Desolate

It’s desolate here. It is 4:30 in the morning on a Wednesday night and I am pretty sure I may be the only person in the office building besides the guy downstairs printing my presentations which need to be at my Director’s house by 8AM so they can go with him on the plane. Speaking of that guy, Andy I think, he is a little too nice. See generally the print room messes things up, generally at the worst possible times. Well not Andy, tonight I was (notice the past tense) on a deadline and Andy made it happen. Small problem though, I made an error, nothing new really but generally someone will catch it before we go to print. So after Andy printed out and bound these masterful fifty slide presentations, I villainously asked him to rip them apart and re-insert a page because I had put someone junior on top of someone senior on the team listing page, a big no-no in Europe. Andy was Johnny on the spot with this, all over it, made the change for me and is redoing the work as I write. I almost wanted to fight with him just to keep my rep up with the other (inept) print room guys who were there. Can’t have Andy telling everyone I was nice, I eat people.


Anyway, to be honest, part of me wonders who is watching. Who knows what I am doing at the moment, if I were to take off all my clothes and run in circles, would I make YouTube? The cleaners don’t care if they’re on camera; they are far too busy taking siestas to come empty my trash barrel. I have decided I’ll stack the trash and let them play Jenga with it later. Rude? Maybe. I’m off to chat with Andy, he just called to tell me my printing is done, what a guy.


PS: I’m barefoot, hope my MD doesn’t stroll in anytime soon….

37 Hours and an ambulance later, we're done

That's right boys and girls, 37 straight hours in the office. I (we) worked from 9am on Thursday until 10PM on Friday, non-stop. Oh and one of our teammates left in an ambulance, here's how things went down...

Let me be completely honest, 9am is way too early for me to be arriving at my desk, I was clearly only there for a meeting which got canceled so I was already pissed off. The real issue though was the news my boss, the all powerful Managing Director, was about to deliver. If you're an analyst or associate and you see one of those little fuckers pumping their fist at 9am on a Thursday just know right then and their that you are completely fucked, immediately cancel all plans. Shortly after the phone call the Spaniard, whom to be honest is a really cool guy, delivered the news; we need to deliver a response to a client's proposal by 4PM Friday. To be fair it is a really interesting deal and we have a fair chance of being appointed to advise on it so I'm not really complaining about any of this.

Anyway, Thursday went along fine until 11pm when we went a man down. The guy had been sick with a chest infection for two weeks and yet continued to work 14 hour days. So whilst we are the only ones on the floor, working diligently listening to our I-Pods, he is sitting there unable to breathe, feeling tingles, getting more pale than Casper, and questing if it was alright to interrupt one of us to call an ambulance for him. Luckily he did, and they came and took him away. Now I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no I am not the first person who asked "well what the fuck do we do now, we're a man down". Mr. French beat all of us to the punch, I don't think the patient was in the elevator before he let it out. It had to be said, don't blame him.

So we continued to work, by 6am it was down to two of us, fighting hallucinations, we were determined to turn this thing out by the 4PM deadline and go home. Armed with Red Bull, Coke, and Skittles we completely defied natural law and except for a few nod offs during a conference call made good progress, by the time the MD arrived in the morning the document was in good shape.

Alright I lied, WE thought the document was in good shape. The two sugar cracked guys who look like shit and didn't even have time to go to the level 5 gym and shower, yes WE thought it was fine. The powers that be did not, and truth be told they were very correct. All of the content was fine, but I'm not even shitting you, we had the Introduction section in the appendix, issues. After working non-stop on Friday we finally finished six hour after the deadline. Forty versions of the presentation and 100 "you look like shit" comments later, we were done. I don't think I have ever slept so good in my life.

It's not like these things go unnoticed though and people seemed happy. My Director even commented that this was my first technical all nighter, which he defines as two complete days. Apparently, my rides home at 7am for a shower and a new suit do not count because I left the office.

Madrid (Airport) is Cool

Weird title, eh? Well let me explain, this post is all about travel in the banking world. I bet it sounds fun to jet set to Madrid for a day, to visit Paris and to go to Dubai, all on the company tab. In my opinion it's fun, I haven't been here long enough. See in banking there is no time for fun when you travel, this isn't a real estate conference in Vegas where you can sneak off to the slots. In my experience thus far, you simply go directly to the airport from the office, fly two hours to Madrid, go straight to and then from the office and then fly home the same day, returning to the office at night of course. When you go to Dubai, things get really bad. You depart London at 9:30 at night, arrive in Dubai at 9:00AM go to meetings all day and then leave Dubai at 2AM, arriving back in London at 6:00AM, plenty of time to shower and....make it back to the office.

See before the credit crunch these sorts of things were acceptable, sitting in business class (first class for the top guys) was not so bad. Now though, the expense hammer is reigning down upon us. All analysts now need to fly economy, no matter the distance being flown. Associates can only fly business on flights over six hours in length, and under two hours even the MD's have to fly economy. It's getting worse by the day, but that's a whole other story entirely.

The Cryogenically Frozen Deal

Have you ever seen Austin Powers? Are you one of the believers that Walt Disney is still alive, cryogenically frozen beneath Splash Mountain? Even you non-believers, I have good news. You CAN keep something alive after its dead, just ask any investment banking executive. Let me explain to you how it works and you’ll understand what I mean. When an investment bank signs a deal, they get a “mandate” from the client. The mandate is a signed document between the client and the investment bank that says the bank has been hired to complete the transaction. Every executive wants and needs mandates; it’s how they collect fees.

The problem lies in the fee structure. You see, almost every mandate is back-ended, meaning that the majority, if not all, of the fee comes as a “success fee” when the transaction closes. Before completion the bank only gets expenses reimbursed which means the director has no profit to show when it comes to bonus time, this is why mandated deals never die.

Luckily for me I just started, but I am now involved in the execution (attempted completion) of two dead deals. What happens is this, as each quarter passes, new financials are released by the client that must be incorporated into the hundred plus page memo. It takes a solid week of continuous work to do this as each time the lawyers need to sign off and so on. After this is done the client sits around waiting and waiting, finally they decide that they are so close to reporting “great numbers” that they decide to hold off the deal until the next set of financials come out in a month. This circle is endless and goes on and on because the client really isn’t sure of what they want to do.

So as an investment bank when do you say enough is enough? When do you decide that if you continue throwing resources at it the deal still won’t go through? Never. An executive who doesn’t have profit prefers to say “well we’re mandated on [dead deal]” than say nothing at all. They don’t care what else is going on, in their mind continuously wasting time is fine; they aren’t the people pulling the all-nighters. Take a guess at how I feels to be working all night updating a document for a bullshit deadline for a deal you know will never close…you’re right.

Sleep? Hmm, doesn't ring a bell....

This week has been one of those weeks that bankers are famous for, just like the girl scout who sells the most cookies, I'm getting a merit badge for this one. What am I talking about? I am talking about relentless non-stop work. It's Saturday morning here and I am getting ready to head back to the office, but let's take a look at the week thus far:

Monday 8:30-7:30 (23)
Tuesday 8:30-4:00 (19.5) (42.5)
Wednesday 9:30-2:00 (16.5) (59)
Thursday 9:30-12:00 (14.5) (73.5)
Friday 9:00-12:00 (15) (88.5)

Who benefits from weeks like this? Well for starters the cab drivers that take us home. Look at Monday, the bloke who picked me up figured he was getting a forty pound fare across the city, nope. He took me home, left the meter running while I went upstairs to shower/change my suit, and then brought me back to the office. It was well over one hundred. Then every other night I just got in the cab and fell asleep. It's funny every time you fall asleep in a cab, you arrive home and the meter is somehow higher than it is normally. Cabs drive home the exact same way every night, yet when you fall asleep, those guys must drive in circles, got to love the entrepreneur in them.

So the big question is what in the world could be so important for you to work that much? The answer, nothing. See in banking we not only organize massive deals between mega sized corporations, we also play bitch to anyone willing to pay a fee. It all goes back to my previous post about begging to be bitches. This particular week we had a client, who is apparently the biggest pain in the ass, call up and say that they wanted a valuation done on a set of Spanish assets for Wednesday. An impossible feat, but being bankers we obliged, working grueling hours to get it done. You know what happened after we sent that of around 4am? The guy got back to us by 8am asking for the same thing under three other scenarios, what an ass. Of course there were other things going on, but that one project took up most of our time.

Anyway, I really do need to get back to work, hopefully today I don't start nodding off in the middle of a meeting or hit my head on the desk like I did on Tuesday or Wednesday, whichever it was. One of the benefits of this past week though is that time flies, it all mashes together and feels like one long day, today could just as well be Tuesday.

----------------------------------------------Update
Saturday 2:00-11:00 (97.5)
Sunday 1:00-12:00 (108.5)

The Bailout (As requested)

Firstly, let me begin by saying not all investment bankers are bad. Me for instance, I'm not one of the bad guys. I do mergers and acquisitions, every once in awhile an IPO or two. We didn't create the credit crisis, in fact, we're more pissed about it then most of you non-banker folk because it has completely ruined our fine (extremely well paid) industry. So next time you're on the tube (subway) and you see a guy dressed in a nice suit don't mumble "hey there's one of those asshole bankers" because firstly we know we're assholes in general, but seriously, not all of us caused this mess.

So, with the disclaimer out of the way, let's talk about the credit crisis. I personally believe Congress has no idea of what they are doing. One female representative the other day called Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson a day-trader. Then yesterday it comes out that one of the many "add-ons" to entice votes in favor of the bill is the elimination of an excise tax on certain wooden arrow toys(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aNyvf3zNdo7o), come on now! We need to let the people who know what they're doing do what they need to do.

Now, Congress may not know what they are doing, but the typical American out there who is strongly against the bailout has no fucking clue. Get it in your heads people, we need banks. Think about everything that you do everyday, going to work, food shopping, movies, gas stations, strip clubs if that's your prerogative, they all require credit. Did Wall Street get us into this mess? Yes, no shit Shirlock, but that is a sunk cost my friends. It's on the citizens now and not doing anything will only make everyone's lives worse. No home loans, your local grocery store can't borrow so they go under, no more car leasing, your employer has to fire half the workforce because they can no longer borrow to expand the business or can't get a credit line to pay the bills. It's doomsday people.

The bottom line is this, I may somewhat understand the severity of the issue. I have a good idea of what it means to read that Libor spreads widened to an all-time high. The average non-finance person has no clue and that's fine. However, if you're in a chemistry lab and you see a clear liquid that the chemist tells you is toxic, you believe him, you don't say fuck you, you're lieing, and drink that shit. So listen to the finance professionals and maybe we can fix this mess.

The Power of the Printer

You might have read the title and thought I was referring to your standard desktop printer, a scene from Office Space maybe, but no. In my world, the printer is an enormous room downstairs where 24/7 these enormous machines eat half the Amazon daily. You see in banking, we print a lot of things. In fact, we even print extra copies of everything just to make sure we've got enough. I'm talking 500 page documents here people. Anyway, the room of presses which I have decided to collectively call "the printer," and those who run them, have a lot of power.

Take this past week for instance, one-hundred hours in the office. Had the printers not been overbooked and had gotten things right the first time, it'd have been 90. However, any worse than they were and it'd have been 120. At first, I decided to go the nice guy route, go down and check-in, say please and thank you, it got me nowhere. I got my document late and messed up (table of contents exist for a reason). Anyway, the nice guy approach doesn't work, dog eat dog, if you want things done around here you better let people know what exactly you want and when you want it. If they don't deliver, go down there and start tapping you're foot until served. I sugggest bringing work because it may take awhile, but if these people get there shit together, you may actually make it to bed, so focus up.