In The Money Culture, a 1991 collection of magazine articles about finance, Michael Lewis shares a jewel-like anecdote. In the summer of 1984, two American investment bankers are interviewing a potential hire from Cambridge University. They ask him why an Englishman would want to work for an American investment bank. He praises its “commitment to excellence”, and the “exceptional” abilities of its employees. Then they ask if there are any other reasons. He says he thrives on “doing deals” and “working long hours”. They ask again. “Well,” he says, “I suppose I could use the money.”
It’s probably apocryphal. Lewis writes that he “heard many versions of this vignette”, which was “all over Cambridge in a week, Oxford in two”. But it has a deeper kind of truth: one society’s elite, wearing a grin that might be a grimace, bowing to another’s. Because when the City of London was deregulated in the Eighties, culminating in the “Big Bang” of 27 October 1986, when a whole load of trading restrictions were wiped away at once, Britain’s brightest (or at least, most prestigiously educated) graduates put their noses in the air, and sniffed.
They followed the smell of money to the City, which was soaking up both the investment and the working culture of American firms. In-person trading and a clubby, old-school-tie vibe were replaced with walls of computer screens and punishing office hours. Britain’s elite sloughed off its ambivalence to moneymaking and paternalistic sense of public service, and joined a carnival of pinstripes, braces, champagne and mobile phones as big as bricks.
Neither of those qualities have grown back. Banks, consultancies and corporate law firms still take a heavy tithe of Oxbridge graduates, even the airy-fairy humanities ones. But we’re not in the Eighties and Nineties anymore, when finance’s power to shape the world eclipsed that of democratic politics. Rather than being high-rolling, cork-popping masters of the universe, the modern banker is a sober, industrious creature. Money is not their liberator; it is something they need in abundance just to keep their head above water in London’s property market. The glamour has died but the drudgery of the day-to-day work remains. As once-solid upper-middle-class professions (teachers, doctors, etc) are being pushed into precarity, finance is in turn becoming a solid, even stolid, upper-middle-class profession. Banking is boring now.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House this year, much was made of a “vibe shift” in American finance back to old-school, red-blooded capitalism and its attendant cultural values. A bull market bellowed, and fig leaves of progressivism were blithely abandoned. JP Morgan swapped DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) for DOI (“diversity, opportunity and inclusion”). Deloitte told staff working on US government contracts to remove their pronouns from their email bios. “I feel liberated,” one “top banker” told the FT. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”
To be a fly on the wall of that banker’s office during Trump’s tariff shenanigans. Was the freedom to shout slurs across the trading floor worth the biggest stock market fall since Covid? Though the bond market might have disciplined the President into putting a 90-day freeze on most of his tariffs, he still freestyles market-upending proposals in public: a 25% duty on iPhones and 50% on all EU goods, at time of writing, but there’ll be a new batch by the time of your reading. The business world is locked in a perpetual frenzy of second-guessing. These days, “finance is obviously subordinate to politics”, says James*, a finance worker around 30, who I meet in a west London pub one listless Sunday afternoon to get a sense of the modern reality of things.
“Was the freedom to shout slurs across the trading floor worth the biggest stock market fall since Covid?”
Our cultural conception of finance is a bit out of date, partly thanks to Industry, the TV series that follows a bunch of young finance guys and gals as they drink, snort, fuck and occasionally trade their way through London. The series’ creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both worked in finance in the early 2010s and have always maintained that the on-screen hedonism they cook up is generally accurate. But James says that in four years in banking, he has “never, ever heard [of] or seen anyone doing drugs in the office”. Even putting aside the fact you’d get “absolutely fucked up” by HR if you were caught, “no amount of coke can make you feel better” if you’re working 100 hours a week, as young finance foot soldiers typically are.
Which is probably just as well: he says that colleagues around 50, who very much lived by the “work hard, play hard” principle in the first decades of their careers, have noticeably more chronic health conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc) than other professionals their age. Instead, finance’s ultra-competitive ethos has made it the ideal host for infection by the wellness craze. People run half-marathons at the weekend, and wear smart watches that track their health data rather than Rolexes.
This is a world almost entirely alien to the one that Jacob Phillips entered in 2000, aged 21. He hadn’t gone to university, and fell into one of the City’s “parasitic” ancillary industries, media monitoring for financial PR firms. It had a “rough-edged, Thatcherite kind of mindset”, he says. There were no meaningful HR processes. It was difficult to fit in without drinking at lunchtime. On Fridays, “it’d be pretty normal for people to be passing a wrap around and popping into the toilet towards the end of the day”. His bosses “were completely open about the fact that they only wanted to employ young people, because you can push them around”.
Finance is still powered by young people pouring their evenings and nights into numbing, repetitive work, but they are not quite as docile about the arrangement as before. In 2021, junior Goldman Sachs employees launched a high-profile campaign to carve out a sliver of guaranteed free time away from the lair of the vampire squid. James, similarly, says that Gen Z staff are “a lot more open to complain to seniors than we ever were”, which helps keep upper management in check even if it does mean his direct underlings are “very whiny” at times. Sarah*, another banker a few years into her career, sees a distinct culture shift with new Gen Z recruits. “They are very good at their jobs,” she says, “but don’t sign up to the narrative that you need to get in before the boss does and leave after.” This, she thinks, is down to there being “less scope to make lots of money over the next 20 years”. If you can get less out, you’ll put less in — it’s not an equation you need a quant for.
This is the latest chapter in what’s been a deeply generational story. Along with wider cultural shifts, there’s an underappreciated and very specific factor driving finance’s death of largesse: banks, private equity houses and the rest becoming publicly listed companies. Goldman and BlackRock in 1999; Lazard in 2005; Evercore in 2006; Blackstone in 2007; KKR in 2010; Carlyle in 2012; TPG in 2022; CVC in 2024. These listings made a small group of senior partners fantastically wealthy, but invited in far more scrutiny from shareholders and the wider public. Salaries and bonuses have to be justified to outsiders; tightening expense accounts bounce employees from business-class flights to economy.
Essentially, boomers who had their fun in the buoyant Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s decided to cash out at the expense of their juniors. Where have we heard that one before? It’s a mirror of the generational distribution of wealth in society at large — in fact, the dynamics are even more distorted, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. Those who started work by about 2000, and so achieved a degree of seniority before the 2008 crash, are rich rich. Anyone younger is merely very wealthy. The guys in their 50s and 60s “come from a very different world”, says James, and the best anecdotes, like buying more than one Ferrari in a single year, are usually theirs. So why wouldn’t their Zoomer juniors quiet quit? The sadomasochistic contract written down the spine of the industry — work like a dog for me, and one day you’ll be as rich as me — is provably false.
Let’s get this in proportion: no one here is on less than six figures, and if you do well, your salary will probably start with a 2 or 3 by the time you’re 30. But the cost of London property, plus the sky-high cost of everything else, leave psychological scars that embed an “upper middle-class mindset where you are very rational with the money”, says James. “I know people who take home over a million pounds a year and absolutely stress over the temperature at which their flat is set up. If I earned a million this year, my lifestyle wouldn’t change at all.” People, in general, aren’t flashy — what’s the finance bro obsession with outdoorsy brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx if not a performative disavowal of finery and frippery? And there’s always the axe hanging overhead. “Banking workforces are constantly getting squeezed,” says Sarah, “so there’s concern the money train won’t last forever, which holds people back from spending.”
When Phillips was in the City, he says there was a pervading, “subtle sense that markets rule everything”. He left after five years, in 2006, and has since become a writer and academic. But when he first read the accelerationist writer Nick Land, his mind was taken back to his old career. “It really rang true with this sense there that the market was this strange, complicated, sinister, untameable beast which could ravage anything in its way. You either rode the tiger or you’d be destroyed by the tiger.”
“Essentially, boomers who had their fun in the buoyant Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s decided to cash out at the expense of their juniors.”
Now, “governments matter”, says James. “What we had in the Nineties and 2000s was an anomaly.” In a funny way, we’ve gone full circle. Before the Thatcherite revolution, finance was a stable, comfortable career. In Liar’s Poker, his book about his years at Salomon Brothers, Lewis meets a minor City grandee who tells him he disapproves of workdays longer than eight hours, because “you then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before”.
Work patterns are now very different, but finance is, once again, an industry where the overriding attraction is stability rather than possibility. You’ve heard the stats, or a variation on them, before: in 2002, the house price to median earnings ratio in London was 6.9; in 2023 it was 11.9. For day pupils, average private school fees as a percentage of the median national salary have increased from 30.6% in 1999 to 48.2% in 2024. If you want an upper-middle-class life, can you afford not to go into banking, or similar industries like corporate law and consulting? This leads to a vicious cycle — prices go up as London becomes more and more globalised and financialised — and a brain drain, as all the pin-sharp Oxbridge STEM graduates are tempted away from the laboratory. If the government can make a meaningful dent in the housing crisis, and build the Oxford-Cambridge Arc to let loose Britain’s life-science capabilities, maybe there’s hope of all this human capital flowing elsewhere. But as many politicians have found, breaking the tight, wrinkly grip of boomer “stakeholders” is no light task.
James, as we reach the dregs of our Morettis, is candid. “If I was born in our parent’s generation, I would have probably not worked in finance. I enjoy being quite comfortable, having a fat savings buffer, but back then, if a London Zone One flat was £300,000, £200,000, I would’ve happily worked in a general corporate job — maybe even marketing [or] journalism. But because we are where we are today, and how uncertain the next 10, 20 years look like, I want to absolutely max out on income.” It’s hard to blame him, or all the other bright young things in their down-padded gilets streaming through the grey dawn into central London every morning.
*Names have been changed
