“There’s always somebody doing better than you,” said Mark Gorton, the founder and chairman of high-frequency trading firm Tower Research Capital. The number of teenagers worth $20 million because they giddily loaded up on crypto can be hard on the ego. “Everyone compares themselves to those people,” Gorton added. “I kind of consciously try not to.”
That envy marks a shift from only about a year ago, when Sam Peurifoy sensed colleagues at Goldman were treating crypto as “kind of a cute, niche curiosity.” Known for his gaming persona Das Kapitalist, Peurifoy left around June for Floating Point Group, which provides services for trading digital currency, and is now an executive at Hivemind, a $1.5 billion crypto fund. Despite bankers’ windfall year, Peurifoy said there’s a “feeling in the air that they are missing out,” describing it not as a bleakness but “this overwhelming ‘Wow.’”
Culture Of Wall Street
One problem, suggested veteran dealmaker Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, is that bankers focus on net-worth rather than meaning.
“We’ve lacked a sense of community engagement and sustainability on Wall Street for over a century,” said Red-Horse Mohl, who’s now chief financial officer of East Bay Community Foundation. Finance executives know subconsciously that widening inequality is a crisis, she said, and “it cannot keep getting worse.”
This year started on a sour note for many bankers. After a wildly profitable 2020, banks were restrained with their year-end bonuses. Turnover was rising by midyear, firms raced to fill in holes left by the people who’d jumped ship, and the talk turned in the fall to a fight for talent.
At the Goldman dinner, retired executives were happy to see each other. But some worried about rising real estate prices in Aspen and frothy markets everywhere, Boisi said. His mind turned to the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve has deployed to buoy asset prices. “You don’t know when the piper has to be paid, but the piper has always got to be paid,” he said. “It comes in an unexpected way, and it comes violently.”
There are other forces at play in Wall Streeters’ greyish mood.
George Walker, who runs Neuberger Berman, points to the “huge workloads” facing bankers as markets roar. Finance bosses are uncertain about hybrid work and putting in “extra efforts” as clients focus on environmental, social and governance issues. “Add a little Covid-stress and you don’t have a recipe for glee.”
Some bankers are keeping quiet out of politeness, said Bill Harts, a private equity investor who has worked for Bank of America Corp., Nasdaq Inc. and the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners.