A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party hosted by the head of a big American
investment bank. As the chablis was poured into our glasses and the caterers
silently handed round the hors d’oeuvres I broke off from a talk with my
dinner companion – should he splash January’s hoped for City bonus on a ski
chalet in Verbier or a castle in Kent? – to eavesdrop on my neighbour’s
hushed chat with a fellow banker.
Their conversation had turned from familiar complaints about the lack of time
their high-pressure financial careers left them to spend with their families
to the recent spate of redundancies in the Square Mile and the threat of yet
more to come.
My host overheard too and chipped in: “You shouldn’t feel sorry for them, they
go into this knowing it’s a high-risk business. It’s dog eat dog out there.”
Rocked by the global credit crunch, thousands of City slickers fear they will
be put out to pasture in a mass of redundancies the Square Mile hasn’t seen
in decades.
According to a recent poll, 64% of City professionals believe that mass
lay-offs are on the cards. Their concerns are mirrored in Ireland, where 66%
of financial workers believe job cuts are on their way. The Centre for
Economics and Business Research has predicted that City firms will cull
6,500 professional positions next year.
As they anxiously await their bonuses or the sack in an atmosphere of
suspicion and anxiety, they know this is not just a question of losing one
of the highest-paying jobs in the country. It means a loss of identity and,
for some, divorce once the high-pressure City lifestyle has imploded.
They may harbour dreams of “doing something creative” from home – using their
pay-offs to set up as landscape gardeners or to buy picture galleries – but
spending more time with the family all too often turns out to be a collision
with a wife who no longer has space for a husband in her five-star daily
routine.
So, what are those who have become used to eye-wateringly high salaries and
adrenalised lifestyles going to do when they are handed a P45? Do they
really want to see more of their families, or is it the rush they get on the
trading floor that brings them the highs, not their children? Just how
difficult is life when the millions stop rolling in? AS someone who once
worked in the City, and whose ex still does, I’ve seen at first hand how
closely financiers’ identity is linked to what they do and how much they
earn. Even at this recent dinner party all the men introduced themselves to
me by their bank, their title, and lastly their name.
For three years while working at Warburgs I had no social life but plenty of
money to spend. I could have bought all manner of luxuries – if I’d ever had
the time.
My ex still enjoys all the material wealth the career provides, and by default
so do I – including a fabulous second home in France.
But how many of these pinstriped City workers will be ready for the real world
if they are asked to hand in their passes and clear their desks over the
coming months? Will spending more time with the family, quality time with
the children, be what they really really want?
For while all the talk may be of work-life balance the truth is that often the
wives of City boys have their own expectations of marriage to highflying
high-earning husbands – and it doesn’t include having them underfoot in the
country pile.
City wives are a breed I got used to at social gatherings, where I dubbed them
the “dimmer switch women” who, no matter how sparkling their own
achievements, systematically dulled them down in public to make their
husbands appear more substantial, sat quietly and spoke only when spoken to.
But put them all together on one table, as happened at one charity event
attended by Ella Martin, a friend of mine who is also an ex-banker’s wife,
and their preoccupations become evident.
“The wives each talked about the usual – the parties they’d been to where
champagne had been flowing endlessly and the new Porsche or Ferrari their
husbands had just bought as a third car on the internet,” said Martin.
“Then they got on to their gowns, their jewellery, gifts from their husbands,
all mentioning the price as though for some reason the expense made it more
beautiful than a slightly cheaper creation and arguing animatedly about how
could you compare a Valentino to a Dior.”
The problem is that a relationship with a banker husband often becomes a
business contract that is expensive on either side to get out of. And as the
husbands work 80-hour weeks the wives become expert at running the family
and assorted homes, pretty much single-handed – with potentially painful
consequences, as Henry Amis discovered.
As a trader for a City bank, said Amis, “I received a very large salary and
great bonuses, and we had the lifestyle to go with it. The bonuses were
never in the millions, but there were sufficient noughts to keep me and the
family happy, mortgage-free with three cars and luxury holidays every year”.
A father of two, Amis said he would “always talk to others in the office about
wanting to have more quality time with the family and that the long hours
and stress prevented me spending more time with them”.
He thought he longed for a quieter lifestyle, and he took redundancy when the
bank he was working for made cutbacks.
Yet, as he puts it, he soon discovered that “my identity was wrapped up in my
job”. Worse, the price he paid for walking away from the City was a broken
home.
“Although my wife seemed happy for me to spend more time with the kids, she
was, looking back, less enthusiastic than I thought she’d be,” Amis, now 45,
recalled.
“She said she was concerned about the school fees and our drop in lifestyle
and our social scene, which was wrapped up in City life, but I realised
after a time that she simply didn’t want me around. The house was her
territory, her domain, and by spending more time at home I almost felt as
though I was invading it.”
Six months after Amis took redundancy his wife filed for divorce on the
grounds that they were mutually incompatible. “She hadn’t realised it before
because she saw so little of me! She said she found out she didn’t like me.”
Now he is trying again to get a job in the City. “I realised that what gave me
my drive in life was the adrenaline at work, it was the stress and the
social side, the long hours. I found family life dull and restrictive in
comparison.”
Dr Rachel Andrew, a clinical psychologist, sees this as a familiar symptom:
“Traders enjoy the rush. They don’t find it anywhere or with anything else,
that’s the bottom line. In truth, many City men when they find themselves
redundant realise that’s it’s been work that has motivated them and not
their families.
“They’ve got used to the income, the hours, the social life and, to be blunt,
the prestige that goes with it.
And so have the wives. So when the man is suddenly made redundant, they not
only feel they’ve lost their job, but they’ve lost their worth, not only to
their company, but to their family, their peers and to themselves.
Everything in their world is valued by how much they earn.
“In their world, the family is valued as an asset or a liability as a car or
house would be. It’s a very unPC thing to say – that you prefer the buzz of
work to being with your family – but that is exactly what many of those who
work in the City feel. That’s why they do it, because they enjoy that buzz
that nothing, certainly not being with their family, gives them.
“They may say over the dinner party table that they wish they could spend more
time with their kids and have quality time but the bottom line is that’s not
what stimulates them. They enjoy the work environment, the social side and
even if they were allowed off earlier to be with their families, they would
probably go to the gym instead.” IT IS a reality Geoff Shaw, a father of two
in his thirties, can attest to. He entered the City from school and worked
his way up, headhunted into his last few jobs at Citibank, Morgan Stanley
and finally UBS.
For a period he worked from 6.30am to 10.30pm. “Two days were never the same,”
he said. “You might come in in the morning and find Turkey had collapsed
overnight or the interest rates had changed and you had wiped out a couple
of million pounds because you’d forgotten to send some money through an hour
earlier.”
Even though his City career cost him his first marriage, he stuck with it. By
the time he reached his early thirties, he was on a six-figure salary with
annual bonuses to match. Then he was made redundant.
“I expected when I left it would be easy,” he said. “But actually what I found
was that it was harder than I had imagined. I went through a crisis,
thinking, ‘Oh my God, what I have to do is get another job back in the City.’
“I even started some conversations with people to try to get another job. That
is what goes on. You do not know who you are. It took me nine months to stop
getting up at 6am and resolve the situation in my head.”
He said it is possible to change direction and free yourself from the
addiction of such a high-energy career, but it’s tough: he still misses the
buzz from working with “bright, switched-on people buzzing with energy”.
Shaw has set up a company, Pinstripes and Beads, offering lifestyle and career
coaching to other financial workers, trying to reach them before redundancy
strikes.
“We help them focus on what they want, because many of them don’t know what
they want, and who they are they, and what they want to achieve in life,”
Shaw said.
“Many think they want to start up their own business or write a novel or start
a yoga retreat, but when we analyse what makes them tick, in some cases it’s
none of these things.
“Although the City isn’t a long-term career option and not many get old in the
City, for many of those that work in it, it’s something they find impossible
to shake off.”
One of his current clients, Gerald Edwards, 36, came for coaching nine months
ago. Working as a project manager in a global investment bank, he was
required to be on call 24 hours a day. After nearly a decade in the City, he
was completely drained, both emotionally and physically.
“I spent my days in meetings and would then come back to my desk at 5pm only
to find I had to spend the next three hours talking to the US and clearing
my inbox of hundreds of e-mails,” he said.
“I felt I was shrinking as a person and had less time with the kids and wife.
At the same time I was struggling to reconcile the fact my job gave me
financial stability and enabled me to fund a lifestyle I enjoyed, which I
was reluctant to give up.” Today he is still working in the same job, and
still on 24-hour call. SO when I walk through the Square Mile or Canary
Wharf these days I don’t feel any envy for the lifestyle – no matter how
glossy it looks, with the dinner parties and corporate events with choice
seats – because no matter how much they get paid, the price is too high and
the anxiety too great.
But how bad is the job cull going to get? Howard Wheeldon, an analyst with BGC
Partners based in Canary Wharf, said: “These are very, very difficult times.
What we have experienced in this particularly nasty round of equity collapse
is something we have never experienced before. Every time it happens there
is never a pure precedent. This time it is sub-prime and it’s affected
companies’ ability to grow.
“Deals are dead in the City. Nothing is happening. There is an air of
expectancy that come next spring there will be fewer people employed in the
City but when exactly these big clear-outs are going to happen no one knows.
I am seeing a trickle effect at the moment.
“If confidence returns within six months the jobs losses may be held at 5%.
But if confidence doesn’t return within that period the job losses will be
much higher than that. Thousands of people will be affected.”
Some have seen it all before – and survived. David Buik vividly remembers
being “blown away” in 1998 after 30 years in the City.
A money broker with a firm that is now part of the global financial services
group Collins Stewart, he was 53 when he was told to clear his desk. At the
outplacement agency his former employer paid for he was told firms were
“hosing people like me out of the door”.
Although he was on a “not shabby” salary, he was under pressure to make money
fast – because of his liking for racehorses and the fact that he was a
member of Lloyd’s.
Against the odds, he landed a job within nine days. While his friends retired
long ago – “if you haven’t made your dough by 45 there’s something wrong” –
he is still working at the age of 63.
Leaving the City did not cross his mind. “I’m not the type. I love the buzz,”
said Buik, who now works for Cantor Index. “At 4.30am I’m out of bed and
keen to be in the middle of things.” His marriage – he is the father of
three grown-up children – survived the redundancy. “Always remember you
wouldn’t be where you are without her, and she wouldn’t be where she is
without you,” is his piece of advice.
But, he added: “If you speak to any serious divorce lawyer, they will tell you
their best clients are the City folk who have had the golden handshake in
their fifties. They go home, look across the breakfast table, and say,
‘We’ve nothing in common.’ It’s very sad.”
He has no regrets: “If you are privileged enough to earn the kind of money we
do [but] cannot take being let go on the chin I have no sympathy for you.
It’s a dog eat dog environment out there. They would rip the skin off your
face. You have to make hay, baby, while the sun shines.”
And he sees it as all part of the business cycle. “What will happen this time
round happened in the 1990s. There’ll be another shake-up, they’ll get rid
of the expensive stuff, then the dust will settle and in two years’ time
we’ll have another young brigade being hired.”
Additional reporting: Sian Griffiths
Some names have been changed
