Geraint Anderson, city analyst turned rogue, knows the high life. His recently published book, Cityboy: Beer And Loathing in the Square Mile, exposes the high-flying life of those working in the Square Mile, from £1,000 meals to insider trading—via drugs and a lot of drinks.
One of the few to break the City’s code of silence, Anderson maintains he ‘slipped through the net’ of the city by mistake. He was brought up left wing by his father, a Labour MP and peer, and a Christian by his missionary mother. While he insists he found his job and the general City culture ‘incredibly tedious and offensive,’ he certainly embraced the lifestyle for a number of years. He quit his job at Dresdner Kleinwort from a beach in Goa with a joint in one hand, pina colada in the other, hours after pocketing his largest bonus yet, a mere £500,000.
Anderson was at this point writing a notorious column for thelondonpaper: Cityboy, targeting the culture and excesses of the City. ‘[It was] confessional and an opportunity to vent my vitriol,’ he remarks. ‘If I hadn’t done it I’d probably have gone fucking mental.’ He didn’t know if he was about to be fired for writing the column and continuing to work for the company, or awarded his annual bonus.
At a time when high-level bonuses have become infamous and symbolic of all that is wrong with the City, Anderson confirmed the notion that the bonus culture is the primary cause of the credit crunch.
‘The City and Wall Street became wild west casinos with everyone trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, thinking that the whole shebang, caboodle, whatever, was going to be falling down at any minute. The whole emphasis is to make money.’ Even since the publication of Liar’s Poker in the 1980’s, the original exposé of city life at Salomon Bros., Anderson thinks the city has developed a dangerous ‘get rich quick, anything goes’ attitude. He believes that the asymmetrical risk of the bonuses is to blame for much of the current economic situation—if you make money you keep some of it, if you lose it there’s little by way of a penalty. But the main problem is too short-term an outlook.
His answer to the bonus furore, now that he no longer benefits from it, is tighter regulation and longer-term incentives so that bankers don’t get rewarded for short-term gambles that may later backfire. ‘The whole system needs to change. Pressure can come from politicians and regulators, but ultimately its shareholders who need to say, “We want our long term interests looked after.”’
‘The electorate’ll go insane,’ he notes, ‘if there’s another credit crunch where it’s clear the bankers are to blame.’ The government has to change something, but there’s only so much they can do.
‘Whatever government, either Tory or Labour, is going to be unwilling to regulate too tightly, they’re going to be unwilling to change market forces too much because Thatcherism won many years ago. It’s a question of tweaking the system so you don’t just get idiots driving around in Porsches snorting cocaine.’
There’s a limit to possible changes that can be made to bonuses and the surrounding culture though. ‘You don’t do the job for the love of the job,’ Anderson points out. ‘I don’t think you do the job because you think you’re doing the world some good; I don’t think you do it for the creative fulfilment; You do it for the money.’
His experience of the city, and he does charitably concede that there are some half-decent people working there to earn a good living, is that people assess their self worth on the size of their bonus. ‘Basically, it’s just “who’s got the biggest penis?” And its pathetic.’
He cites an apocryphal story that Goldman Sachs used to look for people who’d been bullied at school ‘because they’ve got the drive necessary to stay up ‘till all hours going through the minutia of various tedious deals so they can buy the yellow Ferrari Testarossa. It’s insecurity that’s the main driving force in the city.’He comments on the divide in the City culture: on the one hand life is racy, hedonistic and unruly; on the other, its becoming more professional probably due to the complexity of the products being sold.
‘One of the reasons I had to leave was my USP was to get clients drunk, take them out to clubs, parties, whatever, strip joints. You know.And there was a new breed of these tedious graduate trainees who had wanted to be hedge fund managers since they were about ninr years old—you know, wasted their lives trying to get there. And they’re really boring and really dull, and they’re professional and they knew about spreadsheets. They took the fun out of it, and so it became that my ability to charm clients was becoming less and less important.’
Reflecting on whether he’d recommend working in the City, I think there’s a part of him that still misses the excitement. He likens working in the City to working as a bank robber. You’re constantly telling yourself ‘just one more job, just one more bonus.’ But he maintains that ‘suddenly you’re 50, an alcoholic, drug addict, weirdo, red-faced loser. And I didn’t want to become that.’
His broader point on the fruitlessness of the City was thought provoking. ‘The one good thing from the credit crunch is that the City won’t just suck up all the talent this country has to offer by offering vast rewards. Because that’s been tragic, and I’m sure society has suffered from the fact that people who should have been curing cancer or sorting out global warming instead have been pushing around bits of paper. Graduate trainees, or graduates from Oxford, might now be forced to do something more worthwhile with their lives.’
‘Recessions produce great music and they produce great art,’ he considers, on the other upsides to a recession. ‘People maybe start thinking a little less about the next pair of trainers they can buy or the best car they can buy. And might start thinking about things that are free, love or sex or things that are free that give you pleasure and give you fulfilment. And apart from that people’ll stop fucking talking about property prices at dinner parties.’
