Finance Guy

He is sort of my supervisor. My manager, the one I make request for human resources things like taking half a day off to see my friend's art critique, hardly talks to me, though when he does, he's smiling and asks me how I am doing. He doesn't really know what I am doing.

This man, on the other hand, explains everything to me, everything I need to know for projects.

(When he doesn't know, I go to another man, more of a "customer", who tells me more than what I need to know about projects. It is from that man, a younger man, that I am learning a lot about financial theories and practices. More about him another time.)

This is the British man I have mentioned in the beginning. Some days he seems very sad, and almost all mornings he seems sad. Discouraged. I never really know if his lack of smiles is due to my coming always later than the rest of the group or that he is simply tired of this job. Today he spoke multiple times in a joking fashion that he was quitting. After he got his famous "review" that determines the famous "bonus" of each employee of any finance company, he was sullen and put a rating box on his monitor, reminding himself what his worth was to this company on a given day. Today, he was on an all time high of 5+. (I think the highest you get is a 5 so that "plus" might be a sign of sarcasm.)

As I have mentioned before, I think he is in his late forties (as I am in my late thirties, in about a month). He has a wife that forms what seems to be a very functional relationship with him. She drives a Volkswagen Beetle while he drives some American SUV. She goes to the hairdresser only to find their son asking her afterward "Is the hairdresser closed today, Mummy?", while he thinks a lot and talks about about golf. (I realize that finance people love golfing, not sure why.)

I know all this because I sit next to him. I am the quiet Asian man and no one notices me when they let their personal life seep into work, especially when they are so disillusioned about it. Plus, I am the type of people who notice everything. My best friend often still think I work for the CIA.

In any case, there are times when he is genuinely happy, even in a sarcastic way. I much prefer when he's sarcastic and smiling than sullen and quiet. I feel sorry for him. I don't know how long he has been working in finance. He knows a lot, has built great programs for the firm. But I imagine this isn't where you want to be the last decade before retirement. (Or decade and a half.) He feels helpless a lot of times, including with his higher-paid higher-ranked wife who seems much more upbeat than he is (perhaps because I find female British voices sexy, except that of my former roommate, who was annoying). He comes early, and leaves after me, and often he works on weekends. I wonder if he cooks. He wants to lose weight, but the closest he got to the gym in our building was bringing his sneakers in to his cubical but never managed to put them on and march into the gym. His excuse is that he has too much to do. Supposedly that is my job: to relieve him of his work. Sometimes, I think, he is jealous of me.

He knows I code well. He jokes about how I was doing too good of a job. He knows unlike others in the group I am a professional programmer, as opposed to a finance person who spent much of his programming time hacking stuff together. What he is jealous about, or might be, isn't that I am better than him. I don't think I am better. But that I am not cynical.

I am a newcomer and I still leave slightly earlier than others because I have to catch my train. I can get stuff done very fast and in a clean way. I have an attitude that shines among so many jaded faces. It's true. I am happy at work. I don't really care if I really get fired tomorrow. It will hurt. I will cry. But unlike being in one of these many crazy quasi-relationships, I will know I have been happy, even for three months. I am learning a lot, and I am bent on learning even more about finance, no matter when I am leaving this company. Today I got excited when that younger man mentioned in the parenthesized paragraph above gave me a huge, black book on "Fixed Income". I didn't even know what "fixed income" was, except that it included bonds, which themselves I am unfamiliar with. But I have been writing a program for "cash" which was demo'ed today to an impressed crowd over there in London. So when I got the big fat "bible" on fixed income and was told to read four chapters, I was never so eager before, not in high school, not in college. I wanted to know everything about bonds, how they are traded, what kinds, why people trade them. Part of my excitement is also from reading this book (still reading it) that explains what happened a few years ago when the housing marking imploded and unscrupulous people made the economy even worse while putting billions of dollars in their own pockets. Mortgages in that story had everything to do with bonds.

So this digression is to illustrate how excited I am. I don't see half that excitement in the faces of other people. This company is probably the most laid-back investment bank I will ever encounter or learn about. People don't work sixty hours, unlike the animals over there at Goldman Sachs where working eighty hours a week was encouraged with a free cab ride home. Here most people are married, most people have a life outside, most people are older than me, most people take lunch breaks in the lunch room, not at their desks. (I remember when I was at Goldman I was nearly alone in the dining hall during what should have been rush hour. Here between noon and 1:30 the place is jam-packed.)

So that's where any jealousy would come from in that face that oscillated between sadness and sarcastic smiles. I think he's proud of having me help him, even if I made the company lose about ten thousand dollars yesterday for which he had to try to clean the mess. I think he wished life wasn't what it is now, whatever it is. He plays an important role in the company, which is probably why he still has a job after causing some bad ripple a month ago when some of his abuses of the IT system were exposed. He didn't abuse it for money; the bank's IT rules were too tight for him, and he had been going through backdoors for a while until now. That probably caused even deeper depression for him. Coincidentally, or not, it happened around his review.

I see his face. I look at the many lines. I look at his small eyes that made Asian eyes look big. I see the different shades of red on different parts of that face. The lips that seemed so faded and weak. I wonder what makes him want to look forward to another day even if he doesn't always look forward to another day. I look forward always to another work day. I wish I could say the same about weekends when I dread waking up alone. (Less now, but still.) What strange differences we have in our desires. He has a wife, charming and even beautiful for her age, and a shy little son he calls a "wimp" but still adorable when he got him in once for unknown reasons. Me, I complain about not having any of that, not even a girlfriend, and yet, I look forward to everyday except the weekend while he looks forward to the opposite set.

I wanted to talk about this man because I wanted to put a human face in finance. I know I should be enough of a human face on finance. I am not an "outsider"; I am becoming a geek in finance. I am listening to a semester-worth of lectures from a Yale Open Course called Financial Markets. I want to read more and more about the finance industry. And I am not embarrassed to say I want to find a way to make a lot of money.

The trouble is, by saying that, especially the last bit, I am reinforcing this stereotype that, in particular among my circle of leftist/progressive friends, many people have against the financial industry. There's, I believe, a deep and unrecognized hypocrisy in those who chastise the financial industry as a whole as opposed to the specific elements that have committed at least moral wrong to the world. Those who are disgusted with the finance people forget that every human being wants to make money. Some wants it more than others, some, and you'd be surprised how many of us actually want more money than we really need. There is therefore nothing wrong with wanting money. Before castigating those who want to maximize their personal capitals, it's worthwhile to visit the demon of jealousy and look at the mirror first.

It's interesting that at the beginning of the third lecture from this course on the Financial Markets, the professor addressed specifically this point. Hollywood never showed financiers under any good light. People's attitudes are exactly that, financial people are these soulless creatures thirst for more capital, even at the expense of other human beings. I think that most of these people who carry this common misconception have never been exposed to any education in the financial market, let alone worked at a financial services institution. None would really be able to say in what ways financial markets are important and ideally important to the growth of the world. It's far easier to say it breeds greed and causes one depression after another. It would surprise many detractors of the financial market that this professor actually believes the goal of finance is to address the problem of economic inequality through "risk management." And to my own surprise, he declared that socialism, even Communism, is a form of risk management because the goal is for those who are at risk of not being rewarded financially from their less economically usable talents, for these people to minimize the risk of poverty by having others who are more fortunate provide them with the resources. I won't dwell into this further since it is undoubtedly a very debatable subject. But I do want to say that it shouldn't have to be as debatable if the other side actually gained some experience learning and even working in finance.

So in many ways I am accomplishing my main goals when I decided to work in this "evil" world. I wanted to learn finance, its seemingly foggy and obscure forests. I believed that there are few things in the world I would fail to learn (such as the violin). And finance was never going to be too complicated for me. I wanted to learn for the sake of learning, and if I get rich, it would be a bonus, but unnecessary. The other goal was to understand the stereotype of this industry. I remember when I found out my ex from college had been working for Credit Suisse for a while, I sort of insulted her and the rest of her gang by saying, "There's something naturally dangerous about exposing yourself to all this money; all this money surely would corrupt a person." I didn't say it such harsh terms, but close enough. I guess partly I was jealous like a lot of detractors of the finance industry, but also she was my ex and I still hated her to some extent.

Now I sound like an advocate for the finance world. But before you jump into that obvious and obviously wrong conclusion, I wanted to paint the face of a man who has worked in finance longer than any of you have worked in anything you're doing now. He is not an exception, but he is the one person I know the best. But he is human. The professor of that lecture said that people he had met in the finance industry are indeed human, and they work not only to maximize their own capital, which really is what most of us do in our jobs whether that's our principle goal or not, but that these people also believed in the ideals of the financial industry, which its detractors probably don't even know. Those ideals encompass in risk management that holds a very socialist ideal of redistribution of not so much wealth and capital but first and foremost risk. He added that those who do actually make a lot of money, have only one thing to do with all that excess money: philanthropy. Philanthropy is something detractors of finance do not talk about, or if they do, they brush it aside as some justification for the abuses of capitalism.

I think that wherever the truth is about finance, to truly talk about it one needs to go past the movies, the documentaries, and really understand what the human faces, all of them, not just the greedy and immoral ones, do in this sector so often vilified.