Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story (6 page)

It was a hard slog. From time to time, I’d take the Series 7 practice test but not do particularly well, which was scary. When you do take the test, you want your score to be as close as possible to the lowest possible passing score, 70. It’s a matter of pride. If you score too high, it means you studied too hard. In the low 70s is good. On the other hand, to get a 69, the highest possible failing grade, is a supreme embarrassment.

In the meantime, on the trading floor throughout July and August, the betting began.

The trading floor was a betting culture. Traders would wager on anything: Wimbledon, the Masters, how many White Castle burgers a first-year analyst could eat. Even the tech-bubble bust didn’t put a dent in the action. I remember one trader, a very scrawny guy named Tommy, whom everyone used to make fun of. At one point, traders started betting on how much Tommy could bench-press. It turned into such a big deal that people started announcing their wagers over the Hoot, the floor-wide intercom system usually used for business announcements, originally known as the Hoot-and-Holler. Everyone had a view. The sentimental stance was that while Tommy
looked
scrawny—he was around five-ten, and 145 pounds, tops—he could probably bench more than people thought. There were also a lot of antisentimentalists. It became this huge market; everyone was going back and forth—maybe to compensate for some of the flatness in the real-life markets. Then, one day, during a late-morning trading lull, one of the managing directors said, “All right, we’re settling this right now. Tommy is going down to the gym.” A big argument ensued about how many witnesses were necessary. Finally three witnesses were sent down, and of course Tommy benched way more than anyone had thought possible. A lot of money changed hands that day. Years later, Tommy, too, would become an MD.

Now, in the summer of 2001, the betting action on the floor centered on how the new analysts would perform on the Series 7.

The betting worked just like trading. Sometime during a lull in trading, usually around 11:00 to 11:30
A.M.
, somebody would stand up at his desk and call to someone in the next row: “So the exam is coming up—what do you think? What are your Series 7 markets?” Full voice, loud enough for all to hear. “How do you think Greg is going to do? How about Mulroney? What about JF?”

Then, just as in trading, one guy would say, “Well, my market on Greg is 72 at 77.” His “market” meant his spread: his bid and his offer. Meaning he would buy a 72 (he thought Greg was going to do better than that) but he would sell a 77 (which meant he thought I was going to do worse than that).

Then the person he was betting with could either buy or sell his market. Let’s say that person thought I was going to get less than 72. He’d say, “I hit your bid at 72.” Meaning, 72 was now the bogey. So if I got higher than 72, the guy who’d bought it won. If I scored lower than 72, the guy who’d sold it won.

How much? Usually house minimum bets were a hundred bucks (or a “hundo,” as they say on Wall Street). But money wasn’t the real point. The point was to intimidate and provoke the analysts taking the test. To put them under pressure. To say, “You don’t want to screw this one up.”

I felt as if I was on the verge of doing just that. The night before the Series 7, I took a break from studying at the massive and ominous-looking Bobst Library at NYU in the Village—my old Stanford student ID card got me access—to phone a friend and fellow analyst, a Swedish guy named Kris Ekelund: “Dude, I’m only getting seventies and seventy-twos on these practice tests—what’s going to happen here?” It was too close for comfort for me.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kris said. “We’re going to be okay. That’s all we need.”

When my cab pulled up to One Penn Plaza, I saw the whole analyst class outside the building, milling around nervously. A few kids were sitting on the concrete benches trying to do some last-minute cramming. I went into Starbucks and bought a bottled water—I was too wired to drink coffee.
Don’t fail. Don’t blow this
…

Yet it was too late to do any cramming, so I just stood around chatting with people I knew, trying to steady my nerves a bit. I felt a little sick to my stomach. Finally, we began to head, in groups, up to the seventeenth floor.

It was 7:45
A.M.
Outside the windows of the Prometric Testing Center waiting room, the office towers stretching from Thirty-Fourth Street to Lower Manhattan gleamed in the early light. People at tables were checking IDs. The test givers were very strict about identification; you had to have two forms of it with you—I had my South African passport and my California driver’s license—and had to sign an affidavit swearing that you were who you said you were. Once you’d signed in, they gave you a numbered lock and key. You were then required to empty your pockets and put everything in your assigned locker. You couldn’t wear a watch into the testing room; you weren’t even allowed to take in a pen. None of this calmed my nerves.

A testing center escort then took each candidate to a computer in the windowless testing room. The Series 7 was a six-hour, 250-question multiple-choice exam, administered in two three-hour sessions with a short lunch break in between. It was given on a computer instead of in a test booklet—the upside/downside of this being that, at the end of the test, you got your result almost instantaneously. (The computer takes an excruciating five seconds to calculate your score.) We were given earplugs to wear if we wanted (I didn’t), two number-two pencils, and scratch paper for calculations. We were told we were not allowed to speak to anyone; if we had to go to the rest room, we would have to sign out and sign back in when we returned…

And then, with a couple clicks of the mouse, the General Securities Representative Qualification Examination (Series 7) began.

About an hour later, knee-deep in multiple-choice questions, we heard an announcement come over the exam room’s PA system: it was a man, saying in a calm voice, “Please, everyone, remain where you are. We will not be evacuating the building.”

What was this—a fire drill? But there was no further word.
Strange
, I thought to myself. I went back to the test.

Then, ten minutes later, the man came back on the PA system, this time with a slightly more detailed announcement: “Please do not leave the building. We are waiting for word from the Mayor’s Office.” I wondered again whether some sort of drill was in progress, but once again, nothing more was said.

Ten minutes later the same voice came over the PA system: “We’re waiting for word from the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office. Please remain calm.” Everyone looked at one another, baffled. Then, quite startlingly, a woman burst into the room, crying. She screamed at the top of her voice, “Everyone needs to get out, get out, get out! Right now!”

It was the moderator who’d been sitting outside the room, the one who signed us in and out when we went to the rest room. Everyone was shocked; no one knew what was going on. We were still in six-hour-exam mind-set:
What’s going to happen to the exam? Are they going to
stop the clock?
In addition to confusion, my other immediate reaction was slight relief. I had felt that the exam was going terribly for me.

We all walked out into the seventeenth-floor waiting area, where the testing staff were waving people toward the elevator to leave.
What the hell is going on?
Then I saw people crowded around the floor-to-ceiling window, muttering and pointing. I walked over and took a look.

In the sunlight far to the south, under a clear morning sky, the right-hand tower of the World Trade Center, the North Tower, was billowing smoke. Nobody had any idea what was going on. It was a bewildering, inconceivable sight.

A group of us crowded into an elevator and went downstairs.

Out on Thirty-Third Street it felt warm; the sun was still shining brightly. The traffic flowed across town—the city seemed to be functioning—but something was wrong. People had paused in groups on the sidewalk, talking to one another. One group stood by a parked car with the windows open and the radio turned way up. An announcer was saying something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Nobody seemed to know anything; people were voicing theories. Was it an accident? Terrorism?

The one thing I knew was that I probably shouldn’t go back to my apartment, which was just a couple of blocks from the towers. So Kris Ekelund and I, and a couple of the other Goldman analysts, huddled there on the sidewalk. If it was terrorism, we thought, we might be safest not staying in Midtown, among all the tall buildings, but instead heading down to Greenwich Village, where Kris lived.

We turned right on Seventh Avenue and started to head south. It was impossible to find a cab of course. At Twenty-Third Street we headed east to Sixth Avenue, then turned right toward the Village. Sixth is one of those avenues that gives you a straight sight line down to Lower Manhattan. So we could now clearly see huge clouds of smoke rising from both towers. Every block along the way, people were standing in groups staring down the avenue at the unimaginable sight. We just kept walking toward it, to get to the safety of the low-rise buildings in the Village. In retrospect, we should have been walking north, not south. But it was hard for us to think clearly about what was going on. For block after block we walked, alternately speculating to one another what had happened and staring, transfixed, at the burning towers.

Just before 10:00
A.M.
, the four of us saw something that did not seem real as it was happening: the incomprehensible sight of the South Tower coming down in a colossal, slow-motion roar of gray dust.

Time seemed to freeze for a few seconds. Then people started screaming and running. No one in the world had ever seen anything like this happen. No one knew how to react. I certainly didn’t. I stood still for a second and tried to keep calm. It was a surreal few minutes that will always be etched into my brain with great clarity. Two big African American guys who were standing next to us stared at the falling tower, tears streaming down their cheeks. My friend Kris was crying, too. I had never seen so many grown men—so many people in general—all crying at the same time. Not knowing what to say or do next, I felt utterly sick. Thoughts were rushing through my head: thousands of lives were being lost; I was furious that America was being attacked, yet thankful to be alive.

“Let’s get to my place as quickly as possible,” Kris said. “It’ll be tight, but you can stay as long as necessary.” Everyone in the city was in this together.

I tried to call my family to let them know I was okay. They were a million miles away, in South Africa. I had no idea how much they did or didn’t know; I hoped they weren’t following the disaster in real time. But the cell phone circuits were out, and would stay out for hours. When we finally got to Kris’s place, I used the landline to try to reach my mom in Johannesburg, but she wasn’t at home and she didn’t have a cell phone at the time. The first person I reached was my brother, Mark, who was then at the University of Cape Town. I remember this moment very clearly. My brother is not an emotional guy, but as soon as he heard my voice, he started crying. Then I did, too. He later told me that he thought I may have worked in the World Trade Center.

I finally got hold of my mother in the evening, her time: it turned out she hadn’t known about the attacks until very late in the day, so she didn’t have to worry for very long until she heard from my brother, who confirmed my safety. She has always said to me that she’s very thankful she didn’t have the whole day to worry about it.

As afternoon turned to night, a few of us sat around Kris’s place watching Aaron Brown and Paula Zahn on CNN, in a trance. I finally collapsed, exhausted, on the couch. In the morning, surreally enough, I walked over to the 2nd Ave Deli—my favorite kosher deli in New York during good times, at Second Avenue and Tenth Street—and found it open. I hadn’t eaten dinner the night before, and suddenly I was starving. I ordered a corned beef sandwich. While I waited, an African American man and an elderly Jewish guy argued at the top of their voices about why this had happened to America. Even more surreal was the scene on the streets of the East Village: they were as empty as something out of a postapocalyptic sci-fi movie. New York felt like a ghost town, the wind totally knocked out of it.

That same morning, I got a surprising but very welcome call from an HR person in the London office of Goldman Sachs. The guy said, “We know your apartment is a few blocks from the World Trade Center; we’ve got a full system in place to set you up. Number one, we’re going to give you two thousand dollars to buy clothes and anything you need. Number two, the firm has already booked hotels all over the city, which we’re going to be ready to provide to you, but we need a couple of days on that. And number three, we’re going to be in touch to let you know when the markets are opening.”

The call was a huge relief. Because I couldn’t get back into my apartment, I was running low on cash, I didn’t know how I was going to get clothes for work. I didn’t have any shirts or underwear; I didn’t even have a toothbrush. Now I could start to feel human again. A small, good thing.

I hung up shaking my head in amazement and gratitude. Within hours of the attacks, the London office had taken over the reins, found out where I was living, tracked me down, and extended a hand. This was Goldman Sachs at its best. I remember thinking that when it came to efficiency, execution, and generally having its act together, Goldman Sachs was the gold standard. It had the smartest, most resourceful people; no other bank on Wall Street came close.

It was hard to think about something as mechanical as the markets reopening when all anybody was thinking about was life and death. But it was important. Mayor Rudy Giuliani realized this. Osama Bin Laden had attacked America’s financial center, only blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, the greatest symbol of capitalism in the world. Opening the markets quickly, efficiently, and in an orderly fashion would be a strong way to fight back, to get New York and America back on their feet, and to show our collective resilience.