BULLY MARKET: My story of money and misogyny at Goldman Sachs, Jamie Fiore Higgins
“Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow” is the title of a popular rainbow self-help book published in 1988. Covered in a palpable blood red, it suggests that if you do something you don’t like, money will follow you down dark alleys and weigh you down. It may eventually be released into self-awareness, but it does not cause temporary blindness in the first place.
The daughter of Italian immigrants to New Jersey, Higgins suffered from life-threatening scoliosis as a child, which, like Judy Bloom’s Deanie, helped shape her character. One mean girl called her a “disgusting freak” for the back brace and fictitious “flawed cloak” she wore. The expensive surgery left Jamie feeling guilty and indebted to her parents. They wanted a return on their investment.
Meanwhile, a negative physiotherapist made her determined to exceed her low expectations. Like “Eyes Wide Shut”, “wall street“working girl‘ and ‘soupson’mother”
Despite her beef, Higgins worked for Goldman from 1998 to 2016. (In any case, we’re definitely in Corporate America before #MeToo.Lab. A male subordinate whose account was deleted after having an affair with a client angrily grabs Higgins and throws her up against a wall. Anchoring, cursing and spitting: cocaine in the office bathroom, elaborate Christmas parties with bacon-wrapped scallops and $100 tumblers of Macallan Scotch, and constant bruising of dirty jokes. There is a full salvo.
Nicknamed “Sister Jamie”, she has been compared to Mother Teresa for her demeanor at work. Even Higgins, she married early to Dan, an independent IT consultant, and was the mother of young children. A car with an elderly executive she calls Rich. (Many of her names have been changed, she wrote in her author’s notes, and some of these letters are synthesized.)
She also acquired a like-minded work husband, Pete. Pete dreams of leaving everything to become a guidance counselor. Together they create a “freedom spreadsheet” that charts how much time you need to spend before checking out of a lucrative but downright brutal business. The three of her in this all-male alliance of Dan, Rich, and Pete give “Bully Market” some unintentional rom-com suspense in a field of cash-grabbing jerks. There are her 3 coins in the fountain.
Higgins seems to have been a brilliant and resourceful financial analyst, developing a local bank to lend stocks to hedge funds (her grandmother taught her to save a little change). However, when she learned the amount of her first bonus, she dropped her crochet needles). As a writer, she is not very sophisticated and does not like easy metaphors. Her stomach is “rocky” during her important licensing exam. Her vulgar colleague grins “like a dog seeing a bone.” When she first met Dan, her pleasant mood vanished like a bucket of water on fire when he asked her what she was doing for her living.
After Higgins is traumatized by a close-up view of the 9/11 attacks from Goldman’s office, Dan comforts her on the couch. She hears her plea for help from one of the toddlers who is “cutting through her room like a razor.” Instead, the expected promotion “dragged me down like quicksand.” Rich’s Hazel Peeper “locked me in like a laser.”
If you had a glass of tequila for all of these clichés, you’d be as drunk as Higgins and her colleagues are surprisingly regularly. challenged her characterization At a Chicago karaoke bar, one of these vendors ends up with a particularly disgusting colleague throwing racist and homophobic slurs at strangers. When Higgins tried to report the incident to Employee Relations, she was accused of “going outside the family,” she wrote. I was harassed for using a breastfeeding facility. She had a pink gift bag containing a stuffed cow.
Higgins, as they say, was not afraid to “go there,” taking us to the bathroom and other places to clean up spilled breast milk, a stream of child’s diarrhea, her sister, her child. In fact, the whole book has something of an impact, as if the #MeToo movement narratively offered her a solid dose of tocon syrup. There is.
At a time when many white-collar workers lobbied for the right to keep Zooming in sweatpants, the “bully market” was an empty stage set for a human drama where offices were dark and outrageous. It reminds me of the times.
BULLY MARKET: My story of money and misogyny at Goldman Sachs | Jamie Fiore Higgins 320 Pages | Simon & Schuster | $28.99