So, an article about finance:
How to blag a job in finance: buy some black shoes and talk like an aristocrat
Paul Mason
And we have the picture caption:
You’ve got the shirt … but what about the haircut? Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
And the picture
They’re, err, legal outfitters.
please please please read this morning’s missive from the LHTD
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/09/06/the-government-is-still-in-denial-on-the-tax-gap/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+org%2FlWWh+%28Tax+Research+UK+2%29
short version “the HMRC’s view of the tax gap is some made up numbers. My made up numbers are higher therefore HMRC are wrong QED”
‘Centuries of good practice show that capital can only be allocated efficiently when the participants in the deal played rugby with each other at the age of 12’
Which I am hazarding is the mental age of the author of this article – what an absolute load of shite. Make Murphy look like Decline and Fall FFS…..,
Ede and Ravenscroft are also university outfitters. They’re who I got my gown and a couple of ties from.
Perhaps this is the first in a series of articles explaining how to get into a certain career without relevant qualifications.
The next article could be “How to blag a job as an economics editor: a guide for music teachers…”
Mark Poles – score!
Many of the people I know who work in finance are geezers who have never been near a public school.
Oh, Mr Poles- that’s beautiful.
Nothing else in the article is any more accurate. There is plenty wrong in the city, but Mason is just clueless.
Apologies – missed the byeline! I had assumed it was a scribbling summer intern – not the idiot in chief himself. Quite what the intelligence services are doing to earn their pay and perks is beyond me as I fail to see how no evidence exists that he was some kind of Soviet agent/sympathiser along the lines of Seamus Milne in the twilight of that country’s history.
His politics remain resolutely stuck in a 70s timewarp – quite why anyone is prepared to give airtime to this mindset is quite puzzling. Needs to be specifically taxed, probably tagged with a Bill of Attainder and preferably deported to NK, Venezuela or Cuba as a matter of some urgency.
Ede & Ravenscroft are indeed legal outfitters, but they do also make extremely well tailored suits. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Also have a shop in Gracechurch Street. I don’t think you ned to get dressed up for City oif London Magistrates Court, so probaly not a legal outfitters.
“Many of the people I know who work in finance are geezers who have never been near a public school.”
Yes, I do wish the Left would get their stereotypes right. One minute they are sneering at “barrow-boys” in the City, the next they are all posh.
Anyway, how to blag a job at the Guardian: have a parent who works there.
Why does Paul Mason not complete his Northern agit prop street credentials by sewing leather patches onto his jacket elbows, wearing a flat cap, walking around the City with a whippet and prefacing all his statements with Ee By Gum.
Can he not find a picket line to join somewhere, permanently, and STFU?
do excuse the length of this…
An old boss of mine was working in LIFFE on the day of the first May Day Riots, and it was targeted by the crusties. As he tells it, one would go through the turnstiles then up a bank of escalators for the trading floor. The assorted Tarquins and Jemimas vaulted over the barriers, dodged security and sprinted up the escalators. They were halfway up when the security guards hit the emergency stop and they all fell flat on their faces.
Picking themselves up, they crested the rise and came face to face with the floor traders, expecting to find a bunch of floppy-haired Ruperts in pink shirts. What they *actually* found was a large group of no-neck Essex barrow boys up for a pagga, and advancing menacingly. So the protestors ran to a meeting room and locked themselves in. And then phoned the police to ask for help, which strangely took quite some time to arrive.
Some corporate finance departments might hire mainly from a small subset of public schools, but that is hardly the entirety of investment banking. Lots of barrow boys and lots of talent from elsewhere. In terms of outfitters, Savile Row would be more suitable – Gieves and Hawkes. E&R are indeed legal outfitters – which is why they are in Chancery Lane.
The City of today is mainly meritocratic – nowadays even Eton is pretty meritocratic – no more stupid cretins even if their fathers and grandfathers attended.
Flatcap Army
Having encountered a couple of the then ex – LIFFE Traders some years after that event you will be pleased to hear their recollection of events tallies with yours completely. They were if anything quite annoyed they didn’t have the chance to ‘kick the crap out of these scummy bastards’ from recollection…..
I have an Ede & Ravenscroft suit and IANAL.
I have an Ede & Ravenscroft suit and IANAL.
This made me think of Keith Vaz who could, of course, make no such claim since he is/was a solicitor of sorts – though I’ve no insights into the contents of his closet.
There’s a scintilla of truth in what Mason writes about the “customer-facing part of an investment bank”. It’s important for the sales guys to make the customers like them.
But it doesn’t apply to the traders.
There was also the time when the Jemimas and Tarquins raided the International Petroleum Exchange
@Tim Newman – link not working
SJW
It used to be that public schools were important for M&A – being part of the establishment. A lot of rugger buggers and ex-guards people in sales. Nowadays a lot more meritocratic everywhere. Places like Cazenove and Barings were very clubbable, but almost all the old merchant banks have gone. The City is now full of US banks.
ken,
“The City of today is mainly meritocratic – nowadays even Eton is pretty meritocratic – no more stupid cretins even if their fathers and grandfathers attended.”
It costs people money to do otherwise.
The worst places for Old Boy Networks and nepotism are in politics, “the third sector”, the arts, the BBC and non-profits like the Guardian. Because most of the people running those aren’t picking up the cost. So, why not give jobs to your mates? Will Hutton and Alan Rusbridger getting jobs running universities after their careers? Based on what track records?
@BiW – one of the reasons Hutton drove The Work Foundation into the ground was that he took over the Industrial Society, changed its name, changed its purpose and then gave jobs to all his mates on massive salaries. Amazingly it turned out to be unsustainable.
And Rusbridger’s daughter Bella Mackie is still on the Graun staff. Bet she had a really rigorous interview process.
“Centuries of good practice show that capital can only be allocated efficiently when the participants in the deal played rugby with each other at the age of 12”
In other words ‘Person who has long term personal experience of the character of the people he is lending money to tends to get fewer bad debts than person who hasn’t got a clue what the people he’s lending money to are really like’.
‘Centuries of good practice show that capital can only be allocated efficiently when the participants in the deal played rugby with each other at the age of 12’
Well, he intended to be sarcastic but a conservative or pragmatist would see that it has worked for centuries and so would keep it.
@flatcap army
Short story: Greenpeace tried to protest on an oil trading floor in 2005, and found out the hard way that oil traders can be a bit handy in a fight before running away
“I have an Ede & Ravenscroft suit and IANAL.”
Congratulations on the suit, but there’s no need to come over all Keith Vaz…
Further to Tim Newton and Rhydian’s comments
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/mass-brawl-on-the-trading-floor-7169300.html
And
http://forums.canadiancontent.net/international-politics/36727-greenpeace-hippies-get-asses-kicked.html
“Congratulations on the suit, but there’s no need to come over Keith Vaz…”
Unless he’s paid you to do exactly that.
“Mr Mulhall said: ‘Right away when I got hit I said, ‘It’s okay we are going now – there’s no need for violence.'”
Lol. Too late now mate.
I don’t think he is being cynical with his surprise – he really did/does believe he can violently disrupt someone else’s business and get away with it. The smug sense of entitlement is overwhelming.
And speaking of people who take issue with crusty idiot protesters- what happened to Squander 2?
Rob
that on Vaz is truly a vomit inducing mental picture
I particularly like how Paul Mason thinks that firms in the city don’t do proper reference checks:
“As to the CV, you must make it up. The four spring internships claimed by elite candidates in their first year at university (the new normal according to the report) come in limited supply. Apart from the sons and daughters of the bankers themselves, most other places will be reserved for the offspring of Arab despots and Russian crooks.”
If you took his advice the faked internships or jobs would be discovered before you started (if you made it through the interview).
I wonder what his CV looked like when he applied to Newsnight?
@TimothyA
What’s even sadder is that the cretin doesnt even understand that the report is in error. The four internships being quoted by the report include multiple different internships over several years or include “experience days” – one would be hard pressed to do two proper first year spring internships let alone four.
“Ede and Ravenscroft are also university outfitters.”
Timmy wouldn’t know; shoulda gone to Cambridge..
Talking of Savile Row, I once audited the books of a tailors in Sackville Street (just round the corner). They had c19th military uniforms in the basement which had never been collected, a hat stretcher they’d acquired in 1822, and it took me 3 days to count the buttons…
“Apart from the sons and daughters of the bankers themselves, most other places will be reserved for the offspring of Arab despots and Russian crooks.”
Russian crooks wouldn’t get through client acceptance and the sons of Arab despots wouldn’t function outside Islamic finance. On the other hand, it is not unknown for the sons of of the wealthy to gain employment. One grand dame in NY used to phone the chairman of the big US bank where I workedin the 1980s to enquire about the progress of her nephew (who had a habit of turning up to wor in plus fours). “Ah yes, he’s running our branch in Belgium.”
Sorry, link fixed.
The four internships being quoted by the report include multiple different internships over several years or include “experience days”
I knew an American in Paris who mentioned she’d done various internships. Turns out they were 1or 2-week work experience placements as part of her masters programme.