February 27, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:On a lighter note, a
On a lighter note, a friend sends this tidbit, with the following blurb:
Isn't this the real reason we all went to work on Wall Street: to spend more on a few bottles of wine than we did on our B-school tuition? Oh well. Note that they washed it all down with a couple of $5 beers. . .
The article discusses six Barclays bankers who managed to spend £44,000 on one meal. Aficionados of business dinners will know that this wasn't actually spent on the meal (the befuddled restauranteur comped the food) but on the wine, most of which was older than they are. All this in the face of a decline in both profits and prestige in investment banking -- one thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his cronies dancing on the edge of the abyss. Now all but one of them has been fired -- not for spending so much, although that's frowned on in today's more austere banking culture, but for trying to expense it.
Even more priceless, however, is this bit from the otherwise left wing New York Times:
The extravagance occurred as banks were instituting what some complain are draconian measures, requiring employees to fly economy class on business trips and limiting the amount spent on entertaining clients - sometimes to as little as £100 a person, or $140 - as business suffers one of its worst slumps in two decades.
Investment bankers flying coach! Oh, the humanity!
The ex-boy was a Morgan Stanley banker, and for a little while he was quite taken with the theory that the mothballing of planes had actually caused occupancy to rise on most flights post-9/11. Now, I knew from reports about capacity levels that this wasn't true; it didn't even seem to be true on any but a couple of high-traffic routes. Yet he insisted, based on his experience and those of his colleagues (all of whom spent more time in the air than most birds) that it was so. Then one day a light dawned. "Darling," I asked gently, "do you think that this had something to do with the fact that the cutbacks are forcing you to fly coach?" Even when you love them, it's hard not to take a little delight in the utter discombabulation of I-Bankers forced to live the way the peons do.
One would think this were tongue in cheek, if the Times weren't so relentlessly humorless these days. While half of me thinks this is a rare flash of wit in the staid Gray Lady, the other half thinks that this columnist is dismayed to find that her wealthy friends will no longer be able to bring her along on their lush vacations . . . Ayn Rand's Lillian crying "You don't understand! I'm not talking about not having money. . . I'm talking about real, stinking poverty!" But the article goes on to discuss prices and menus at the restaurant in a more traditionally indignant style, so I suspect a case of sudden onset adverb deficit disorder (ADD), which is often mistaken by laymen for subtlety.
Sigh. They spent all that money on wine, when they could have helped a needy MBA almost completely pay off her loans. . . up the revolution! Grab your calculators and your compilers and march on Wall Street! Underemployed professionals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but 8-20 in accomodations no worse than the ones you have now!
Posted by Jane Galt at February 27, 2002 3:50 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links