100-hour weeks and heart palpitations Inside Wall Street's brutal work culture

Published

4 months ago

May 20, 2024

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The tragic death of former Green Beret and Bank of America employee Leo Lukenas III has become a flashpoint of anger over allegedly unrealistic work expectations on Wall Street partly because some bankers say Lukenas’ experience is so similar to their own.

While there is no evidence that job-related stress caused the blood clot that killed 35-year-old Lukenas on May 2, a recent Reuters report that he was talking with a recruiter to find a job with better hours has put a glaring spotlight on the 100-hour work weeks he was said to be juggling before his death.

Multiple Wall Street sources told The Post about scary health issues they claim are related to their high-stress occupation.

There have been incidents where analysts pass out in meetings due to lack of sleep/food, and other times where analysts are hospitalized due to panic attacks and nobody steps in to check in on them, a Bank of America employee alleged.

On Thursday, a second Bank of America employee died.

Adnan Deumic, a 25-year-old London-based trader, was playing in a five-a-side charity soccer tournament with other finance employees when he fell suddenly and was administered CPR, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

While the cause of death is unknown, the source told The Post that cardiac arrest is suspected. There is no known connection between Deumic’s work and his death.

While Deumic worked closer to 60 hours a week than 100, those hours were highly stressful. He was involved in trades worth as much as $1 billion some days despite his lack of experience, the person said.

He probably worked 11 to 12 hours a day and those hours were incredibly intense he didnt have time to get coffee, the source said.

This isn’t the first time bankers have been angry about a colleague’s untimely death, but the current response has prompted more people to speak up, sources said.

Employees are finding vindication and camaraderie in popular financial chat boards on Reddit and WallStreetOasis.com. And popular Instagram accounts like Litquidity and Overheard on Wall Street, with more than a million followers between them, have given airtime to some of the most egregious problems.

One Wall Street Oasis post from an anonymous banker, highlighting a list of demands for employees welfare, recently generated more than 450 comments.

The anonymous banker behind Overheard on Wall Street has spoken with multiple Bank of America employees and shared some of their comments with The Post.

Bank of America has a system called ‘banker diary,’ where junior bankers input their weekly hours. It is supposed to safeguard us from overworking by flagging anyone who inputs more than 80 hours a week, one said. I cannot actually even start to count the number of times I was asked by [managing directors and directors] to lie on my banker diary so that it wouldnt get flagged.

“Our policy is clear and we expect employees to accurately record their hours,” Bank of America said in a statement.

While Wall Street culture varies by firm and department, investment banking the division in which Lukenas worked is notoriously the most grueling. It’s also the most lucrative, where bankers only a year out of college can pull down $200,000 a year, but regularly clock 100-hour work weeks.

It’s a top-down problem, sources most of whom asked for anonymity because they feared repercussions for speaking out said.

VPs do not respect junior peoples time, a managing director sympathetic to younger bankers told The Post. “They will proactively give someone a piece of work at 6 p.m. on a Friday that could have given it to them on Tuesday, but [managers] were distracted.

Mark Moran now runs an investor relations firm Equity Animal, but spent four years working on mergers and acquisitions at Lazard and Centerview Partners.

You typically dont have to get to the office until 10 a.m. and you often dont get any work assigned until the afternoon, he said of many junior employees at large banks But around 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., you often get an assignment and have to stay until 2 p.m. finishing it.

These CEOs love talking about efficiency and productivity but they literally waste their most important asset: Peoples time, one source who left Wall Street after six years told The Post.

Most junior employees, typically referred to as associates, spend just two years on the bottom rung before leaving a firm or getting promoted.

Lukenas, who lived in Brooklyn, had been a Green Beret for more than a decade from 2013 until he joined the bank as an associate last July according to his LinkedIn page. He leaves behind a wife and two young children.

His death came three days after working around 100 hours a week for several weeks in a row, completing a $2 billion merger, according to Reuters.

Those two associate years can reportedly be hell, with employees complaining they have no control over their schedules.

According to a survey conducted by Overheard on Wall Street, junior bankers average just 5 hours of sleep a night.

One source who left investment banking for private equity told The Post that, at her old job, she was so exhausted that she had to rest her eyes in a bathroom stall every few hours just to function.

Sleep deprivation can lead to depression, physical illness and, in some cases, use of drugs like cocaine to stay awake, bankers said.

Hank Medina, who chronicles Wall Street culture on the Instagram account Litquidity, told The Post how, after months of chest pain and heart palpitations when he worked at Jefferies Bank, he finally worked up the courage to ask his manager for time off to see a doctor.

The pain was diagnosed as being caused by incredibly high stress and a lack of sleep,” Medina said.

The week the doctor had me wear a heart monitor, the analyst I was working with told me he also had one [chest pain] happens a lot, Medina said. “The adrenaline from the job was unsustainable.

Another Bank of America source told Overheard on Wall Street: I have led deal calls with clients from a hospital bed before apologizing for the sound of my heart rate monitor in the background. I returned to work after sick leave only to be made to feel guilty for taking time off for my health, when the job is the primary cause for my health issues.

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Over the years, a handful of suicides and deaths have resulted in some reforms. In 2013, after a Bank of America intern in London died of a seizure after working until 6 a.m. for three consecutive days, Goldman Sachs implemented the so-called Saturday rule requiring employees be out of the office and not working between 9 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. Sunday.

Other firms like JPMorgan and Citi reportedly adopted similar rules but sources told The Post those guidelines are now frequently ignored at some firms.

Wall Street firms including D.E. Shaw, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs offer egg-freezing as a benefit for female employees as a benefit a process that would free them up to work intensely before starting a family.

But, sources say, much of the change is cyclical. When profits are high and there is a talent shortage, banks assuage junior employees by promising to limit meetings or giving them Peloton bikes, as Jefferies has.

But as soon as profits dip, firms are pressured to cut costs, reduce headcount and force more work on fewer employees starting the cycle again.

And some older bankers just aren’t sympathetic.

What happened to [Lukenas] was absolutely tragic, but for junior bankers to leverage is untimely death with the aim of reducing the heavy and intense workload required to be a successful investment banker is inappropriate, one banker who spent two decades on Wall Street told The Post. “Elon Musk works more than 100 hours a week and he hasnt dropped dead.”

Another banker added: If you dont want to do the job, there are three junior people behind you who will take your seat.”

But one former Goldman employee told The Post there’s no excuse for the exhausting workload.

While not working with one’s hands like in a factory, working 100-hour work weeks as a junior financial analyst has similar features to serious labor in being physically demanding and taxing that are under appreciated, Jon Hartley, who is now an economics PhD Candidate studying labor and financial economics at Stanford, told The Post. There’s an overall culture that needs to change which requires both employers and employees to put health and well-being first, above incremental low-productivity hours.

I dont get it because it wouldnt take that much to be a leader and make real change, another longtime Wall Streeter told The Post. Its such an archaic culture.

Entertainment

Artist behind ‘disturbing’ sculpture says it’s not intended to cause upset

Published

24 mins ago

September 22, 2024

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Artist behind 'disturbing' sculpture says it's not intended to cause upset

The artist who created a sculpture which has been called “disturbing” and “shocking” says he’s been “surprised” at the backlash but welcomes difficult conversations it might inspire.

Jason deCaires Taylor told Sky News: “I don’t strive of my artwork to divide people or cause upset. But I do try to talk about issues that are pertinent and relevant to our current times.”

The 50-year-old artist has a history of producing political work but says this one contained “no political intentions at all” and is based on the painting which inspired Shakespeare‘s tragic heroine Ophelia.

The Alluvia – which is made from recycled glass and steel and features LEDs which light up at night – was installed in the River Stour, in Taylor’s hometown of Canterbury in Kent around a week ago.

However, comments posted on Canterbury City Council’s official Facebook page have included accusations that the work is “tone-deaf” and “offensive”.

One wrote: “I can’t be the only person who finds this deeply offensive. She looks like a drowned woman. How did the council not see the link to women as victims of crime or the sad fact so many drown off the Kent coast as refugees.”

Another said: “I find this sculpture absolutely appalling. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disturbing. The imagery of a submerged figure, reminiscent of a drowning victim, is both morbid and utterly tone-deaf given the tragic drownings that occur along our coastlines. What on earth were the council thinking?”

Others stood up for the work, with one commenting: “More people seem to be “disturbed”, “offended” and “shocked” by this than they do by images of actual drownings which are happening daily along our coasts. Rather than wasting your hate on an artwork that is designed to provoke, why not put some of that energy into something constructive?”

Another wrote: “It’s a beautiful piece of art and nowhere near as disturbing as the previous sculptures that it has replaced. What kind of world do we live in when anything that offends or “triggers” someone, must be removed??”

The sculpture had replaced two similar female forms, also created by Taylor, which had been in the water since 2008 but which had been damaged due to dredging.

‘If it fosters care and sympathy, that’s good’

Taylor told Sky News: “I was surprised… 99.9% of all the feedback that I’ve received has been very positive… But at the same time, I appreciate everybody takes something different from everything they see.”

While he says there is “no connection” between the work and the ongoing migrant crisis taking place further along the Kent coast, he hopes it could inspire empathy for what’s happening out in the Channel.

He said: “It’s an extremely tragic situation, and I don’t think ignoring it is the solution. If [this work] can foster any kind of care and sympathy for that situation, then I think that’s a good thing.”

More than 21,000 people arrived in the UK in small boats between January and September, according to government figures, with at least 45 people dying in Channel crossings this year.

Taylor also said the fact the subject is a young woman is because it draws reference from Sir John Everett Millais’s celebrated painting, on display at Tate Britain.

‘Art without questions is pointless’

Some of Taylor’s past sculptures have raised issues around the climate crisis, Brexit and the plight of those risking their lives on the perilous migration route from West Africa to Spain.

Taylor says: “Art should ask questions. They should make people think about things that should elicit emotions, that’s really critical.

“If things were ignored and if you tried to please everybody with all your artwork, I think you’d make something very benign and quite frankly, pretty pointless.”

He also feels our age of information overload could be part of the reason for the negative feedback.

“We’re so inundated with images and media, with having our phones interrupting us and screens everywhere we look that people look for divisiveness and things that cause clickbait. I think there is an element of people sort of seeking out controversy.”

Taylor said the majority of negative comments online had come from people who had not been to Canterbury and seen the work in real life, with one call for the statue’s removal coming all the way from Orkney.

Responding directly to calls for his work to be taken out of the river, he said: “People are perfectly in their rights to have [an] opinion. But I would urge them to go and see it first.”

‘A dead body doesn’t light up at night’

Chair of Canterbury Commemoration Society Stewart Ross, the charity that commissioned the work, told Sky News: “Some people find it offensive and shocking, we have no objection to that. All public art is open to discussion”.

Comparing calls for the work to be removed to the destruction of art during the Reformation, he said: “I feel strongly about this [call for censorship]. It’s what the Taliban do. If you don’t like it, don’t look.”

Mr Ross said the “confected anger” around the sculpture was “unnecessary” and that the charity was simply “trying to do its best,” adding: “People have been comparing it to a dead body, but I have yet to meet a dead body that lights up in the night”.

Taylor, who has been working as an artist for over 25 years, has sculptures in marine locations around the world including Australia, Mexico, Grenada and Norway. Prices for his sculptures start at around £1,300.

He first donated the two original Alluvia figures to the city of Canterbury in 2008.

Technology

Middle Eastern funds are plowing billions of dollars into hottest AI start-ups

Published

24 mins ago

September 22, 2024

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Middle Eastern funds are plowing billions of dollars into hottest AI start-ups

Sovereign wealth funds out of the Middle East are emerging as key backers of Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence darlings.

Oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar have been looking to diversify their economies, and are turning to tech investments as a hedge. In the past year, funding for AI companies by Middle-Eastern sovereigns has increased fivefold, according to data from Pitchbook.

MGX, a new AI fund out of The United Arab Emirates, was among investors looking to get a slice of OpenAI’s latest fundraise this week, two sources told CNBC. The round is set to value OpenAI at $150 billion, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential.

Few venture funds have deep enough pockets to compete with the multibillion-dollar checks coming from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. But these sovereign funds have no problem coming up with cash for AI deals. They invest on behalf of their governments, which have been helped by rising energy prices in recent years. The Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, countries’ total wealth is expected to rise from $2.7 trillion to $3.5 trillion by 2026, according to Goldman Sachs.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund, or PIF, has topped $925 billion, and has been on an investing spree as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” initiative. The PIF has investments in companies including Uber, while also spending heavily on the LIV golf league and professional soccer.

UAE’s Mubadala has $302 billion under management, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has $1 trillion under management. Qatar Investment Authority has $475 billion, while Kuwait’s fund has topped $800 billion.

Earlier this week, Abu Dhabi-based MGX joined a partnership on AI infrastructure with BlackRock, Microsoft and Global Infrastructure Partners, aiming to raise as much as $100 billion for data centers and other infrastructure investments. MGX was launched as a dedicated AI fund in March, with Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and AI firm G42 as founding partners.

UAE’s Mubadala has also invested in OpenAI rival Anthropic, and is among the most active venture investors, with eight AI deals in the past four years, according to Pitchbook. Anthropic ruled out taking money from the Saudis in its last funding round, citing national security, sources told CNBC.

Saudi Arabia’s PIF is in talks to create a $40 billion partnership with U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. It also launched a dedicated AI fund called the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence, or SCAI.

Still, the kingdom’s human rights record remains an issue for some Western partners and start-ups. The most notable case in recent years was the alleged killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, an event that triggered international backlash in the business community.

It’s not just the Middle East spraying money into the space. French sovereign fund Bpifrance has inked 161 AI and machine learning deals in the past four years, while Temasek out of Singapore has completed 47, according to Pitchbook. GIC, another Singapore-backed fund, has completed 24 deals.

The flood of cash has some Silicon Valley investors worried about a SoftBank effect, referring to Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. SoftBank notably backed Uber and WeWork, pushing the companies to sky-high, valuations before going public. WeWork spiraled into bankruptcy last year after being valued by SoftBank at $47 billion in 2019.

For the U.S., having sovereign wealth funds invest in American companies, and not in global adversaries like China, has been a geopolitical priority. Jared Cohen of Goldman Sachs Global Institute said there’s a disproportionate amount of capital coming from nations like Saudi Arabia and UAE, and a willingness to deploy it around the world. He described them as “geopolitical swing states.”

WATCH: OpenAI is the indisputable leader in AI supercycle

UK

Ex-Harrods director reveals how ‘paranoid’ Mohamed al Fayed created toxic culture at store

Published

24 mins ago

September 22, 2024

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Ex-Harrods director reveals how 'paranoid' Mohamed al Fayed created toxic culture at store

A former Harrods director told Sky News he does not see how security at the department store “wouldn’t have known” about Mohamed al Fayed’s behaviour towards women.

Five women have alleged they were raped by Fayed, who died last year at the age of 94, with several others alleging sexual misconduct.

A legal team representing alleged victims confirmed on Saturday morning they have “had over 150 new inquiries” since the airing of a BBC documentary on Fayed.

The Harrods’ ex-director, who reported directly to Fayed, said: “There was security everywhere, all the phones and offices were bugged, with cameras everywhere.

“I just put it down to paranoia, wanting to know he was getting his pound of flesh from us. The nature of the man was to set everyone against each other, to set directors against each other.

“Whether Fayed’s own offices or stuff had surveillance, I wouldn’t know. But to get into his suite of offices you had to have an appointment, PAs had to arrange it, it was very secure.”

He added: “The only thing I was aware of was that someone said he had lots of PAs and they were all blondes. I thought that he just wanted to surround himself with pretty women.”

The former director, who spoke to Sky News on the condition of anonymity, said the culture at Harrods was toxic.

“It was very much keep your head down, no one helped each other. It wasn’t a team as you knew Fayed was trying to catch everyone out.

“He was always trying to make fun of people in front of others, which he thought was very funny.”

Harrods said in a statement on Thursday it was “utterly appalled” by the allegations of abuse and apologised to Fayed’s alleged victims.

The department store has also set up a page on its website inviting former employees to come forward if they have allegations.

Meanwhile, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has defended Sir Keir Starmer after it emerged the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to bring charges against Fayed while the prime minister was director of public prosecutions.

The CPS considered bringing charges against the former Harrods chairman in 2009 and 2015 but concluded there was not “a realistic prospect of a conviction”.

The minister told Sky News that tackling violence against women was a “personal priority” while Sir Keir was head of the CPS as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.

“I don’t know the details of what happened in 2009, there sometimes can be issues with the evidence that’s presented by the police, whether that can lead to a conviction,” Ms Phillipson said.

“The first time that I ever knew who Keir Starmer was when I saw him on television as director of public prosecutions, talking about the personal priority that he attached to tackling violence against women and girls, so he’s got a personal commitment to it.

“He turned the CPS around while he was leading it to focus on that. But, clearly, if there have been issues that should be considered, that should happen.”

A Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir did not handle Fayed’s case, adding it “did not cross his desk”.

The CPS also provided early investigative advice to the Metropolitan Police in 2018, 2021 and 2023 following allegations made against Fayed.

However, a full file of evidence was never received by the CPS in each of these instances and they were given no further action by police.

Former Victims’ Commissioner Dame Vera Baird accused the CPS of only taking “cases they could win”, saying the organisation was “a den of negativity for all sexual offence allegations and for the people who made them”.

She told Sky News: “They have always been valued for the proportion of cases they win. So you do 20 [cases] and you [win] 15 – 75%, that’s good. But if you only do 10 because 10 are really, really safe, then you get nine of them – that is a super rate of conviction.

“Their interest mitigated for all of that time against the interests of people who severely needed to have the help of the criminal justice system to get over the awful way that they were treated by their assailants. And now it’s very clear that Mr Fayed was one of those.“

She also said the CPS’s treatment of women may have affected its decision to not take charges against Fayed.

“Women who come forward with complaints of this kind are underestimated and undervalued, and to some extent seen as a liability who [is] likely to be volatile or emotionally not very well, largely because of the way they’ve been treated,” she said.

But Dame Vera defended Sir Keir for his “ahead of the game” approach to violence against women while he was director of public prosecutions.

“They were doing their best and for instance, the CPS was the first ever government organisation to have a violence against women and girls strategy.

“Keir initiated a report by a very highly-regarded lawyer about how the CPS should systematically get away from the myths about prosecution and about sex offences, that it impeded them from taking cases forward. That was a very strong thing to do.”