Once they get their egg the golden goose can be served for lunch for all they care
by digby
Bloomberg View’s Michael Lewis kindly dispensed some advice to young Wall Streeters earlier this week on how to navigate that boulevard of broken dreams. It’s interesting in many ways, but I think this gets to the nub of it:
You may think you are going to work for Credit Suisse or Barclays, and will there join a team of professionals committed to the success of your bank, but you will soon realize that your employer is mostly just a shell for the individual ambitions of the people who inhabit it. The primary relationship of most people in big finance is not to their employer but to their market. This simple fact resolves many great Wall Street mysteries. An outsider looking in on the big Wall Street banks in late 2008, for instance, might ask, “How could all these incredibly smart and self-interested people have come together and created collective suicide?” More recently the same outsider might wonder, “Why would a trader rig Libor, or foreign exchange rates, or the company’s dark pool, when the rewards for the firm are so trivial compared with the cost, if he is caught? Why, for that matter, wouldn’t some Wall Street bank set out to rat out the bad actors in their market, and set itself as the honest broker?”
The answer is that the people who work inside the big Wall Street firms have no serious stake in the long-term fates of their firms. If the place blows up they can always do what they are doing at some other firm — so long as they have maintained their stature in their market. The quickest way to lose that stature is to alienate the other people in it. When you see others in your market doing stuff at the expense of the broader society, your first reaction, at least early in your career, might be to call them out, but your considered reaction will be to keep mum about it. And when you see people making money in your market off some broken piece of internal machinery — say, gameable ratings companies, or riggable stock exchanges, or manipulable benchmarks — you will feel pressure not to fix the problem, but to exploit it.
Then read this piece by ProPublica. You just won’t believe it:
Segarra appeared to be exactly what Beim ordered. Passionate and direct, schooled in the Ivy League and at the Sorbonne, she was a lawyer with more than 13 years of experience in compliance – the specialty of helping banks satisfy rules and regulations. The New York Fed placed her inside one of the biggest and, at the time, most controversial banks in the country, Goldman Sachs.
It did not go well. She was fired after only seven months.
As ProPublica reported last year, Segarra sued the New York Fed and her bosses, claiming she was retaliated against for refusing to back down from a negative finding about Goldman Sachs. A judge threw out the case this year without ruling on the merits, saying the facts didn’t fit the statute under which she sued.
At the bottom of a document filed in the case, however, her lawyer disclosed a stunning fact: Segarra had made a series of audio recordings while at the New York Fed. Worried about what she was witnessing, Segarra wanted a record in case events were disputed. So she had purchased a tiny recorder at the Spy Store and began capturing what took place at Goldman and with her bosses.
Segarra ultimately recorded about 46 hours of meetings and conversations with her colleagues. Many of these events document key moments leading to her firing. But against the backdrop of the Beim report, they also offer an intimate study of the New York Fed’s culture at a pivotal moment in its effort to become a more forceful financial supervisor. Fed deliberations, confidential by regulation, rarely become public.
The recordings make clear that some of the cultural obstacles Beim outlined in his report persisted almost three years after he handed his report to Dudley. They portray a New York Fed that is at times reluctant to push hard against Goldman and struggling to define its authority while integrating Segarra and a new corps of expert examiners into a reorganized supervisory scheme.
The incentives in our financial system are built for individuals getting rich at the expense of the Average Joe — and the system itself. It’s a miracle that 2007 is the worst we’ve seen since the Great Depression.
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