FINANCIAL WORLD:One-time City trader Venetia Thompson tells London Editor MARK HENNESSY about the seamier side to life in the financial powerhouse
FOR VENETIA THOMPSON, life as a broker in the City of London in the days before the Fall in 2007 was marked by aggression by day, bewildering moments of ignorance, and expense account-fuelled drunken dinners over £900 bottles of wine at night. In moments of doubt, in the dark early hours as she struggled into Canary Wharf, hung-over once more, she would take consolation in her newly-acquired Chanel handbag, or a pair of Louboutin shoes.
Today, Thompson is a writer, having been fired by her firm after she wrote a magazine article in which she gave an insider’s description of the world she inhabited and the habits that led the City and the rest of the world to the brink of the abyss.
Still only 23, and earning nearly £100,000 a year when she was ejected unceremoniously from her job, Thompson has now, two years on, turned her magazine article into a book, Gross Misconduct: My Year of Excess in the City.
Listening to her talk in a plush and crowded hotel bar in Charlotte Street in London, it soon becomes clear that the City, though briefly chastened, has re-embarked on many of its old ways, just a little more discreetly, perhaps.
“Brokers are still taking clients out. I have a friend in the Fat Duck today (the Michelin-starred restaurant owned by chef, Heston Blumenthal). If somebody is making you a million a year in brokerage, spending £100,000 on entertaining them is, theoretically, good business. They all went skiing this year. They will all still have boxes at Ascot, but they won’t do every day, perhaps. They’ll buy £200 bottles of wine, rather than £900 bottles. People are starting to make money again,” she says.
Thompson was a broker, the lowest rung on the City ladder, who survive on their wits, on their hunger for money and their ability to source buyers for complex, ill-understood financial products.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Thompson, raised in Devon, was well-educated, yet education was of little value in a world where success was marked cruelly and immediately by the green and red flickering lights of a Bloomberg screen.
In her first days, she knew nothing, but she was not alone. “The City is a monster, a crazy world. The idea that you could have people like me with no background in finance, or knowing what a bond is, is worrying, sure.
“Even the traders themselves wouldn’t know what they were doing and would be asking us for information, especially on products where the information wasn’t publicly available and wouldn’t know what was being packaged together,” she said.
The lack of knowledge did not just cover the sub-prime mortgages that eventually brought the system toppling. “Sub-prime is the most obvious disaster, but this is going on all the time in various different ways on a smaller scale.”
Misogyny marks every page of Gross Misconduct, particularly where it retells the endless round of vacuous, usually ill-mannered entertaining, deemed vital for ensuring that phone calls would be picked up on the following day by traders.
“As a broker you are the scum of the market, trying to get people to drop you a bone. It was having quite a bad effect on my self-esteem. I have a degree in Russian from University College, London. I can read War and Peace in Russian and yet I am here, being treated like shit over a dinner table by some American trader who thinks I am a bimbo because I am young and I am female,” she declared.
Nicknamed ‘airbags’, for reasons which the reader can guess, Thompson today has more time for her often poorly-educated male colleagues, many of whom entered the City at 16, than the higher orders.
“You have a really hard time whether you are male or female. I don’t believe that the City is that sexist. It’s tough. It is about a general culture of aggression and bullying, whether you are male or female.
“I felt more misogyny from clients than I ever did from colleagues. A lot of people think brokers are all barrow boys, but actually they were a lot more honourable, a lot more respectful than most of my clients,” she said.
“All ‘the guys on the floor’ have is their word, their honour, there is nothing else that they can use as leverage and they have to be liked. You have to be well-liked in the market to survive. That is their currency.
“Sure, there was the banter, being called airbags and everything else, which some women might see as sexist. I always saw it as being affectionate and a sign of being accepted and included, which was important to me to be seen as an equal,” she said.
By the end, Thompson was drained by the lifestyle and the lack of intellectual challenge: “My brain was really turning into mash potato. Yes, it was wonderful when it was adrenalin-loaded, but when the market was quiet it was the most boring job in the world. The city just isn’t that interesting. It is good while you want to make money but the second that you want to do something more interesting you’ll find you can’t. There is no room for it there.”
Part of her still pines for Canary Wharf. “I missed the guys, I missed being part of a team. Some were the funniest people I have ever met. Totally shallow, yes, but it is quite hypnotic when everybody is buying into it.
“Your own humour defaults to the lowest-common denominator. You end up mirroring what is around you. For a long time I thought I had found my place. I loved it, having never felt like that in university or in school.”
Understanding the public’s anger towards bankers and traders, Thompson cautions against the pervasive demand for vengeance.
“The City is big claim to fame. We have to be very careful about not smashing an entire generation. All that is going to happen is that nobody will want to go into the City. It has already been shown in Oxford that the City is the last place that anybody wanted to be, especially females, but also across the board.
“Unfortunately, Asia will take over and New York will get stronger and stronger and England will get left behind and I think that that is particularly dangerous. We have had all the hysteria about the market as a whole.”
The public, not just the City, she says, enjoyed the 20-year boom. “Everyone has had cheaper mortgages and everyone has enjoyed the fruits of what people have been doing in the City.
“The public is furious, but, to be honest, it is human nature. It is humanity’s greed that is the issue, not just the City’s, and I think that those in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones.
“The easiest thing to do is to point the finger and say it is bankers that have made my mortgage as expensive as it is, rather than thinking, should I have taken out that size of a mortgage? Should I have had five credit cards?”
Higher taxes are not the answer either, she claims. Some will leave for foreign postings, others will find loopholes, while some of the ones who cannot leave for family reasons will simply quit.
“A lot of people are starting to earn a lot here again and they want to stay here. They have got families so they are stuck, and the government can do whatever it wants. The City is going to have to fall in line, one way or the other.
“The danger is that we lose the ones who are top traders, who could have retired but decided to stay working. They are the ones we need to stay on, because they have the experience and can get us out of the mess that we are in.”
Having been fired, Thompson first had to sell her collection of Chanel handbags on eBay to pay her bills. “ if you are happy in the rest of your life, you no longer need material things as much.
“I still appreciate beautiful things, amazing food and amazing wines but I also know that it is all worthless unless you are doing it with someone you want to be there, rather than someone you are paying to be there, such as a client.
“That always made me feel a bit sick afterwards. I used to buy myself things as a trade-off. Yes, I had to get up at 5.45am, but look at this handbag. It was my way of justifying what I was doing. It is like being bulimic. You gorge, and then . . .”
Gross Misconduct: My Year of Excess in the City, by Venetia Thompson, is published by Simon and Schuster (£7.99)
