Swimming with the sharks – book review

Not a secret I am fond of all books and films which lay bare pathologies of murky financial sector. Several such works have sprung up in the wake of 2008 financial meltdown and they have turned out in different genres: from nearing conspiracy theories, through more substantive, critical, though at times quirky analyses, to narratives that have gone to silver screen and whose plot have been approachable to nearly everyone.

Swimming with the sharks by Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch journalist, is a compilation of interviews with the insiders from the City, who, provided their anonymity was protected, decided to let in on some of the secrets of how the top of the world works. All interlocutors who have contributed to the book have broken the code of silence, the unwritten rule that outsiders should be deprived of insight into the spoilt financial sector. Those who deliberately break the code of silence take the decision to burn their boats (just like the Cityboy did) or go the extra mile to make sure nobody can trace their confessions back to them.

Predictably, though financial sector in Poland generally does not resemble the City (especially in terms of payrolls) many semblances can be discerned and I most focused on them while reading the book.

Front Office (bankers who deal with clients directly, solicit and foster relationships) are worshipped everywhere. No matter if it is Warsaw or London, sales guys who bring bank the bacon are the upper class in the hierarchy. This manifests itself not only in higher salaries and perquisites, but also in informal pecking order. FO look down on Middle Office, while the latter often feel underappreciated, shrugged off, less important despite their undeniable contribution to well-being of an organisation.

Polish banks have accurately copied the way laid-off staff are handled from their HQs. Waves of redundancies became the order of the day after the 2008 crash when violent cost-cutting had to be pursued to shield profits, in the absence of adequate revenues. I once described how it looked in Poland and the practices in principle do not differ with how sharks are given the sack.

While going through the book, I naturally sought the answer to the ever-nagging question, whether the system or the people were to blame for all malpractices that had sent the global economy on the verge of collapse. The interviews prove most workers (who had agreed to be interviewed) were genuinely righteous people, with moral spine, abiding by ethical principles in their own job, yet they were cogs in the immoral machines, trying to hold back from wrongdoing while doing their bit.

Interviewees, decent or indecent, in unison blamed the whole chain of institutions for all evil financial sector has done to ordinary people. No one, including politicians, regulators, shareholders, employees and clients (people living beyond their means), in their opinion could feel innocent. Yet the most destructive part of the system were built-in incentives and disincentives (they even came up with lack of fear not greed as one of major causes of financial crisis, yet the book was released in 2011, while I published my concept in early 2010). It paid off to chase profits in short-term while calling for long-term sustainability was inconvenient to everyone in good times. The foregone conclusion, which I have reached on PES several years ago, is that the financial system is still wicked and no major reforms have been done to preclude the reprisal of financial tornado from 2008.

I have found quite interesting the passage on passionate bankers whose relish on their jobs, working late hours, travel to distant parts of world, celebrate closing jumbo deals; zealots who toil away not just for seven-digit yearly compensations but who draw genuine satisfaction from what they do. The only question is, whether such time-consuming profession (working until midnight during working week, spending weekends in the office, being on every beck and call of your boss) can be combined with happy personal life and for how long one can withstand it. This is a part of general question about priorities in life, not confining just to popular work-life balance.