Vice met up with former City banker Geraint Anderson who began writing the anonymous "Cityboy" column in 2006 for The London Paper, in which he revealed misconducts that happened in the banking sector. You can read Anderson's archived column on his website.
The column later became the best selling book "Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile" (2009) that got translated into 5 languages, and later this year a featured film based on the memoir is to be released.
If you were a Londoner and you used public transport in the mid-00s, there's a strong chance you remember Geraint's column, and are aware that he subsequently wrote a book called "Cityboy". Since he outed himself, a lot's changed – Geraint's been shunned by the people he used to know in the banking game and the world's markets have been rocked by the global financial crisis. Now that people have realised the one-way bonus system might have had something to do with everyone losing their jobs and going broke, city boys tend to occupy a rung on the popularity ladder somewhere between animal cruelty convicts and Joey Barton.
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But banks always argue that investment bankers get shit-loads of money because they do such an important job.
I thought that what I was doing was completely pointless. The bonus system is a perfect way to get rich quickly, and investment bankers are never responsible. Before the big bang in 1986, if there were losses, you had to pay for them. But that quickly changed to the American way of doing things: the one-way bet.
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There are a lot of studies that investigate investment bankers being psychopathic.
What are the key features of psychopaths? They're manipulative, deceiving, charming, have no empathy, no remorse and are guilt-free. I worked with loads of people who were like that and they were the best bankers. You're a better banker if you don't care about other human beings. If you organise take-overs and know that thousands of people will lose their job because of it, you best not give a shit.
A documentary has also been made called "Cityboy – The Life Of Investment Banker Geraint Anderson". The following footage is a shortened version of the original running time of 45 minutes:
Image credit: Daily Mail