Michael Lewis Chapter 02 Never Mention Money.docx

1、Michael Lewis Chapter 02 Never Mention MoneyChapter Two. Never Mention Money. I want to be an investment banker If you had 10,000 sheres sic I sell them for you. I make a lot of money. I will like my job very, very much 1 will help people I will be a millionaire I will have a big house It will be fu

2、n from a Seven-year-old Minnesota schoolboy, What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, dated March 1985 I WAS LIVING in London in the winter of 1984, finishing a masters degree in economics at the London School of Economics, when I received an invitation to dine with the queen mother. It came through a dist

3、ant cousin of mine who, years before, and somewhat improbably, had married a German baron. Though I was not the sort of person regularly invited to dine at St. Jamess Palace, the baroness, happily, was. I rented a black tie, boarded the tube, and went. This event was the first link in a chain of imp

4、robabilities, culminating in a job offer from Salomon Brothers. What had been advertised as a close encounter with British royalty proved to be a fund raiser with seven or eight hundred insurance salesmen. We fanned out across the Great Hall in dark wooden chairs on wine red carpets beneath sooty po

5、rtraits of the royal family, as if auditioning to be extras on Masterpiece Theatre. Somewhere in the Great Hall, as luck would have it, were two managing directors from Salomon Brothers. I knew this only because, as luck would further have it, I was seated between their wives. The wife of the more s

6、enior Salomon Brothers managing director, an American, took our table firmly in hand, once wed finished craning our necks to snatch a glimpse of British royalty. When she learned that I was preparing to enter the job market and was considering investment banking, she turned the evening into an inter

7、view. She prodded, quizzed, needled, and unsettled me for about an hour until finally she stopped, satisfied. Having examined what good had come from my twenty-four years on earth, she asked why I didnt come and work on the Salomon Brothers trading floor. I tried to keep calm. I was afraid that if I

8、 appeared too eager, it might dawn on the woman she had made a terrible mistake. I had recently read John Gutfreunds now legendary comment that to succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning ready to bite the ass off a bear. That, I said, didnt sound like much

9、fun. I explained to her my notion of what life should be like inside an investment bank. (The description included a big glass office, a secretary, a large expense account, and lots of meetings with captains of industry. This occupation does exist within Salomon Brothers, but it is not respected. It

10、 is called corporate finance. It is different from sales and trading, though both are generally referred to as investment banking. Gutfreunds trading floor, where stocks and bonds are bought and sold, is the rough-and-tumble center of moneymaking and risk taking. Traders have no secretaries, offices

11、, or meetings with captains of industry. Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as clients, is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they dont risk money, corporate financiers are considered wimps by traders. By any s

12、tandards other than those of Wall Street, however, corporate finance is still a jungle full of chest-pounding males). The lady from Salomon fell silent at the end of my little speech. Then, in a breath, she said limp-wristed, overly groomed fellows on small salaries worked in corporate finance. Wher

13、e was my chutzpah? Did I want to sit in an office all day? What was Isome numbnut? It was pretty clear she wasnt looking for an answer. She preferred questions. So I asked if she had the authority to offer me a job. With this she dropped the subject of my manhood and assured me that when she got hom

14、e, she would have her husband take care of it. At the end of the meal the eighty-four-year-old queen mother tottered out of the room. Wethe eight hundred insurance salesmen, the two managing directors from Salomon Brothers, their wives, and I stood in respectful silence as she crept toward what I at

15、 first took to be the back door. Then I realized that it must be the front of the palace and that we fund raiser types had been let in like delivery boys, through the back. Anyway, the queen mother was headed our way. Behind her walked Jeeves, straight as a broom, clad in white tie and tails and car

16、rying a silver tray. Following Jeeves, in procession, was a team of small, tubular dogs, called corgis, that looked like large rats. The English think corgis are cute. The British royals, I was later told, never go anywhere without them. A complete hush enveloped the Great Hall of St. Jamess Palace.

17、 As the queen mother drew near, the insurance salesmen bowed their heads like churchgoers. The corgis had been trained to curtsy every fifteen seconds by crossing their back legs and dropping their ratlike bellies onto the floor. The procession at last arrived at its destination. We stood immediatel

18、y at the queen mothers side. The Salomon Brothers wife glowed. Im sure I glowed, too. But she glowed more. Her desire to be noticed was tangible. There are a number of ways to grab the attention of royalty in the presence of eight hundred silent agents of the Prudential, but probably the surest is t

19、o shout. Thats what she did. Specifically, she shouted, Hey, Queen, Nice Dogs You Have There! Several dozen insurance salesmen went pale. Actually they were already pale, so perhaps I exaggerate. But they cleared their throats a great deal and stared at their tassel loafers. The only person within e

20、arshot who didnt appear distinctly uncomfortable was the queen mother herself. She passed out of the room without missing a step. At that odd moment in St. Jamess Palace, representatives of two proud institutions had flown their finest colors side by side: The unflappable queen mother gracefully dea

21、lt with an embarrassing situation by ignoring it; the Salomon Brothers managing directors wife, drawing on hidden reserves of nerve and instinct, restored the balance of power in the room by hollering. I had always had a soft spot for the royals, and especially the queen mother. But from that moment

22、 I found Salomon Brothers, the bleacher bums of St. Jamess, equally irresistible. I mean it. To some, they were crude, rude, and socially unacceptable. But I wouldnt have had them any other way. These were, as much as any investment bankers could be, my people. And there was no doubt in my mind that

23、 this unusually forceful product of the Salomon Brothers culture could persuade her husband to give me a job. I was soon invited by her husband to the London offices of Salomon and introduced to traders and salesmen on the trading floor. I liked them. I liked the commercial buzz of their environment

24、. But I still did not have a formal job offer, and I wasnt subjected to a proper round of job interviews. It was pretty clear, considering the absence of harsh crossexamination, that the managing directors wife had been true to her word and that Salomon intended to hire me. But no one actually asked

25、 me to return. A few days later I received another call. Would I care to eat breakfast at 6:30 A.M. at Londons Berkeley Hotel with Leo Corbett, the head of Salomon recruiting from New York? I said naturally that I would. And I went through the painful and unnatural process of rising at 5:30 A.M. and

26、 putting on a blue suit to have a business breakfast. But Corbett didnt offer me a job either, just a plate of wet scrambled eggs. We had a pleasant talk, which was disconcerting, because Salomon Brothers recruiters were meant to be bastards. It seemed clear Corbett wanted me to work at Salomon, but

27、 he never came right out and proposed. I went home, took off the suit, and went back to bed. Finally, puzzled, I told a fellow student at the London School of Economics what had happened. As he badly wanted a job with Salomon Brothers, he knew exactly what I had to do. Salomon Brothers, he said, nev

28、er made job offers. It was too smart to give people the chance to turn it down. Salomon Brothers only gave hints. If I had been given a hint that it wanted to hire me, the best thing forme to do was call Leo Corbett in New York and take the job from him. So I did. I called him, reintroduced myself,

29、and said, I want to let you know that I accept. Glad to have you on board, he said, and laughed. Right. What next? He explained that I would start life at the Brothers in a training program that commenced the end of July. He said that I would be joined by at least 120 other students, most of whom wo

30、uld have been recruited from colleges and business schools. Then he hung up. He hadnt told me what I would be paid, nor had I asked, because I knew, for reasons that shall soon emerge, that investment bankers didn t like to talk about money. Days passed. I knew nothing about trading and, as a result

31、, next to nothing about Salomon Brothers, for Salomon Brothers is, more than any other on Wall Street, a firm run by traders. I knew only what I had read in the papers, and they said that Salomon Brothers was the worlds most profitable investment bank. True as that might be, the process of landing a

32、 job with the firm had been suspiciously pleasant. After some initial giddiness about the promise of permanent employment, I became skeptical of the desirability of life on a trading floor. It crossed my mind to hold out for a job in corporate finance. Had it not been for the circumstances, I might

33、well have written to Leo (we were on a first-name basis) to say I didnt want to belong to any club that would have me so quickly for a member. The circumstances were that I had no other job. I decided to live with the stigma of having gotten my first real job through connections. It was better than the stigma of unemployment. Any other path onto th