Summary: Long hours, a little bit of moral ambiguity, and Excel spreadsheets -- always Excel spreadsheets. Kevin Roose, New York Magazine columnist and author of Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits, reports on the new generation of Wall Streeters - the bankers who were recruited after the 2008 crash - and how the industry's morals have changed since the financial collapse. Excerpt: Two Chapters from Kevin Roose's Young Money Chapter 1 Arjun Khan straightened his tie, brushed a lint ball off the charcoal gray suit he'd bought for $179 at Lord and Taylor to wear to his high school graduation, gave his hair a final pat, inspected his teeth for food in the bathroom mirror, and bounded out the door of his apartment and into the elevator of his downtown high-rise. A confident, bright-eyed twenty-two-year-old with an aquiline nose and a slight belly paunch, Arjun was on his way to his first day of work as a mergers and acquisitions analyst at Citigroup. His neck muscles were tense and his stomach was turning over, but those were just surface nerves. Mostly, he was filled with the flinty resolve of the newly emboldened. After thousands of hours of preparation, dozens of interviews and expertly crafted e-mails, and one extremely lucky break, he had finally become a junior investment banker at a major Wall Street firm — the job he'd been chasing for years. Nine months earlier, Arjun's plans had been derailed by the financial crisis. The Queens-born son of a data engineer father and a social worker mother who had both emigrated from India to New York as young professionals, he headed into the fall of his senior year with a prestigious job offer at one of the best banks on Wall Street: Lehman Brothers. Arjun felt lucky to have gotten Lehman's attention in the first place. He attended Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx that, while strong academically, wasn't among Wall Street's so-called target schools, a group that generally included the Ivies, plus schools like Stanford, New York University, Duke, and the University of Chicago. That meant he had to work harder to get his foot in the door — joining the Finance Society at Fordham, attending lectures at Columbia Business School, spending his free time watching CNBC to pick up the cadence of the investor class. And his strategy worked. He secured a junior-year internship at Lehman, and he did well enough that at the end of the summer, he was offered a fulltime job beginning after his graduation. His recruiter told him, sotto voce, that he had been the only Fordham student to get an offer from Lehman that year. During Arjun's internship, things began to go south. Ever since the Bear Stearns collapse earlier that year, industry watchers had been speculating that Lehman would be the next bank to fail. The firm's stock price had tumbled, thousands of workers had gotten laid off, and one well-regarded hedge fund manager jolted Wall Street that summer by proclaiming that Lehman wasn't properly accounting for its real estate investments. Still, Arjun assumed that Lehman would be fine. He was wrong, of course. In September 2008, while Arjun was starting his senior year at Fordham, Lehman filed for bankruptcy. (Most of its U.S. operations were bought several weeks later by Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of the large British firm.) The same day, Merrill Lynch, which had also been pummeled by the housing collapse, announced it was selling itself to Bank of America for $50 billion. AIG, an insurer weighed down by towering piles of credit default swaps, had to be given a massive $182 billion bailout, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last freestanding American investment banks, turned themselves into bank holding companies in order to give themselves better access to the Federal Reserve's emergency lending window. Congress passed a $700 billion bailout package that gave a lifeline to banks and kept the markets afloat, and the entire coun
