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To business. We have some clerical fun courtesy of the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, some more tit-bits from Buckingham Palace, a little something about why novels have got Good and Important again and to our minds, the greatest rave video of all time.
But first, a look at the institution who Matt Taibbi described as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’: Goldman Sachs.
Let’s Talk About Sachs, Baby
Getting a job at the world’s preeminent investment bank has long been a dream for striving and ambitious graduates. Now, stung by a survey from a group of 13 first-year analysts who complained about the 95-hour working weeks and ‘inhumane’ working conditions, CEO David Solomon has addressed his 34,000 employees, promising to enshrine the ‘Saturday Rule’, whereby workers cannot work from Friday 9pm to Saturday 9pm (except in certain circumstances).
But is this change cosmetic? And how will the bank compete with the demands of tech firms offering similar salaries but more amenable working conditions? And what’s the deal with these private equity firms hoovering up all the talent? The Fence spoke to three past and present vice-presidents (VP), to find out more on how this infamous institution operates on an executive level.
Cormac*, who left his job at Goldman in 2016, was sceptical that the survey will lead to a new cultural shift at the bank. ‘Say an analyst quits, everyone knows that guy’s shoes will be filled as soon as they leave. So there is no incentive for bosses to change. The guy at BAML died in 2013 [ Moritz Erhardt, an intern at Bank of America, died of exhaustion after working three nights in a row] and nothing changed after that happened.’
Banks are under sustained pressure to not only source talent, but retain it. Private equity (PE) firms are on the lookout for analysts at the leading banks, and these boutique companies can offer more money, as Cormac adds, ‘A PE associate is looking at a £115k base, with a £60-80k bonus.’ (For reference, an entry-level position as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs earns a salary of around £55-65k, depending on location).
Karl* has worked for Goldman Sachs for almost a decade, and is now a VP based in a European capital. He feels that the company was compelled to act for two reasons. The first? ‘10 or 15 years ago, the response would have been very different. The whole prism through which society views mental health has changed. A dismissive response would be completely inappropriate.’ The second? ‘The company has been trying to change their image through social media, with their Twitter and Instagram accounts. So they have to respond thoughtfully.’
Young analysts work thumbscrew hours. They’re paid to enact complex financial models for difficult bosses while hoping that they might be the difficult boss one day. The salaries and the exit opportunities you have at VP-level are extremely lucrative. For workers like Karl, ‘the two years was the sacrifice you needed to do to make that happen.’
Perhaps the most poignant picture emerged when The Fence spoke to Alicia*, who, until recently, worked as a VP in the Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A) department at Goldman Sachs: the most demanding gig in that insanely demanding business.
‘I got PTSD from reading that survey’ she began. ‘When I was there, change happened. The ‘Saturday Rule’ was actually introduced by David Solomon, who was very interested in junior banker initiatives. Those 24 hours of personal time – which we hadn’t had before – felt kind of revolutionary at the time. I was on various committees, and I was always very keen to have my analysts to enjoy the experience, and not suffer as much as I did.’
Big Tech firms like Google and Facebook are players: they offer salaries as competitive as the ones offered by banks like Goldman Sachs. But it is the PE firms who worry the execs. For Alicia, most of her analysts had their job lined up six months after signing up to Goldman.’So you are doing the training for the private equity companies.’
Alicia relays that there was a death in her sector that wasn’t reported at the time, likely caused by overworking. ‘It was supposed to be caused by underlying health conditions. We were upset at the time and spoke to one another, but nothing happened.’
As David Solomon, the CEO who moonlights as a DJ under the moniker D-Sol, looks to maintain the gilded name of Goldman Sachs in a volatile market, he might pay heed to his erstwhile colleague, Alicia, about how to tend to his thousands of employees. ‘There must be an underlying basis of sympathy going forward. It just wasn’t sustainable for me.’
*Names have been changed
We Cannot Help but Stan Cosmo Gordon Lang
TF staff writer Fergus Butler-Gallie compiled a thread of post-Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury’s as crisps. It proved such a hit online (and even met with the approval of Rowan Williams) that print-outs of the thread are now being deployed alongside the portraits of Lambeth Palace to help explain who the lesser-known Archbishops are.
No Heirs or Graces
Last weekend, the Sunday Times published an investigation into the indolent hereditary peers currently sitting pretty in our legislative system by mere accident of fortune. (Though the exhaustive profiling failed to mention our favourite lordly morsel: that John Michael Edward Seymour, the 19th Duke of Somerset, currently revels in a 4.9/5 ‘superhost’ rating on Airbnb).
Gabriel Pogrund and Tom Calver’s deep dive into Britain’s half-hearted stab at democratic reform was accompanied by an ‘exclusive’ profile of Prince William entitled ‘an intimate profile of the future king’. Written by the paper’s royal correspondent, Roya Nikkah, the article relies on sources claiming to be William’s ‘closest friends’. It paints a picture of a hard-working man, animated by duty, family and the noble causes of mental health and wildlife conservation.
Our source at Buckingham Palace agrees that it is certainly a very interesting article, adding ‘what really comes across is the “plan” to change his image’. We leave it to those free-speaking American publications to spell out what that exact image was.
The courtier also points out that ‘William has been afforded the most excellent private secretaries all having come from the top of politics to guide him along.’ Take Simon Case. Prior to assisting the Prince, Case was working at GCHQ, where he was Director of Strategy. The latest mandarin highflyer to help the second-in-line to the throne is Jean-Christophe Gray, who was working as a director at the Treasury. In a time of prolonged national crisis, it is a curious sight to see our most able civil servants deputed to assist a man whose only achievement is his birth. And it seems that the Sunday Times is selective in its critiques of baubled patronage.
The Millennial Virgil Guiding the Boomer Dante
Novelist Brandon Taylor has been writing some fascinating criticism on Substack, stylishly suggesting useful contexts for contemporary fiction, which is suddenly interesting (see below). For Taylor, the ‘internet novels’ of Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood operate in ‘the projected sense of guilt and corruption that make it feel so Gothic’, while the ‘millennial novels’, best typified by the work of Sally Rooney, are best understood as works of Naturalism, as Taylor advances:
‘So much of the Millennial Novel as an aesthetic and genre – icy detached narrators, restrained prose that flares from time to time into lyricism, ennui, social alienation, overdetermined answers to questions about the nature of work and capitalism, new idioms to describe our increasing entanglement with technology as the environment suffers are right out of the Naturalist playbook. When I read Normal People and Conversations with Friends and Luster and Early Work and Cool for America (very good!) and Such a Fun Age and Private Citizens (a perfect and extraordinary novel) and Severance and My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Memorial and Black Buck and Fake Accounts (though I maintain that this is a Gothic novel) and even the excellent stories in Clare Sestanovic’s Objects of Desire, novels and collections of stories that wouldn’t be inaccurately described as being social fiction I didn’t think of Jane Austen. I thought of Zola’s terrifying Thérèse Raquin or François Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux.’
Elsewhere, James Marriott speaks to Review31 about the literary mood of sincerity in his/our generation, witnessed in the work of Megan Nolan, Naoise Dolan, Rooney, Jia Tolentino and Hera Lindsay Bird. And over in the States, The Drift has been set up by a group of young graduates in their twenties (Do you need another East Coast lit mag? Turns out that you do).
We’re not sure there’s a new mood of sincerity – if anything, sincerity seems to be on the way out – and we’re pretty awkward around catchy terminology, but the one thing we will say is: novels and literary life are… exciting again? Which can only be a good thing.
Flagging Enthusiasm
Apparently, the BBC needs more Union flags in its official documents, and more respect for those that are shown during interviews. Government buildings need more flags, and foreign countries should keep the ones they have. Bananas, ice cubes, even tanks need more flags.
The last few weeks have seen enough culture war vexillology to uproot even the most well-planted pole. It has traditionally been a canard of the British right that since flag-waving is permissible among the Irish, Scottish and Welsh (just not you Huw) then it should be in England’s green and pleasant lands as well.
In this spirit, there ought to have been a diversification of patriotic fabric-waving last week when St Patrick’s Day hoved into view, but this year the streets of Dublin went untroubled by jigs and reels, as the emerald isle undertook its second entirely-online Paddys Day. In the absence of green Guinness and drunken American tourists, many on Twitter indulged their desire for Irish street life with a particularly outstanding video from eighteen years ago.
The clip focuses on one such exercise carried out on Dublin’s O’Connell bridge on what looks to be a balmy summer’s afternoon. In two minutes, he asks 25 different people the question, prompting such responses as ‘No’, ‘Never’, ‘No thanks’ and ‘Sure, why not?’
Eleven of the responses are resoundingly negative, while three make no clear statement either way. Of the eleven ‘Yes’ answers, they run the gamut from measured – ‘erm yeah, probably’ – to resounding ‘Of course I would, yeah.’
But the overall picture records something of the nuance of a famously proud nation. The cumulative effect is a funny but, dare we say it, moving evocation of patriotism in another time and place, that seems so close and yet so far away.
Ireland’s relationship with itself is, of course, the meta-subject of most of the country’s most famous poets and authors, many of whom had to leave Ireland to discover their nation never left them. Few would say the country’s inhabitants lack pride in their nationality, but the crude photocopy of patriotism that is currently being mailed around the constituencies and newsrooms of the UK would be unknown in Dublin or Cork.
It perhaps resembles only the sort of hyper-identitarian behaviour of the island’s Northern inhabitants, which prompted Byrne to undertake the artwork in the first place, and which is not generally considered a healthy relationship with one’s nation or its history. It is, after all, an odd model to aspire to. Perhaps this is why it’s the one place the government’s flag-mania has been conspicuously dampened down.
While writing this piece, The Fence’s Irish correspondent was surprised to discover he recognised one of the people featured in the video – the aforementioned ‘erm yeah, probably’ that features at 1:55 – so he reached out to see how he felt about it all these years later.
TF: Is this you?
Oh no is that going around? Someone else sent it to me just now. I don't want to be a meme.
What do you remember about it?
Nothing. It was about 20 years ago, and I've had people mention it to me a couple of times. They used to show it in Kilmainham jail apparently!
I’d never seen the clip myself until today. It's weird to see myself as an awkward teenager, rather than an awkward adult. I think it might have been the summer between school and university. The worst thing is I said I would die for Ireland. What a sap!
A lot of the comments on the video are from British people, juxtaposing it with the increase in state-ordered patriotism in the UK. You live in the UK now, how do you feel about it?
I think the lads who are suddenly patriotic wouldn't dream of putting themselves in harm’s way for their country. It's more about anti globalism than pro-Britain.
I don't think it's that weird though. There are social and economic reasons driving provincial people to the right if they're not seeing the benefit of globalisation.
And finally, here and now in 2021, would you die for Ireland?
Absolutely not 😀
In Case You Missed It
Confused about the Suez boat blockage? This exhaustive explainer unpacks all you need to know.
Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen is the star of one of the most moreish long-reads we’ve read in a while, detailing the collapse of her life as she attempted to correct a troubling, and deeply engrossing miscarriage of justice saga.
A long-debunked internet factoid says the average human swallows eight spiders in their sleep over a lifetime. New South Wales is doing its best to let its residents do that every second, with a literal spider flood.
Staying with webs, here’s the best scientific analysis we’ve ever read of a more spirited variety; an engrossing deep dive into whiskey webs, the repeatable patterns left by spirits on glass as they evaporate.
Our concern for Prince Harry’s employment prospects were all for nought as he defies all the odds by being named Chief Impact Officer at Betterup, a job title that surely could not mean less than it sounds like it does.
Scientists hell-bent on creating exactly the right conditions for Planet of the Apes to happen in real life have scored a real milestone: identifying a gene that can enlarge apes brains, presumably so that they might one day rise up against the fellas in white coats who’ve been poking said brains with wires for a few months.
And Finally
OG Off The Fence readers will know all too well our love for extreme sports videos (this video is the exemplar of that sublime genre). Now, as the promise of normality tickles our senses, we bring you live from Quadrant Park, Bootle, the greatest rave video that has ever been recorded. 21st June? We’ve got the bag.
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TF
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