Wall Street: A spy's report

While sitting in my Marxism and Society class, an idea dawned on me. A fantastic, hilarious idea. I would get an internship on Wall Street! I had never done it before and knew that I would never do it again, so this would be quite an adventure. What better tribute to Marx and Engel than to sneak into the fortress of capitalism and unveil the heart of darkness.

Wall Street holds an immense allure for many Duke students. It seems that a third of the campus just can't wait to crash out of Durham, N.C., and head to the Big Apple. Don't do it! You would get a much more rewarding experience teaching, researching or going abroad. The other two thirds have strong stereotypes one way or another about this curious species of "I-bankers."

Anyway, here is a Marxist spy's report back from Wall Street. For you econ majors, take this as one outlier data point. Any names of individuals or firms are eliminated to protect me. You can like it or love it.

The Interns. A funny thing happens when someone is pretending to be curious. Pretending hard. The brain's immune system kills off the invading information as fast as it can. It is battling. But the face is frozen in a most unnatural contraction of muscles and the mouth is grinning so wide you can insert a floppy disk through it. A yawn breaks through the throat's strangle. The chin twitches until the jawbone suddenly bursts loose, leaving a gaping hole. In the socket the eyeballs churn, and through the nostrils escapes a primitive howl. The horror!

This I have witnessed on several occasions when interns felt obligated to be enthusiastic and curious. They would pick some employee's brain on put/call parity, option pricing, futures-things that they confessed after work to have little interest in. What they were really passionate about was making money, but unlike the Goodfellas below, they were not yet spiritually secure enough to admit to such a materialistic goal in life. Hence the epic struggle everyday to be curious.

"The Big Swinging Dicks." BSD is a term that Michael Lewis immortalized in Liar's Poker. You can spot a BSD right away-testosterone-driven cowboys. Brash. Arrogant. Elbow in the face. There were a few of them around. The ones I met fell into two categories: those who were plainly wrong and those who pretended to be right. Once a BSD gave an entire lecture on how G8 represents the eight biggest economies in the world. It does not; G8 is a political alliance. But we were all too scared to point this out since he was such a BSD.

The Goodfellas. It was a genuine surprise and pleasure for me to discover that many of the full-time employees were actually decent, smart people. They had cosmopolitan backgrounds-some were musicians, others had traversed a better portion of the world. They were brutally honest about their objective, which was to make as much money as possible, and it took some authenticity to acknowledge this. As individuals, they were the nicest people and were generally progressive to boot. It is when these individuals were aggregated into the corporation that something went wrong. The work place culture took on a life of its own that I found both superficial and oppressive.

The "Work." The stereotype is true. The interns and other junior people were required to get everything from breakfast and coffee to chewing gums, anytime from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. There is a simple trick to beat the system. I made a point of screwing up the orders early on. Especially fun is to get coffee with whole milk when a manager requested skim milk and watch him (for it was almost always a "him") squirm. I was pulled from the intern duties real quick.