The Rise of the Finance Bro

The world is very different to the one in which previous generations have grown up. We have all heard it so often by now that it almost seems like a worthless truism - that no longer even merits the ink needed to print it, not that there is much printing nowadays. There are always those who want to hang on to a past that is dying, one that can no longer bring flowers to bloom, but the winds of time are much stronger than those individuals. “The times are a-changing,” and these times have given rise to the finance bro - the pinnacle of radical 21st-century individualism made manifest.

In a world where technological advances are accelerating at unprecedented speeds, it is easy for those who think to feel left behind and question what all this means. I hope you don’t find me vague in saying “this” because “all this” is precisely what I mean. It has always been easier to turn away from the one act that most defines our humanity - the courage to think deeply and creatively. It is that which has characterised our journey from caves to "this," and that I would adamantly maintain still differentiates us from even the most advanced artificial intelligence networks.

I have grown up all my life in what we like to call the developed world - something we, more or less, still today only measure in terms of GDP per capita. With the financialization of industries and commercialization of our quotidian - of “this,” I found myself surrounded by an immutable, echoing chorus - a relentless emphasis on the primacy of money, a sound that couldn’t be muted with the click of a button. Every waking second is somehow monetized and there are few places to look that aren’t used for advertising - every glance being capitalized. It is of no surprise that the youth of today believes so strongly in wealth as a defining metric of success.

Enter the finance bro - a symbol of this belief, embodying the pursuit of financial dominance as the ultimate status marker, the end justifying all means.

No one is born a finance bro. As pointedly asked by Frank Slade, played by Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman: What values are we instilling in the generations to come? It would be a mistake to characterise the proliferation of the finance bro as a contemporary generationally idiosyncratic event. The truth is that while Gen Z may talk more about compensation - being far more transparent and willing to share - it appears to stem more from a deeply-rooted need for validation through openness and general transparency. Money is less of a taboo than in previous generations, but there is little evidence to suggest that this generation prioritizes it more than the last. Similarly, the widespread Gen Z stereotype of wanting to only work remotely is categorically false. So, if you are about to reminisce of the halcyon days of the past, you will need to look further back. One also mustn't fall victim to a pessimistic outlook and neglect all the positive progress our societies have made in terms of equality and justice. What is true, nevertheless, is that never has money as a public subject of interest been so omnipresent.

Materialism and consumerism are older than this generation and the one before. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the notion that having more meant living better was planted in our minds and by post-WWII, it had grown to replace many other ideals by which we once lived. More and more seem to live to work rather than work to live. We seek meaning and status from our job. While the former is undeniably great, the issue is the replacing of alternative meaning sources by our jobs until our job becomes our sole source of meaning.

Never have as many young people been trading and trying to follow any “get rich quick” guides. It isn’t surprising that at the same time self-professed “inspirational gurus” or so-called “motivational speakers” of the likes of Tony Robbins to the next charlatan making Instagram Reels are making a killing. There seems to be a growing societal fascination with the idea of “easy money,” visible in the popularity of speculative assets like cryptocoins, meme stocks, and other bogus investments. This trend reflects a deeper shift and a broader cultural appetite for any shortcuts to wealth. Hold-times on stocks are significantly down, reflecting the impatient need to get rich, the actual success of the investment being of no interest. Such short-term trading for instance makes no contribution to the real-economy, rather leading to unreliability and price fluctuations that in the end leave companies with no real capital to work with. Even if we can argue that long-term investing isn’t a zero-sum game, one definitely cannot make the argument for short-term trading.

For the lack of a better word, undisguised douchebags like Kevin O’Leary are now looked up to on shows like Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den. We consume shows like Billions or Succession or movies like Wall Street or Wolf of Wall Street. We have begun to glorify greed, rolling back an ethical understanding dating back to biblical times, and have allowed this deadly sin to take the place of voided solidarity. This is a universal phenomenon. Whether it be referred to as avarice, hirst, lobha or lobe, few things are as common between all the major religions as our condemnation of greed. I would argue that even in a world without Gods, there are still lessons we can draw from past generations such as these - certainly worth heeding today.

Examining The Wolf of Wall Street, having embraced greed, and despite recognising that he practically embodies complete ethical compromise, the narrative's central transgressor, Jordan Belfort, awakens in young viewers something they seek to emulate. There is something fascinating about Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman that does the same, putting aside the murder and executions of course. Despite all these depictions of “finance bros,” contrary to dissuading the career path, it seems that it is even in some distorted way romanticised through this.

Although with satirical intent, last year’s hit “Man in Finance” or emerging influencers like “Gstaad Guy” or Aris Yeager, better known as @theeuropeankid representing this growing subculture, seem to in fact only further fuel this idealisation of a life with little intellectual pursuits but lots of time in St Moritz, St Tropez, and St Barthes. Brands like Ralph Lauren and Loro Piano have been quick to capitalize on such trends and it is unsurprising that they are now heard far more in conversation.

It isn’t that literature and arts haven't always been fascinated with the rich and powerful. From Tolstoy to Austen to high society almanacs to The Philadelphia Story, we have long been captivated by wealth and all that comes with it. What we can observe with the finance bro is different - it is an intentional and shameless rejection of morality. The finance bro knows that he is not contributing to progress but he does not care. He does not need to attempt to absolve himself, for the financial reward seems to take care of vindication.

I want to point out that I am not rejecting individuals who simply seek to make a good living. I share the same desire and shall refrain from hypocrisy. I too want to be able to travel and indulge in life’s many pleasures. What I criticize in no uncertain terms is the attempts to fulfill this wish and simultaneously choosing easy paths whenever faced with crossroads, whereby one becomes a net taker from society. The underlying pattern is a shift towards making money by, where it is impossible to add value, extracting it. The same status-quo that led to the 2008 global financial crisis has never truly faded, for nothing fundamentally changed its wake. Even investors like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have long raised the alarm of the parasitic nature of speculative trading. There is also a notion of manufactured complexity, whereby financial products are deliberately engineered to be opaque, effectively insulating financial actors from scrutiny and making regulation extremely difficult. This complexity is not accidental; it serves to obscure risk, enable unsustainable rent-seeking behavior, and justify the ever-expanding role of finance in domains once considered outside its purview.

I don’t mean to say that everyone working in finance is a “finance bro” or that “finance bros” are confined to the finance industry. The road of selling out does not exclusively lead to finance…

Worst are those who refuse to give up their sanctimony and while working within systems that perpetuate the very ills they privately condemn - be it high finance, defense, or other Leviathans of destructive power - speaking loftily of inequality as if from some untouched moral height. We cannot split ourselves in two and live by a different set of standards than those we proclaim to uphold in a theoretical world, expecting that of others, clinging to a conceived reality. When the time comes for the finance bro to apply for university or an internship, he is armed to the gills with disingenuous letters of motivation, painting him as an unwavering moral force. All the while the imposter knows that he has no desires but his own monetary success.

The finance bro culture has robbed us of scientists, innovators, changemakers, and worst of all, of passions. It has defrauded us of our dreams and corroded our society: far too early do we know BB banks or what MBB is. Why? Why does everybody study business? Why do the majority of undergraduates already have LinkedIn and follow Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, BCG or McKinsey? Why has no scandal been able to shake and tarnish these firms and people’s desire to work for them, enabling them to hoard talent?

It is unsurprising when one now hears that there are more physics PhDs choosing to work in finance than in physics itself, with fields like quantitative finance luring scientists with beyond-belief salaries - diverting talent from the beneficial to the profitable. Many from Ivy league unis now believe figures as high as 100,000-150,000 USD straight out of university to be normal, perpetuating a classist divide that has led us to the levels of inequality that we are seeing today. It doesn’t take much untangling to see that these issues are closely interlinked. All that while the median salary of the average worker in the USA is less than 65,000 USD per annum. Here are your John and Jane Does; they have been failed by a notion of a dream that was nothing short of a lie.

If we are judging our success on unjustified salary expectations then the reality is that we have a teacher that is failing most of their class. It is time we question whether it is not an issue with the teacher. First of all, the course is wrong - as is the course of this thinking! Often, however, those from Ivy leagues do achieve and exceed their targets, because they are willing to compromise their morals. This “selling‑out” phenomenon is often initially self-justified as a brief phase to gain some financial security and perhaps pay off the cost of an expensive degree. The reality is that once one becomes accustomed to such figures, it is far from easy to settle for less. What begins as a temporary compromise often hardens into a permanent way of life, and the line between necessity and choice quietly disappears. For, if one has been able to sell out for a moment, it becomes far too easy to justify doing so again, until the moment stretches into a lifetime.

The “developed” world constitutes one that has developed countless drugs to give us a break from thinking - more and more of us requiring manual shutdowns to sleep; during the day, it being effortless in today’s digital age to be distracted - notifications competing for every iota of attention. This developed world is increasingly relying on the financial sector to produce economic output, other core products being lifestyle diseases and depression. While one cannot look over the groundshaking AI developments, it is interesting to see, to which ends, most of these technologies are being harnessed over others.

What we see in much of the developed world should be a severe worry to us all - it is the pervasive loss of meaning and purpose that is ripping through the fabric of societies, with a disenfranchised youth - deprived of hope. Chomsky starts his 2015 documentary film Requiem For The American Dream on this note, observing how, in his youth - despite the Great Depression and WWII, there was still always an expectation that things would get better. A flame of hope, for which too a requiem may be in order - this clearly not being the case today.

In a nihilistic world where hope is absent, it becomes all too easy to surrender to the path of least resistance. And yet, this is precisely why we must rekindle hope, reigniting the flame - because in its absence, we lose the will to strive for something better. In such moments of reflection, facing this central crisis of modernity, it is the time to think and rather than give in to conformity, passive consumption or other forms of escapism, deliberate to fill this void. Without a higher purpose to anchor us, our ship simply glides along the currents of circumstance - which is why we need the creation of new values beyond the most rudimentary and primitive: money. Whether it is an absurd Camusian defiance of meaninglessness or Sartrian attempt to construct meaning, it lies up to us to act and take action: take a grip on life. Our time in this world is far too short to be an indifferent observer. A life with emotions is far more worthwhile, in spite of it being far more prone to what in literature we consider tragic.

It is unsurprising that in a world in which many chose to live with such indifference, we witness democratic backslidding and gates are opened to the extremes, who as opposed to us are not indifferent. They, unlike us, fuel their passions - just that theirs is to let the world burn to the ground. If we are apathetic to the progressive ideals that we have carved over centuries then our palettes will undoubtedly lose diversity in color and our world will darken.

The truth is that money is not what drives us. We often convince ourselves it is because for the unthinking mind, it appears as though it must be. It is simple to be corporate-minded. After all, in most cases, this consists of looking only to maximise profits for the next quarter. We need a revival of hope and passions - an awakening for this second Lost Generation.

The finance bro is the victim of our day for he chooses the route of self-deception - clinging to zombie ideas and superficiality that cannot fulfil a life. Fortunately, there is still time for all of us. Before you return to your daily life, I unconventionally urge the reader to listen to RFK’s 1966 speech “A Tiny Ripple of Hope”. Choose to be someone that moves the world in the right direction and sends forth ripples of hope!