Here's one investment banker's first hand version of what investment banking really has become...

"...My first job out of Cornell was on the trading floor at UBS. So when news would hit the wire about an American company closing a domestic factory, I felt a good deal of conflict as I watched the company’s stock price go up as a result. Those sorts of factory closings had ruined my neighbourhood, my city, and many of the people I’d grown up with. I was not alone in this feeling, but there were not many of us, either. One of my British friends from the training programme, who later became a currency trader, once told me: “I mean Christ, mate, every time they close a factory in Wales the goddamn market goes up. The whole system’s a little fucked, don’t you think?” And of course it was. The question was how to deal with it.

The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist.

The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.

The fact is, I became pretty good at making this argument myself. Until a roommate of mine, a guy named Mark Brewin, asked me: “So is that really what you want to be? A selfish animal?” “It’s not like we have a choice,” I said. “No,” he said. “You always have a choice. It’s just easier to pretend that you don’t.” Ouch. The strangest thing was, this thing I’d wanted for so long, this chance to become wealthy, was causing me more internal conflict than anything I’d ever done. I began writing a second novel, about a kid from the provinces who comes to Wall Street and is both drawn in and horrified by the culture of excess.

I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff - Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.

What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000)...."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-ex...