent STDs or end up on a slab in the county morgue deceased of alcohol poisoning. Namely, work.³

I can only say: Lloyd. Gary. WTF?

There has been some attempt from certain quarters of the blogosphere to understand the rationale behind this ludicrous pandering to all that is unholy in Human Resources political correctness, and the consensus seems to be that Goldman is taking this ill-advised step reluctantly, in order to compete for its fresh meat valued junior resources with other, currently more glamorous employers like social media companies and other purveyors of popular masturbatory aids. As part and parcel of this facile narrative there is copious pointing toward the alleged demand for and attraction to the “best and brightest” of our youth by said employers. Since Goldman Sachs is purportedly in direct competition with such archetypes of socioeconomic desirability as Google, Facebook, and Twitter for the most intelligent, ambitious, and driven of the flower of our culture’s young people, of course (the argument goes) they must relax the traditional salt mine labor characteristics of entry level investment banking jobs in favor of “work-life balance” and uninterrupted cocaine benders on Friday and Saturday nights.

But this is stupid on many levels.

* * *

For one, as I have stated unequivocally before, investment banking neither seeks out nor requires the allegedly “best and brightest”—whoever the fuck they are supposed to be—for its employees. All we seek are aggressive, ambitious, smart enough young kids to process our ridiculous pitch books, update our standardized models, and generally take our shit while we senior bankers do whatever is necessary to bring in enough revenues to ensure our continued employment and the consequent support of our dependent wives, children, mistresses, and bartenders. For another, the majority of youngsters who are attracted to investment banking are, contrary to the general prejudice of investment banking critics everywhere, surprisingly risk averse and non-entrepreneurial in nature. The tender young shoot who aspires to Lloyd Blankfein’s beard and pay package is almost never the same sort of soul who wishes he or she were staging a Lord of the Rings-themed wedding in the Pacific Northwest woods on the back of technology company stock options. They hold completely different life ambitions. This can be seen by the perhaps surprising absence of former investment bankers among the massively rich and successful entrepreneurs of the world.⁴

Finally, the implicit coddling and tender concern for the delicate sensibilities of young investment bankers’ boy- and girlfriends which are encoded in Goldman’s new policy are completely and irrevocably at odds with the core premise of my industry, which is uncompromising customer service. The entire fucking point of working 24 hours a day, for days on end, and canceling weeknight dates with Kate Upton, Las Vegas bachelor parties with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and Christmas holidays with the Pope of all Christendom at the last possible minute is that the entire investment bank works at the pleasure and whim of clients who pay us a small fortune to do so. That is why successful senior bankers never tell the client no. That is why we agree to impossible deadlines for ridiculous requests at the last minute. Why we therefore ruin our junior bankers’ lives with all-night and all-weekend work on a regular basis. Because that is the fucking job.

So telling some pissant college graduate or wet-behind-the-ears MBA she can futz off and take in a Broadway show, art gallery opening, or all-night drinking session in the East Village or West End from Friday night through Sunday morning does that person absolutely no good whatsoever. Because it is telling her, incorrectly, that she should expect clients and bosses to respect the life-work boundaries of normal human beings in her life too. But none of these ever will, and if she wants and expects to make a success of herself in my industry, she better reconcile herself to that fact as soon as fucking possible.

* * *

I am old enough, O Dearly Beloved, to remember the last time big investment banks tried to pander to junior professionals, during the first dot com boom of the late 1990s. Then we tried fruit baskets, casual Fridays every day, and in-house concierges to pick up and deliver dry cleaning, Broadway tickets, and other bullshit in a desperate and ultimately fruitless attempt to prevent our most ambitious young Turks from joining such guaranteed future world beaters as Webvan or Pets.com. None of it worked, since the true entrepreneurs (or reckless idiots) among our ranks lit out for the coast anyway, and the risk-averse remnants who stayed behind got utterly ruined by our coddling. For believe you me, when the dot com boom imploded, the work-life balance perks and privileges disappeared on Wall Street faster than you can say “Bernie Ebbers.” And the poor young knuckleheads who had embraced the kinder, gentler Wall Street as their birthright could not adjust to the harsh light of workaday reality. It is no exaggeration to say an entire generation of potential investment bankers was ruined by such nonsense.

But that is the nature of large scale corporate investment banking nowadays. Human Resources weasels rule the roost in times of weakened revenue generation and secular decline, and the Executive Committee is more than happy to throw a sop to the political correctness police who claim such nonsense is the only way Goldman Sachs will ever hire another person from Princeton University or Harvard Business School ever again. It doesn’t really cost anything, and it is an easy way to separate the oh-I’m-only-here-for-the-resume-building chaff from the yes-I-really-want-to-be-an-investment-banker wheat.

I’d suggest the junior bankers of Goldman Sachs and elsewhere keep that in mind as they adjust to this brave new world of investment banking with a human face. For in my industry, it is wise to remember that it is always the human beings who are taken out behind the woodshed and shot first.

Related reading:
Molon Labe (September 1, 2008)
If the Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me (October 1, 2011)
In the Nation’s Service (December 29, 2011)


¹ Yeah, he’s a dick. A talented dick, but a dick nonetheless.
²By which corporate bureaucratese is meant the wet-behind-the-ears tyros who join investment banks straight out of college (known, grandiloquently, as “Financial Analysts”) or business school (known, similarly, as “Associates”) to provide the blood, lymphatic fluid, and gristle which lubricate the grindstones of a large, multinational investment bank such as Goldman Sachs. Note that the moniker “professionals” is applied only to those naïfs who join an investment bank with some pretense or ambition of making widow and orphan cheating their long-term career, rather than the far more numerous, better-treated, and far less dispensable folks known as “support staff” who actually make the world go around.
³ I speak throughout, by the way, as is my wont, of the junior professionals who work in the corporate finance and M&A arms of investment banks, not the knuckle-dragging denizens of the sales and trading floors. For only the former tend to be on call at the whim of the clients of their investment bank 24/7, whereas the latter knock off at reasonable hours on Friday evenings and only return, bleary eyed and hungover, early Monday morning, to devour onion cheeseburgers and rip off hapless portfolio managers of Landesbanken. Perhaps it is revealing that Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn come from the sales and trading side of Goldman Sachs and hence have little understanding, respect, or appreciation for the traditional work hours of their corporate finance colleagues which they have so unwisely attempted to curtail.
⁴ Counterexamples, like Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos, prove my point. They worked at investment banks, but they were not investment bankers. They were technology geeks. Staffers. Q.E.D.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.