by John LeFevre
Dear Mr. Lefevre,
Hope this email finds you well.
As per our previous communication through phone, I am very sorry to inform you that our management would not like to consider your extension of Room 4827 because we have received six serious complaints during your current stay with us. Please be so kind to understand that you will have to check-out on 26 July 2010 according to your current contract. According to your previous request, please find the following details of the glitch report for your information.
Date of incident: 07/16/2010
Time of incident: 08:37 PM
Location of incident: FSP 48/f guest lift lobby
Details of incident: Guest from Room 4827 walked out from taxi and shouting to the taxi driver in the FSP entrance. Security accompanied the guest to his room. Upon arrival on 48/F, the guest was over react and kept yelling in the corridor by using foul language. Security tried to stopped the guest but not success. After 15 minutes, guest went back to his room.
Date of incident: 07/09/2010
Time of incident: 01:45 AM
Location of incident: FSP concierge
Details of incident: At 0145 hrs, Mr Lefevre was intoxicated. Security escorted Mr Lefevre to Rm 4827. When Mr Lefevre opened the Rm 4827 door, he refused to stay and said he was bored, started to use foul language to talk to Security Team. Mr Lefevre attempted to assault security personnel. Security Team suppressed Mr Lefevre and brought him to FSP lobby. At 0245hrs, Mr Lefevre was chased by three police officers and two IFC securities from IFC escalator to FSP concierge gate. Mr Lefevre was using foul language to talk to the police officers with physical contact. AM speak to calm police officers. The guest returned to room 4827.
Date of incident: 06/17/2010
Time of incident: 10:25 PM
Location of incident: FSP 59/F Swimming pool area
Details of incident: At 2225 hrs, Mr Lefevre was found sleeping on the beach chair. Security tried to wake him up, however he had no response.
Date of incident: 05/29/2010
Time of incident: 09:20 PM
Location of incident: Hotel Driveway
Details of incident: At around 2120 hrs, Security was informed that guest is in Hotel driveway. FSP guest Mr. Lefevre, who seems to be intoxicated was inside the taxi (JS2953) but didn’t settle the taxi fare. FSP AM settled the taxi fare and Mr Lefevre was escorted to the room by Security.
Date of incident: 05/21/2010
Time of incident: 09:15 PM
Location of incident: FSP 59/F Swimming Pool
Details of incident: At 2208 hrs, guest from FSP Rm 4827 (Mr. Lefevre) was eating sushi and drinking with female guest in the swimming pool on 59/F.
Date of incident: 05/16/2010
Time of incident: 06:15 PM
Location of incident: FSP Lobby and 59/F
Details of incident: At 1815 hrs, Security was informed a intoxicated guest who was showing up at the FSP lobby with no shirt. FSP AM stopped the guest and advised him return and put a shirt on before to the IFC mall. The guest obliged and returned to room 4827—(Mr Lefevre) who was escorted by AM.
If you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact me at any time.
Thank you for your kind understanding!
______________________
Best Regards,
Vicky
Four Seasons Place Hong Kong / Leasing Executive
Not only are they banning me for being a terrible human being, they have politely complied with my request to prove it in writing. My favorite part of the email is that they begin it with “Hope this email finds you well” and end it with “Thank you for your kind understanding!”
One month after being expelled from the Four Seasons, I was offered the job of head of Asia debt syndicate at Goldman Sachs.
A Long Day
From about the middle of 2007, the cracks are really starting to emerge. Credit markets are completely dislocated and dysfunctional, with market execution windows opening and closing violently and with little provocation. New deals are few and far between. I am able to get a contentious deal done in June but then nothing again until September, when I hit an improbable home run with a Chinese high-yield private placement that nets us $6 million in fees.
And then, just like that, the market slams shut again. Come October, the contagion finally reaches equities, and investor risk appetite evaporates overnight. It’s lights out; we might as well shut up shop for the rest of the year.
I don’t really care. I’ve more than made my budget for the year, so a few more deals won’t really move the needle on my number (bonus) much anyway. I’m happy to kill the rest of Q4 taking longer lunches, arranging client meetings at bars, making unnecessary trips to Jakarta and Seoul, or simply playing Bloomberg chat room trivia with my equally bored counterparts at rival firms.
Everything is fairly calm, except for the fact that we all know “it” is coming.
The way things work with layoffs or redundancies on a trading floor is that once team heads have been asked to update revenue estimates (budgets) for the purpose of evaluating head counts, rumors and fear start to spread and people will obsessively speculate on how long it will be before a few unfortunate souls get “the tap” on the shoulder or “the call” to go meet HR in a conference room upstairs.
Information and rumors travel at light speed on a trading floor, across Wall Street, and then around the globe; after the first tap and formal confirmation, everyone knows. Occasionally, there’s a false alarm. By the time poor Jignesh comes back upstairs from an all-too-leisurely trip to Starbucks, someone has already called dibs on the HP financial calculator he left on his desk, and people as far away as London and Tokyo are reading his obituary. “Sorry, dude, I thought you got shit-canned” has to be one of my favorite all-time apologies.
Usually, we don’t make mistakes, and when the real day comes, it’s no joke—the typical banter between guys making millions of dollars quickly disappears. It’s probably the only day when there are no minifootballs being tossed at analysts’ heads, no prank phone calls being made, and no bets being wagered on how many push-ups the Muslim research analyst can do while he’s fasting for Ramadan. (That motherfucker cost me $800.)
Heading into year-end, the gossip proliferates, the speculation builds, and the tension swells. Every morning we’ll come in to rumors that the bloodbath has started overnight in New York and a few names will get tossed around. “But he’s still on Bloomberg,” one guy will say, or “I can still see him in the system.”
The quickest way to confirm the rumor is to send the person in question an email, because as soon as someone is fired, the IT guys swoop in and suspend their account. If the email bounces back as undeliverable, then you have your verification. So we invent stupid reasons to email our friends (and foes) in the New York office. It’s almost like a game, trying to be the first person to confirm that so-and-so got canned. My strategy is always to send out a mass email to a distribution list, an entire department, sales desk, or deal team. Fishing with dynamite.
News of this magnitude is met with the full gamut of emotion, or sometimes just complete indifference: “Fuck him” or “That’s too bad” or “Sweet, our share of the bonus pool’s getting bigger” or even “Do you think I could get a good deal on his GT3?”
I get my first “undeliverable” message back. Fuck me. It’s my good friend Dennis Lipton. He gave up one of the hottest fixed-income seats in Asia to take a job back in New York on the mortgage desk—of all places to be when 2008 rolls around. And boom, just like that, he gets fired, just a few weeks before bonus communication day, all for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
So it’s confirmed. The great RIF (Reduction in Force) of 2007–2008 has started. And from everything we are hearing out of New York, it’s fucking bad.
One of the first things I do to
get confirmation in Asia is to have my secretary call and try to make a conference room reservation on the fiftieth floor, which is where we have most of our formal client meetings. If there is going to be a big RIF, HR will book the entire block of rooms to prevent bankers from inadvertently holding a client meeting close by. It’s not good for business for a client to see a teary-eyed banker turning in his BlackBerry on his way out.
The entire process is always a bit shrouded in mystery, given the seriousness and sensitivities involved. Even many MDs don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. Also, banks don’t like it when the media find out about big layoffs because it sends the wrong message to the market and to shareholders. “This is a normal part of our annual process where we cull the bottom 10%” is our party line, which is obviously better than the reality, that revenue is down, and going forward, we’re way overstaffed for the business that we expect to generate in the next few years.
My secretary confirms that all the conference rooms upstairs are blocked off all afternoon.
For the most part, everyone is nervous, primarily because we’ve all seen our share of injustice when it comes to redundancies. Beyond revenue production and performance reviews, sometimes it just comes down to sheer numbers and politics. Guys will get fired for being too senior, aka FIFO (First In, First Out). Or a guy might have just come across from Morgan Stanley with a fat guarantee the previous year and now has nothing but a big target on his back, aka LIFO (Last In, Fuck Off).
In the case of Dennis, there’s plain bad luck. In tough times, if the powers that be in New York have an opinion, informed or otherwise, that certain areas of a traditionally lucrative business are going to be down the following year or two, they’ll arbitrarily cull a large chunk of an entire team, rock stars included, just to satisfy head count pressure and ultimately to protect their own bonuses.
Everyone (myself included) is nervous and, to the extent possible, empathetic. The phones still ring. The dealerboards still light up. But people tend to be a bit slower and more apprehensive picking up the lines today. It’s not even 10 a.m. and I’ve had five coffees, just because people can’t sit still and keep volunteering to make Starbucks runs.
Inequity aside, people on Wall Street generally know where they stand. They know how much revenue they’ve generated; they know what they got paid last year, and they hear about what Mr. Aston-Martin-in-the-Parking-Garage got paid. Most guys are smart and objective enough to be mentally prepared for the ax. They have their wallet and keys in their pocket instead of in their drawer, their jacket is close by, and they’ve forwarded their email contacts to their personal account weeks ago.
And then it starts. The first guy leaves and doesn’t come back. Another guy, youthful and exuberant, disappears looking like Tom Hanks from Big, only to come back thirty minutes later looking like Tom Hanks from Philadelphia. He collects his things, quietly nods, and walks out.
Time drags on. Other than on 9/11, I’ve rarely heard a trading floor with two hundred people so quiet; the unfamiliar patter of nervous fingers on keyboards has never been so irritating. That’s when I hear Tony Paolini, our head of structured products, screeching into the phone with his high-pitched Italian accent, “Listen.” But the way he says it, it sounds more like “Leeesin.”
“Leeesin . . . Leeesin . . . No, you leeesin to me . . . Does it have the black seats with the red stitching, or the red seats with the black stitching?”
Everybody hears him, and most people are a bit confused and bewildered, but I know exactly what he’s talking about. All I can do is make eye contact with a couple of guys three rows over to see if they are getting this too. Yes, they are. We exchange glances, shaking our heads and laughing silently to each other in disbelief.
I consider Tony to be a friend and a likable person—intelligent, funny, condescending and arrogant for a reason, and yet also oblivious to the feelings of others, totally unapologetic, and seemingly quite proud of all of this. So I’m not surprised by his obtuseness to the situation. He’s just one of those guys who is missing a sensitivity chip, and maybe that’s what makes him a good trader. Over the summer, almost on a daily basis, he would shout over at any intern, “Hey, Rick [there was no Rick], how about a Starbucks run.” He’d then announce to anyone within earshot that he was buying coffees and then, without even thinking about it, dismissively throw the intern a HK$100 bill [US$13]: “Coffees are on me, guys.” This poor kid would then have to take orders that would often total three times that amount and just have to eat the difference himself. Imagine being some lowly college kid, losing US$20–30 a day on coffee runs, just because some guy who gets paid comfortably in the seven figures doesn’t give a shit. They’re fighting to secure one of a handful of full-time offers into the analyst program, so of course none of them has the balls to say or do anything about it, and rightly so. But, for the record, and to my credit, once this was brought to my attention, a few of us started quietly subsidizing the interns on Paolini’s coffee runs.
Today, assuming (and probably knowing) that he’s not getting fired, Tony Paolini is just being himself. He continues into the phone, at this point practically yelling, “I ordered this fucking car six months ago. I was very clear. I want black suede seats with the red stitching.” In case people still didn’t get it, he slams his receiver down on the desk. “Fucking Ferrari. Man, I can’t believe this shit.”
His having caused a small disruption, the trading floor, four rows in every direction, is now standing and staring right at him. Five seconds later, a young VP sitting two seats down from Tony, having just received “the call,” puts on his jacket, gives a half-wave acknowledgment (now that everyone’s looking in his direction), and then walks out, never to return.
“Oh . . . Fuck . . . Sorry, dude,” Paolini says in a slow, drawn-out, intentionally loud whisper. And then he just laughs, clearly proud of what he considers to be perfect, albeit coincidental, comedic timing.
Aside from a few times in 2001, when we were still reeling from the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and in the midst of the Enron and WorldCom debacles, I don’t recall any other days that have come even remotely close to being as bad as this one.
I make it through the day without incident. Most of us decide to head out pretty early for a few well-deserved drinks, and by that I mean to get shit-faced.
It’s not uncommon for some of the fired employees to throw themselves an impromptu party that same day by heading to the nearest bar, opening up a tab, and spreading word that they’re buying drinks for anyone who cares to join them. It’s almost a point of pride, as a way of demonstrating that they are taking the news like a champ, and are confident and secure enough that it doesn’t bother them too much. I assume they don’t want to go straight home and face their Warden equivalent. I know I wouldn’t.
After a few hours of solid drinking, I decide to go back upstairs to my desk and catch up on a few things. After all, I hadn’t done shit all day. And Friday nights out aren’t really my thing; I much prefer a big night out on a Tuesday or Wednesday when the amateurs and weekend riffraff are all at home or at work.
Around 9 p.m., the glass doors that separate the private side (investment banking) of the Chinese Wall and the public side (sales and trading) open and a young banking analyst, Carol, walks onto the deserted trading floor and over to me. She is working on a last-minute presentation and needs me to opine on pricing for a specific credit, provide recommendations in terms of a theoretical deal structure, and highlight what anchor investors we’d target—a fairly standard pitch for a company looking to raise money via the public bond market. How she knew I was still in the office, God only knows.
Truth be told, Carol is a pathetic specimen, so much so that even I have always felt sorry for her. She works at least six days a week, usually sixteen-plus-hour days, and sometimes through the night. Naturally unattractive and metabolically challenged, it doesn’t help that she is forced to eat mos
t of her meals at her desk and clearly never has time for the gym. On top of her having the body of an indolent hippo, her morose demeanor reminds me of a severely depressed zoo primate. Moreover, she is slow-witted and annoying and always seems to need something at the worst possible times, like trying to talk to me when I’m on a pricing call, or pestering Andy for trading levels in the middle of a some credit event shit-storm.
One day, she’s hovering behind right as I’m cramming for an imminent client update call. “Not now, Carol. I’m busy,” I say to the enormous shadow, without bothering to look away from my screens. Yet, she doesn’t fucking move. That’s when my dealerboard lights up; it’s Andy.
“Hey dude, I know you’re busy, but I’ve got a quick question: What do you call a fat Chinese person?” He pauses, stands up two rows over to make eye contact and flash me a big grin. Oh boy, here it comes. “A chunk.” Click. I can still hear him laughing across the floor.
I frequently wonder how and why Carol manages to carry on living. Adding to her miserable existence is the fact that her boss, Benny Lo, is a tyrannical, abusive sociopath. He is such a pedantic piece of shit that most good analysts refuse to work for him. He is famous for taking a red pen to pitch books, making unnecessary changes, and then three hours and five iterations of the draft later, screaming, “What’s wrong with you? This is all fucking wrong,” and then changing it back to what the analyst had put in the first draft.
Fortunately for her, it’s been a rough day, so I’m feeling particularly sympathetic. I’m a little drunk, and on a Friday night alone in the office, I’ve got nothing else to do. I handhold her through a few slides, marking up changes, reviewing a theoretical roadshow and marketing strategy, and explaining the optimal way to position the credit versus its peers. This is probably the nicest and most helpful I can remember being to any of the pitch-book monkeys from the origination team.
As she goes to leave, she says, “Thank you. Thank you so so much.” And then she just breaks down and starts to cry. Oh fuck. I don’t even like to put up with this shit from my girlfriend, and she’s hot. And fucks me. Sometimes.