This is the tale of Cityboy – Geraint Anderson – a star analyst in the City
who was so outraged by the greed and lust of the Square Mile that he has
written an excruciatingly candid novel all about the excesses and
wrongdoings within London’s financial market. He resigned from his immoral
job (but not before he had banked more than £2.5m) and the book, Cityboy:
Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, is now riding high in the bestseller
lists.
“It’s like a dream come true,” admits Anderson sheepishly. Although he doesn’t
look particularly Cityboyish this morning, in a floral top, Ray-Ban Aviators
and – what? – a beaded necklace. Oh, there’s quite a lot of the hippie in
the elegantly bearded Anderson, 35, and that was part of the problem. Having
torn up his original career plan (roaming around the world selling
trinkets), the self-styled “Trotskyite revolutionary” and Cambridge graduate
says he never saw eye to eye with the Armani-suited, Ferrari-driving
brigade. His car was a clapped-out Vauxhall Cavalier and his suits were £6
numbers from charity shops.
He certainly wasn’t above enjoying a raunchy old time of it, however. He
admits that as “team leader” in the office his unique selling point was that
he could show his clients a great time. Which he did with gusto. If you read
his book as a thinly veiled account of his own career, Anderson would get up
to all sorts of things, including a £25,000 trip by private jet to Ibiza,
where his group was met by a limousine full of naked girls and helped
themselves to cocaine from a silver-domed platter. Meanwhile, a busy City
morning’s analysing would be topped off by a visit to rooms just off Oxford
Street where women would pleasure themselves with cucumbers.
Some business commentators have suggested the book is 80% true and that the
fictional 20% is its fatal flaw, but Anderson is understandably coy about
how much of it is a product of his, er, fevered imagination (as well as
dodgy deals it also has lots of sex). “I would have had my ass sued so
quickly if I had named names and banks,” he says. Nevertheless “it is mostly
true. I’ve embellished it, but anyone who knows me knows that most of it is
true”.
However, he has no qualms about pulling away the veneer of respectability
behind which, he says, the City shelters. “People try to keep it really
quiet because the prospect of losing a £500,000 bonus is quite a deterrent,
but the rumours about a code of silence are absolutely valid.”
All right, so what’s top of the list of secrets and lies? “Insider trading,”
he says. “It is rife. And during my 12 years in the City, how many
convictions were there? Not a sausage.” In his experience, manipulation of
shares was chiefly done by small teams of hedge fund operators spreading
false rumours. “Day in, day out, you’d see the shares rise slightly. Rumours
would go round that the company was being taken over. These nasty little
toerags, they work in little groups, on mobiles, and it’s very difficult to
prove who started the rumour. The shares would go up by 30%. Then they would
sell.”
That was known as “pump and dump”. The opposite – “trash and cash” – also
happened quite a bit. “You would spread a false rumour that shares were
going down.” At which point the hedgies would “short” the shares, namely
borrow them from, say, a pension fund, sell them, watch the rumour do its
work and then buy them back.
“The reason why this is so nasty is that it leads to financial instability.”
And it’s we civilians who pay the price, according to Anderson. “Because the
shares are being bought from your pension fund or your Isa, and someone else
is getting the benefit of that 30% premium. These people are stealing
directly from you.”
Forget the glossy confidence of the City, its philanthropy, the famed
intelligence of its workforce: “It’s all about money and greed.” With a big
helping of carnal activity on the side. “The City is made up of white, young
heterosexual males with egos of truly biblical proportions, who like the
buzz of the trading floor and love drink. And as we know, the devil’s urine
leads to the devil’s dandruff and other naughtiness.”
What sort of naughtiness might that be? “Oh, I can’t say. My parents might
read this,” he says. Come on, man. “I’ve tried everything. Everything. Look
at my eyes,” he says, pulling off the Aviators and squinting at me. “These
aren’t bags. These are suit-cases. My mum says it’s only because she prays
for me that I’ve lived this long.”
He’s desperately hoping his parents aren’t going to read his book and I can
see why, since I imagine it is not the sort of thing that Pa (the Labour
peer Lord Anderson of Swansea) and Ma (a devout Nonconformist brought up by
Bolivian missionaries), would enjoy reading. Indeed his mother sounds rather
excellently focused, and fond of giving her son maxims such as, “You’re only
young once, but you can be immature all your life, Geraint.”
Yet the diligent, left-wing background is telling, since he clearly has some
form of moral motivation. Forget the bestseller status and gaining what he
calls “Z-list celebrity”; that’s not why he was inspired to publish. There
is a missionary zeal about the man. “I may be biting the hand that fed me,”
he says. “But it deserves to be bitten.”
He acknowledges his standpoint seems to be at odds with the facts, namely that
he worked his way up to a very well paid position in the City for more than
a decade. His older brother Hugh, a City fund manager who later left to
train as a Baptist minister, got him his first interview with an investment
bank in 1996. Despite his qualms, he grew used to raking in six-figure
bonuses. He has no mortgage on his £750,000 house in west London, and that
£2.5m must be a tidy nest egg.
In his defence, he says he was seduced by the entire package. “I did enjoy it.
I would have never done it for 12 years unless I enjoyed it.” However, the
whole game eventually got to him; with weeks to go before his wedding, which
was to be appropriately lavish, he pulled out, citing stress. “I realised
when I split up with my missus I had become slightly monstrous. Then I had a
motorbike crash in which I almost died, and that did make me reconsider my
life’s priorities and look at what I was becoming.”
He started the long climb to the moral high ground when he was commissioned to
write an anonymous, confessional column in thelondonpaper. He approached the
job “in a state of mania and anger”, almost hoping he would be found out and
lose his position at the bank. Unfortunately his bosses kept on upping his
bonus, and he was never unmasked.
He knows it’s a good time to point the finger. Now that the credit crunch is
fully upon us, people are feeling the pinch and scanning the horizon for
someone to blame. Anderson hurls the gauntlet directly at the well polished
brogues of the financial market. “The reason the credit crunch occurred is
because people thought that loans to poor Americans weren’t going to
explode. And because they are greedy, malicious, short-term gamblers. The
bonus culture only dictates what happens one year ahead. And if there is one
thing the City hates it’s the notion of ‘jam tomorrow’,” he says.
His descriptions of the decadent precrunch City life make it sound akin to how
one imagines the dying days of the Roman empire. “I would get £1,000 to take
someone out to a meal. We would go to somewhere like Pétrus. And then we
would go to China-white, and after the £1,000 was spent, the client would
just say here’s £550 for a table, and we would get a table with two bottles
of vodka on it. Pretty soon we would be surrounded by a swarm of pretty
eastern European girls.” Whom he would take home? “Of course I would! I
don’t look like Quasimodo, I was single, and I had a bit of cash. It was
normal. They were great times. When I say great,” he says hurriedly,
“horrific, really.”
In the end it was his upbringing that rescued him. “I was brought up to be
extremely religious and, to be honest with you, you can take the boy out of
church but you can’t take church out of the boy.”
He was on a beach in Goa when his bank called him. He thought he had been
rumbled about his column, but no. It was good news – a bonus of £500,000.
Anderson had had enough, though. So he gave some money away, banked the
rest, handed in his resignation and got down to writing. He knocked out the
book in just over a month.
In his preCity days, Anderson took a master’s degree in the study of
revolutions, so now he knows what must happen. “The revolution has to be in
our hearts and souls. City boys need to pay their taxes, stop stealing off
us and stop their consumption. Give some money to charity. And have one
Ferrari, not three.”
What then? Don’t tell me – we all have to go and live in a commune. Well, yes.
“I’d like to set up a commune in Pembrokeshire,” he says. “I’d like to try
and show people an alternative to this system where you get rich or die
trying. I’m going to try and do something to improve the situation. Although
it’s just idealistic nonsense I don’t care. I prefer to be part of the
solution than part of the problem. I will fail, but I hope there will be
some kind of nobility in the failure.”
Go for it, Cityboy.
Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson is
published by Headline at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including
postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Geraint Anderson: Trust me, greed ain’t good.
Says the man puffing his new book to make money.
Bob, Geneva, Switzerland
Where EXACTLY were these rooms off Oxford Street again?
John, London,
...people will love only themselves and their money...be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents...ungrateful...consider nothing sacred...unloving and unforgiving...slander others and have no self-control.... cruel...proud...love pleasure rather than God. The Bible: 2 Tim 3
Karen S, London,