Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Bankers and Brotherly Love

I realised today that UN does not have shit on the average non-Japanese trading floor of an investment bank. We often speed through our day not noticing the individuals we dealing with day to day, but if we stop speeding through our lives, the white blur teases itself out into all the colours of human species. My day, in this vivid technicolour, is as follows:

1. Use friendship with Hong Kong Chinese boy to get a copy of Research in the neatly collated form used by Research (not the shoddy piecemeal shit they send to the clients and our desk).

2. Greet the head of our desk, a lily-white Canadian, and ask how his Korean wife is feeling after the flu. Pass him the research report. He flips over it, something catches his eye and he immediately calls up his Japanese-American broker in Tokyo.

3. Next to arrive is the Taiwanese-Chinese-origin, Canadian-born trader who handles Korea and Taiwan. He begins his day by going over night arbs with our Italian/Irish American staffed Asian Equities desk in New York. He opens his first e-mail of the day, the Korea derivatives summary, written by a young Frenchman.

4. Later still arrives the Indian and Pakistan trader, a North London lad of the best kind. He jabbers excitedly about his trip to see tigers in Rantanbore, forts in Jaipur and mujaheddin in Delhi. He complains that his Malay-Chinese-origin, London-born wife is harassed as all women are in India. He wonders how the locals keep their hands off Indian women, who he finds gorgeous. He spends the rest of the day speaking to several dozen Indian brokers, who first words are invariably "Arite mate?". But two of these calls are personal: an Indian broker's British wife is homesick, would he get something for her next time he goes to London....an Australian broker fro Macquarie living in Mumbai calls in to boast about bowling to Sachin Tendulkar in the Mumbai Indians nets. Sachin pulled the rank long hop to Brisbane.

5. Last to arrive is our American-origin, British-born Hong Kong and China trader. He slides elegantly to his desk, his beautiful Malay-born, American-educated, investment banker girlfriend by his side. As they part ways, he remembers something, and he asks me:

"Mate are there any good places to dive in Sri Lanka? There is a boutique hotel there we want to check out"

A full cirle, world peace and a benneton ad. Bankers 1, Hypocritcal Hippies 0.

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