Rotten to the core? LeFevre levies heavy accusations at the banking industry
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Rotten to the core? LeFevre levies heavy accusations at the banking industry

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If John LeFevre is right, nothing has changed in banking.

Reviews of his new book Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion Dollar Deals have been pretty much what you would expect for a book from the man who brought you the @GSElevator Twitter feed. Some have found it funny, some have found it disgusting, some both. And some have questioned the credibility of LeFevre’s accounts.

There is a fair point to be made in that, as a person who admits in writing to consistently dishonest behaviour, and who also has no regrets at all about it, that LeFevre could be at least embellishing some of the stories about himself and others in the book, if not outright lying. But LeFevre is absolutely vehement that every last bit is true. Not having worked for Goldman is hardly a reason to not believe him, as some have argued. He was, after all, quite a big gun at Citi.

But, even if you can’t find the justification to take the book seriously, even if you cannot keep the book open for disgust, there is one point that should not be ignored: the old mentality that brought the industry into such disrepute — the one that senior bankers and their public relations colleagues insist on telling everyone has been stamped out — still dominates. And that may very well land us right back where we started in the bad old days.

The devil you know?

If you are reading this review, then you probably know some of the people in this book. Most of the names are changed, but some, like former Citi veteran Paul Young, are in full view. If you are in the book, you (hopefully) won’t like what you read. Even Young, who LeFevre told GlobalCapital he loves and has great respect for, is unflatteringly portrayed when LeFevre recounts how, as his boss, Young advised him to buy a stack of Asian porn, ditch his girlfriend and get five new ones in Hong Kong.

“I meant it in a completely flattering way,” LeFevre says of his portrayal of Young, who he called a “legend”. Which betrays perhaps why — if he is genuine about his claim that the book is meant to avoid the messy consequences of judging, well after the fact, the behaviour he and others display in the book, and to simply lay all of banking’s ubiquitous dirt on the table for more morally adept individuals to interpret for themselves — the book may be seen as falling short.

The stories are told as if from one knowing colleague to another, like we are all in on the joke, which can obscure what LeFevre says is the book’s real point. And, as LeFevre readily admitted to GlobalCapital, bankers behaving badly is a tired cliché, which obscures an otherwise important suggestion — that even if cheating isn’t really universal in the business, the very structure by which it incentivises cheating has not changed at all.

“I’m trying to highlight some serious issues that went on then and go on still today,” he says. “Skirting compliance is and was always just a running joke.”  

“There’s no easy solution,” he says. “You get punished for following the rules. You lose your edge.”

LeFevre’s account could easily be read (mistakenly, he says) as the high finance version of Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell — as a handbook for misguided and horny adolescents and emotionally stunted adults. There is a glee that comes across in his accounts of bad behaviour. From lying to buyside clients in order to get a deal done just before the market — and Bear Stearns — tanks, to wondering in amazement at a junior analyst’s ability to make a poll of the least undesirable women in the office into an “excellent” PowerPoint presentation, LeFevre’s assertion that he has no regrets rings hideously true.

And he is right when he tells me that another cliché, perhaps an even worse one, would be to write of his latter dark night of the soul and redemption, which he says he did not have. And yet, he says, people should still be repulsed by the stories in the book, which he argues was intentionally written in style that puts on display the whole thinking process of one who was fully immersed in the culture. 

“I’m sorry to the idiots out there that didn’t understand my book," he says. "I’m not trying to draw conclusions for them. I’m saying here it is, this is clearly a culture of pervasive deviance and it’s rotten to the core.  

“It’s a mentality through and through. It doesn’t just apply to one person or one rotten apple,” he says. “It applies to everybody — you put your bonus ahead of your client’s interest.”

Running amok

LeFevre painted in conversation an expansion of the portrait made in the book. Women are not just at a disadvantage in banking, they are often outright cheated of success. Nepotism is rife. Bankers are so focused on their bonuses that they will even collude with the competition to squeeze money from clients.

And though some reviewers have commented that the book is more of a portrayal of a few rotten bankers running amok in Asia, LeFevre says that misses the point. As he says in the book, the malfeasance and boorishness is systemic. Indeed, LeFevre notes in one chapter that New York and London based bankers can’t get away with as much in their home cities as he did in Hong Kong, but that that given the chance, they show their true colours.

“In my experience it was always the European, New York and London bankers who were the craziest,” he said.

Interestingly, and at odds with the claims of the author's note in the book, LeFevre says he sometimes doesn’t recognise the person he has written down as his younger self. It wasn’t until writing it, he said, that he began to realise how detached he was from anything like the real world.

But, he says, it would be remiss to think the book is a portrayal of just him and a few buddies. 

“If I look at myself in the mirror, I was always a little bit of a class clown as a kid, or a deviant as a student, or a guy who skirted the rules and picked and chose which rules to follow," he says. "So it is a function of Wall Street attracting [people with] that mentality, and so I do bear some responsibility for all of it.

“But it does shape and mould you and shift your moral compass. Sometimes I don’t even recognise the person that is me in the book, and that’s how detached from reality I think I was. I’m detached from reality but at the same time self-aware in the sense that I’m keeping track of all these [events] as I went through it. 

"It’s kind of a weird place to be, and I don’t really have an explanation for it.”

LeFevre's book is indeed funny at times, when not overwhelmingly offensive, and he has a clear talent for storytelling and writing. And while the book is very much a dark illustration of a culture LeFevre says is still ubiquitous, it feels like it is struggling to get to the dark heart of the matter. 

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