Monkey Business
Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle
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4.7 • 11 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Animal House meets Liar's Poker in this hysterically funny, often unbelievable, and absolutely, positively true account of life at DLJ, one of the hottest investment banks on Wall Street.
"Like most other young business school graduates, John Rolfe and Peter Troob thought that life in a major investment banking firm would make their wildest dreams come true -- it would be fast-paced, intellectually challenging, glamorous, and, best of all, lucrative.
They were in for a surprise. For behind the walls of Wall Street's firms lies a stratum of stunted, overworked, abused, and in the end, very well-compensated, but very frustrated men and women. Monkey Business takes readers behind the scenes at Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette (DLJ), one of Wall Street's hottest firms of the 90s, from the interview process to the courting of clients to bonus time. It's a glimpse of a side of the business the financial periodicals don't talk about -- 20-hour work days, trips across the country where associates do nothing except carry the pitch book, strip clubs at night, inflated salaries, and high-powered, unforgettable personalities.
Monkey Business provides readers with a first-class education in the real life of an investment banker. But best of all, it is an extremely funny read about two young men who, on their way towards achieving the American dream, quickly realized they were selling their souls to get there."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering. By the time Rolfe and Troob were able to discern the key fact that the "investment banking community has long been an oligopoly, with only a handful of real players with the size and scale to drive through the big deals," they were already grappling with the gritty reality of performing grunt labor in an environment ruled by despotic senior partners who called innumerable meetings to set unrealistic deadlines and make superhuman demands on anybody within screaming distance. The authors' resulting disappointment and disaffection leaps off every page. Unfortunately, they take out their frustrations with indiscriminate potshots at such easy targets as word processors ("Christopher Street fairies"), copy center personnel ("a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans" they offhandedly refer to as "militants") and female research analysts (whom they describe as "under-sexed, eager-to-please"). Long before the hapless authors have stooped to expressing their fury at the bank by such puerile antics as urinating into a beer bottle while seated at a banquet table at the Christmas party, readers will have had enough.
