Charming smile, confident voice, Anna gets straight to the point from the first minutes of the discussion: “What interests me is money. “ Earning money, of course, but also understanding how money works and its circuits. Anna (all first names have been changed) is a 28-year-old Swedish woman who has worked for the City of London for seven months after studying economics and management. Like her boyfriend, Arthur, a 27-year-old Belgian, she began by trading online: some cryptocurrencies, ETFs (financial products that follow stock market indices), stocks … “I like to see how money creates money. “
Anna has been preparing to work in finance for years, like her mother. Jean, a 27-year-old Frenchman, fell into it quite by accident: a good student, the way opened up for him naturally. And the taste for added value too: he won 25,000 euros from a bet of 100 euros by betting on a little-known cryptocurrency. “I could even have won 400,000 euros if I had waited longer”, he regrets.
“Young people who enter finance are either very good at math or want to get rich. It doesn’t change. A former Goldman Sachs
Thirteen years after the great financial crisis of 2008, the City still attracts the younger generations. The key to this article was given to us by a former Goldman Sachs veteran of the markets. Are the young people who work in finance different from the past, in search of meaning and aspiring to a more balanced life, as we sometimes hear? Not sure, he replies. “Young people who enter finance are either very good at math or want to get rich. And that doesn’t change ”, he replies. Generations pass, the City remains this same obscure object of desire … Anna and Jean are in the infancy of their careers and are not earning millions, far from it. Their annual salaries are around 40,000 euros, to which it will be necessary to add a few months of bonus. They are not traders or investment bankers, but work in two different companies serving clients, monitoring the positions taken by them on the markets.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Lars, another Swede. Between his salary and his bonus, he receives more than half a million euros per year at 32 years old. His job is private equity, that is, buying unlisted companies, restructuring them and selling them after a few years. The work is very interesting: at a young age, he sits on several boards of directors, makes strategic decisions for these companies, sometimes spends very long nights preparing for acquisitions … “But especially difficult not to talk about the good remuneration”, he specifies unvarnished.
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