As City firms announce huge job losses, bankers are taking more risks and working longer hours to justify their existence - is the macho culture back?
Here's how bad things are: bankers are quoting Hamlet. Asked to describe his mood, one slumps over a chair in a City bar and offers this: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable."Translation: everything sucks. Clients aren't doing deals. They are "risk-off" rather than "risk-on", in the jargon. So profits are falling - and a fresh bunch of whippersnappers without family commitments who are willing to work till dawn have just been hired. Thousands of people across town have never felt under more pressure in what was always a high-pressure game.
Translation: everything sucks. Clients aren't doing deals. They are "risk-off" rather than "risk-on", in the jargon. So profits are falling - and a fresh bunch of whippersnappers without family commitments who are willing to work till dawn have just been hired. Thousands of people across town have never felt under more pressure in what was always a high-pressure game.
The banker, 42, who doesn't want to be named, has three kids in private school, and is by his own account "very" married. He's knackered. He wants to go home. He wants another drink. He works a foreign bank with a big City presence, that, like the rest of the industry, has just announced swingeing job cuts.
HSBC says 30,000 people must go. Royal Bank of Scotland has already done away with 28,000 - more will follow. UBS, Credit Suisse, most of the rest, are sharpening axes.
Three years ago, after Lehman Brothers was exposed as a house of cards rather than a paragon of financial virtue, he was one of those who said he would no longer allow his employer to so totally control his life.
Never again would he let the vice tighten on him in return for perpetual insecurity and money that still never seemed like enough. He had gained perspective - work/life balance was the future.
And here he is again doing the same old things: looking busy when he's not, cosying up to the boss, attending endless drinks dos to make sure his face still fits, that he is still seen as one of the boys.
Firms are so desperate to keep clients that they are entertaining with a vengeance. Not showing up is not an option.
"My wife doesn't understand. She can't see why I am still under pressure after all these years. She thinks the drinks with people I don't like is me on a jolly - I'm sure she thinks I'm having an affair. Three nights last week I was home at 10-ish, a bit pissed. She keeps saying, 'If you haven't got that much to do, how come you are working so much?'"
The latest banking slowdown is hitting hard. Banks that ramped up staff levels, in some cases as recently as six months ago, in expectation that the financial crises were over and that a boom could be coming, are suddenly scaling back.
Some say the effect of all this has been to reinforce old working practices: "presenteeism" in particular is again regarded as an essential survival tactic, especially for the well-paid over-40s who are under pressure from a younger, cheaper crowd.
Those who hoped that they were entering a time of life when their experience would be regarded as so valuable that they could ease off once in a while are instead nervously looking around the office and doing the maths. "I'm in serious trouble here," some are thinking, and with reason.
Bankers say the shift away from bonuses to higher basic salaries has exacerbated the problem. The banker on £150,000 who got the same as a bonus in a good year is now on a flat £225,000, no matter how the bank performs. So when there is a downturn he is a high fixed cost that the company wants to be rid of, unless he's really coming up with the goods.
So changes to pay that were supposed to make banks safer are in fact making it harder for people to justify their existence, which in turn encourages them to take risks, to be gung-ho.
Saying "yes" to a deal when the prudent answer is "no" might be the only way to get through the slump, to stay employed and, perhaps, married.
For a few years, with varying degrees of success, the City has been trying to reinvent itself as a more reasonable place, as less of a casino, and with a better understanding of why women (or men) with childcare issues might in many cases be preferable employees to jack-the-lads with short attention spans and a permanent adrenaline deficit.
When times get tight, the City reverts to type, it seems. Every man for himself. Women and children last.
One bank insider said: "The new pay rules have forced us to put on fixed costs. A chief executive faced with uncertain markets is asking, 'What levers do I need to pull?' So the
45-year-old banker who is under the cosh is now thinking: 'I wish my salary hadn't risen.' It's a direct consequence of doing away with the old bonus culture."
Asked if the bank keeps a record of which sort of people it fires - how many family men and women, how many above 50, how many below 25 - an HSBC spokesman blocks: "We are at the start of the process. We will let our people know first."
Not everyone is upset by the developments. A trader who has been around the block more than once says: "The current quiet period is allowing a few of us old boys to meet a few clients, have longer lunches. You don't have to worry about fat-fingering a trade [selling 10,000 stocks when you mean to buy 1,000] if business is virtually non-existent. It's during the lulls that you cement relationships which should stand you in good stead when the upturn comes. But then there's a new breed of younger kids coming into the game. They accept the longer hours, the tougher environment and are cheaper. I can't say I'm not concerned."
The economy aside, who is to blame for all this? Bankers point to mid-level bosses rather than chief executives.
One says: "It's certainly true that the hellish hours are back in the City, largely promulgated by layers of grasping middle management, eager to please senior bosses in the hope of promotion, by working their underlings to the core and expecting 16-hour days."
These things become endemic. Anyone not putting the hours in is rounded upon as a "part-timer" or a "half-day Johnny".
"It's a culture that serves little purpose and merely breeds the urge for good employees to quit and 'do something' with their lives," says the same banker. "It's a great shame. Many talented individuals burn out early and leave, when they should have been nurtured."
A lawyer at a City firm who has just pulled an all-nighter says she was told to wait around for the chief executive to make a final decision on something.
In fact, the boss had gone to dinner, had 40 winks and strolled back into the office at 4am to complete a deal before the markets opened. He sent her home and carpeted her middle managers for keeping her there. The guys at the top don't usually expect this sort of kamikaze career posturing, it seems.
If you feel a sense of schadenfreude at all this, and think that bankers and traders deserve what's coming to them, remember that very few are the millionaire playboys of legend. Most people who work in the City don't actually feel the need for a Ferrari and a private jet loyalty card to be fulfilled. Their concerns are the same as anyone's.
Some firms claim to be fighting back against all this. One is Charles Stanley, a mid-size stockbroking house. A spokesman says: "Clearly in stockbroking there are times when staff are required to work later than prescribed contractual hours in order to get the job done. But working longer than contracted hours for the sake of it is not in the DNA of the firm and Charles Stanley is happier and more productive because of it."
This could even be true. For those at less enlightened firms, there's a sickening feeling rising: here we go again.
Present tense: A banker's tale
"It took me three months of not doing the drinks, of going home at 4pm because my wife was depressed, to be ostracised from the team. Three months later, I was sacked."Not being seen at the desk when others are there is a big no no. Realistically, if you come in at 7am in the morning all your useful work is done by lunch. Post-lunch you're pretty useless and bloody tired. The sense of stress and pressure at hanging around for four hours for no reason, and then perhaps another two hours on drinks, is overwhelming.
"The office atmosphere is extremely sterile, with all the PCs buzzing and people pretending to work while doing internet searches. It's depressing and often causes illness, such as headaches and depression. Being there for the sake of being there is a horrible condition of working, the modern Anglo-Saxon work-slavery culture. At my former employer HSBC Investment Bank there were several cases of cancer in staff in their thirties. I think this sort of stress can bring about severe ill health.
"The City is such an inefficient culture in terms of measuring real value. The common denominator is always time spent at your desk - big bank, small bank, US bank, European bank, UK bank, all of them - unless you are some sort of super-rainmaker, in which case you come in and out in your Chelsea tractor and do what you like. For the rest of us, it's never been worse."
Source http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/
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