Wall Street Temptations

In an insightful piece at BloombergView, Michael Lewis analyzes the ways Wall Street affects the character of the eager young graduates who come to make their fortunes. Some of the temptations, he says, are obvious – emphasizing short-term gains or using financial success as a cover for moral laziness or failure in the rest of life.

Some are more subtle. Lewis writes, “Anyone who works in big finance will also find it surprisingly hard to form deep attachments to anything much greater than himself.”

He explains further, “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. . . . 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 this, he claims, tempts one to complacency about how things with the status quo, at least in the finance sector: “One of our financial sector’s most striking traits is how fiercely it resists useful, disruptive entrepreneurship that routinely upends other sectors of our economy. People in finance are paid a lot of money to disrupt every sector of our economy. But when it comes to their own sector, they are deeply wary of market-based change. And they have the resources to prevent it from happening.”