Laws of Contrition de Valerie Elizabeth Thompson

Laws of Contrition

Valerie Elizabeth Thompson

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 sep 2011

A raw and realistic up-to-date (story opens March, 2008) novel about life on and off the trading floor. Set in London, within an American investment bank, this is a fast flowing tale about debt and dysfunction, deception, lust, and old fashioned love, where there are as many winners as losers. Or perhaps everyone's a winner. Even the dead.

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Notă biografică

Valerie Thompson grew up in Dagenham, left school at fifteen, and at sixteen joined Salomon Brothers Int'l in London, and worked her way through the ranks to become a Director of the firm by the time she left in January 1987. On account of career achievements, her life story is now in the National Sound Archives of Great Britain, as part of a social history project, called City Lives. Laws of Contrition is her first novel. Previous works include Mastering The Euromarkets (Irwin/McGraw Hill,1996) and The Logical Magic of Change (Calmrise, 2010). A mum, grandma, and twice divorced, she now lives on the South coast of England, and works as a life coach/consultant.

Recenzii

"Former Salomon star turns her experience into post-Lehman fiction" By John Mastrini, International Financing Review(IFR)May, 2012: She remains one of the most fearsome women ever to grace London's Square Mile, described by Michael Lewis in "Liar's Poker" as an "alley cat" and by the IFR in 1987 as an "FRN mega-star". Now 25 years after walking away from Salomon Brothers as head of syndicate, Valerie Thompson has focused her formidable energy on writing a trading room bodice ripper, a post-Lehman story of banking and bonking. In "Laws of Contrition", the life and career of her main character, Tanya Pryce, echoes Thompson's own story - rising from humble beginnings to manage a team of risk-taking, ego-fuelled men in a big American investment bank in London. She says while the protagonist does have much in common with her life at Salomon, she was never as audacious. "This is fiction - but I would like to be Tanya, quite frankly." Constructing scenes from the post-2008 crisis world has made Thompson reflect on what has become of investment banking. Although there have been myriad changes in financial engineering and technology since the years of big hair, huge mobile phones and even bigger personalities, she believes the real changes in the City are a result of a sterilised HR and PR-driven corporate culture taking the place of common sense. Traders in the 1980s would get their kicks through office banter, booze and being a bit wild: "Now they have substituted that with excessive risk-taking," Thomson laments. "It was a way of managing all of that testosterone and all of that excitement, but it was also about containing it. Now I think it has got all exported. When you put someone in a straitjacket, they go a bit mad, and then they have to export that, and then they do all these things trading-wise." A force of nature from the East End Thompson's own personal story has been recorded as part of the Sound Archive at the British Library, but it plays like a novel. Her trading skills were honed at age seven next to her father, bidding for fish in London's Billingsgate Market. She left school at 15, bored to tears but needing a job, any job. She decided to look in the City, "because that's where the real money and the excitement was". With her cockney accent, a crumbling family life and little formal education, she blagged her way in as a filing clerk at a local stockbrokers and taught herself how to input deals on the Telex, the massive key-punch machine via which much of the business was done in the early 1970s. Less than a year later, she answered a newspaper ad in the Evening Standard: Salomon was expanding its European hub in London and needed a Telex operator at GBP32 per week. Again, she talked her way into it. Over the next 10 years she went from punching deals as a clerk, to chasing for tea and running tickets on the trading floor, to constructing complex Eurobond deals raising millions of pounds, dollars, guilders or marks. She pored over thick books to learn the business and found that years of trading banter and doing her sums in the stalls served her well. Her bosses at the time described her as a unique force of nature. "When she leaves a room, she takes all the atmosphere with her," Salomon executive committee member Bill Voute told Working Woman Magazine in 1985. She rose to head of trading, and then head of syndicate, responsible for billions. One young turk working under her was Michael Lewis - now the best-selling author but back then, just a guy learning the ropes and taking names. Describing Thompson in "Liar's Poker" he wrote about how she handled a scheming senior colleague, whom he refers to as "the Opportunist", who was trying to put through a seemingly dodgy trade and get Lewis into trouble: "What the Opportunist had neglected to consider in his scheme was the omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous Presence. No, not God. A person on the trading floor known as the syndicate manager - Syndicate managers are the investment banking equivalents of chiefs of staff in the White House or general managers of professional sports teams - The role produces masters of realpolitik, Machiavellian in the original sense of the word. They see all. They hear all. They know all. You don't cross a syndicate manager. If you do, you get hurt." Lewis told Thompson about the Opportunist's scheming: "She was even angrier than I had hoped - I mercilessly left his fate in her hands. It was like leaving a goldfish in the care of an alley cat." Lewis said Thompson made several phone calls to dump the trade, cut the Opportunist's bonus and block his promotion at the end of the year. He soon left Salomon. "I'm a street fighter and when angry I would act," Thompson recalls. While she says Salomon's business was always "deadly serious", the antics of the age go well beyond what most big corporations would be willing to allow today, for fear of crossing HR or potentially generating bad PR. She tells of a Christmas Party she organised for her team in the office. Beyond the booze and food fights, one of her reports hired a male stripper for her. "I was shaking and quivering with embarrassment." Bosses could often turn the air blue, screaming at the top of their lungs. Sexual and sexist banter and gifts were commonplace, on both sides of the Atlantic: "The trading floor in New York was a bit scary, because of the sheer size of it. I was over there and I remember a woman's birthday, and they rolled out this cake, and it was two balls and a cock. It was just par for the course. It's what they did." In such a male-dominated environment, she said there were embarrassing and frightening moments with randy colleagues. "I tend to fight my own battles, so I would not go to HR even if I worked on a trading floor today, because I'm not sure where that would get me, I am not convinced it leads to more satisfaction, although granted it's proven to be lucrative for some." Still, she defends the working environment of the day: "They want a sense of self. It was a release for the intense energy of a human being. They wanted to feel alive and more powerful. The environment today is so dis-empowering, and I think that has played a part [in the 2008 crisis]." Moving on After a failed early marriage to an electrical contractor, and trying to raise two children, the 12-hour days at the office were taking their toll. "There are only so many hours in a day, and I was a single parent as well." So in 1987, at the height of the City boom, she cashed in her banking career. In a comment that underlines the sexism endemic in the markets at the time, but was nonetheless heart-felt, IFR's l'Eminence Noire column wrote: "It was a sad, sad day to see the departure of very pleasant Val Thompson from Salomon Brothers. Hers was a career that set an example for every girl embarking upon a life in the Euromarkets. The press loved her and she became better known in the City of London than Brooke Shields in Beverly Hills. The first report from the Secretary of Val's fan club is that she may not join a rival organisation, but she is far too pretty and clever to retire and there has to be someone out there who can offer a seven figure salary to get them out of their present predicament in the FRN frying-pan where Val is one of only around six people in the market who can stand the real heat. A million a year is, in fact, probably rather on the low side, but Val firmly believes in charity. Many of the present houses in the FRN market shouldn't be there in the first place, but for those who want to stay in the hot seat it would surely be worthwhile to persuade Ms Thompson to take up her former career as an FRN mega-star." Since leaving Salomon, Thompson has been living on the south coast of England, mentoring people in a variety of fields as a "life coach". She started blogging about the 2008 financial crisis, which lead to the creation of Tanya. "Obviously I've modelled her on me, would be hard not to, and written about what I know, because there aren't many novels out there with a female protagonist from the field of finance so that seemed a good idea. Basically, fiction gave me free reign, and I loved not being constrained by anyone or anything." "Laws of Contrition will be eerily familiar to anyone who has spent much time on a trading floor. Valerie Thompson has been there and done it, and her experience saturates this racy novel... A real page-turner, this is a rare woman's glimpse into a man's world, but told with humor all the way. Definitely a must-read, although not for the saintly." Simon Hylson-Smith, CEO, Paragon Public Relations, and former Editor-in-Chief of International Financing Review (IFR).

Laws of Contrition

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