for the love of money and when the Joneses wear jeans

U3L1B For the Love of Money Article

For the Love of Money

By Sam Polk

January 18, 2014

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big

enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted

more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer

internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth

meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker” how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000

bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I

think about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes

are made.

I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a

salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I

make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not

that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.

Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor

for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with

enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I

wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if

you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich.

It was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I was competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at

Columbia University — I was also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and

ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for

burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet company for fistfighting. I learned about rage from my dad,

too. I can still see his red, contorted face as he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the C.S.F.B. internship

by omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was determined not to blow what seemed a final chance.

The only thing as important to me as that internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia volleyball

team. But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes end up with other women.

Three weeks into my internship she wisely dumped me. I don’t like who you’ve become, she said. I

couldn’t blame her, but I was so devastated that I couldn’t get out of bed. In desperation, I called a counselor

whom I had reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help. She helped me see that I was using alcohol

and drugs to blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That began some of the

hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked

open, exposing my heart to air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an

underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it. C.S.F.B. didn’t offer me a full-time job, and I

returned, distraught, to Columbia for senior year.

After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the grace of a managing director willing to take a

chance on a kid who had called him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was

sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. For

the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader

U3L1B For the Love of Money Article

who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock —

his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.

Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a

bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I

started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years,

and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for

$6,000 a month.

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by

picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with

unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I

might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of

how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits together, from interns to managing

directors. When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet.

Nonetheless, I was thrilled with my progress.

My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and

alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating

more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and

went to work for a hedge fund.

Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed. I’d think about how my

colleagues could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have

money; they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to their offices. They

were royalty.

I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being

thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was

paid “only” $1.5 million.

But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of

unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the

new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for

the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his

saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this

affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at

the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher

taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is

like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix.

Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a

neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was

embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that

wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I

didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all

U3L1B For the Love of Money Article

if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply

distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and

the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated

mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that

bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison

populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the

world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting

the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of

trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d

made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and

she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but

addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction

imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift

that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity

between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified

in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don

Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on

their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then

lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Despite my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to leave. I was terrified of running out of money and

of forgoing future bonuses. More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel like an

idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What made it harder was that people

thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving. In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I

demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several

more years. Instead, I walked away.

The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at

nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had

gotten promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to

make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery

tickets.