An excerpt from Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker

7,600 people have already lost their jobs on Wall Street this year, but Logan, a Princeton-educated investment banker turned private equity god, doesn't seem too concerned. "It's Banker Darwinism," he scoffs. "Survival of the sweetest."

Okay, so Logan is actually the fictional creation of 26-year-old writer Amit Chatwani, and while Chatwani, an ex-strategy consultant, never was blessed with the sacred opportunity of actually working on Wall Street, he has always been immersed in the grandeur of its culture. After graduating from Princeton in 2004, he lived in a Tribeca man-pad with nine prestigious financiers, and many of his close friends are still "keeping it real" Wall Street–style.

These experiences have provided Chatwani with enough fodder to start and maintain Leveraged Sell-Out, a blog on which he has lampooned the excesses of investment banking and general finance culture for more than three years. In 2006, Business Week labeled him the "Borat of Wall Street"; a book deal with Hyperion followed shortly thereafter.

The end product, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker (in stores August 5, but available for pre-order here), is narrated by Logan and excerpted below. "Bear Stearns is the Wall Street Radar" says Logan. "Let's just hope they don't come back from the dead like you guys did."

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Chapter 1: No. We do not have any "hot stock tips" for you.

Industry
In the fall of 2005, I moved to New York City to work as an Analyst at a Bulge Bracket Investment Bank. Leading a wave of other recent Princeton graduates, I casually stepped from one of society's most elitist playgrounds to another. It felt completely natural. Since then, my friends and I have made the city our own. Frequenting the city's hottest nightclubs and bars, we throw the best parties, and we experience its most beautiful women. Essentially, we run shit. We dominate The Scene, and it is all facilitated by one overarching fact: We work in finance.

To clarify, we don't work in the layman's concept of finance (fı¯'n˘ans), spoken with a long "i"; we work in finance (fe-n˘ans'), the refined English pronunciation reserved for only the upper echelons of the industry. We are "Bankers," but not in the traditional sense. When most people think "Banker," they're really thinking of Retail Bankers—those who offer loans and credit to fledgling T-shirt stores and overeager franchisees. Retail Bankers wear golf shirts they buy on eBay, live in North Carolina, and get home at 6 p.m. to eat dinner with their kids. As Investment Bankers, we are their polar opposite—we spend thousands on any given night, wear suits the price of automobiles, and work intimately with the world's most high-profile businesses.

That fall, I moved into an apartment in one of Tribeca's most exclusive areas with seven guys from school. Five guys ended up living in an apartment upstairs, and three of us took a place directly below them.

Getting the apartments was a breeze; when our Russian landlord saw the names Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone written all over our applications, his face lit up with delight. "Gold men and sex!" he proclaimed, prophetically. He was so confident we'd be good tenants, he even offered us a "very special rate."

Cheap things generally suck, so we doubled it.

Investment Banking
I chose to live in the three-man with the two guys the rest of us didn't know that well, not out of kindness, but because I wanted my apartment to operate efficiently, exactly like an Investment Bank.

Corporate Finance
My room, with floor-to-ceiling windows, southern exposure, and its own private bathroom, is the Corporate Finance arm—the Investment Banking Division (IBD). I help companies raise capital and advise them on mergers and acquisitions. I conduct in-depth, highly quantitative analysis that requires both the utmost intelligence and extreme diligence.

Starting out, I often worked upward of 100 hours a week, pausing only to instruct the world on nightlife best practices and to budget my Bonus. Hearing about this schedule, people often naively asked, "When do you sleep?" To which I offered the only logical response: "If I wanted to sleep, I'd have been a surgeon."

Sales and Trading
My roommate Jon is in Sales and Trading. While IBD is often referred to as the "library," S&T is the "locker room," and from the Gold Bond–ish stink of Jon's room, it's quite obvious how this nomenclature came about.

Sales at a Bank is just like sales anywhere else—pushing stuff that people don't want down their throats. In this situation, however, financial products and trading ideas are being peddled, and since it's an Investment Bank calling, people actually pick up the phone. Jon, a Trader, prices and executes the trades that the sales group has orchestrated. Jon lives and dies by the market, waking up at 6:30 a.m. before it opens and getting home around 6:30 p.m. after it closes; it even dictates his bathroom habits, forcing him to be able to go in less than 15 seconds so he can return to sit by his obsession, vigilantly.

It would ruin the Bank I have created, but I've been not-so-secretly hoping Jon will move out, taking with him his jock straps, empty beer cans, and sweat-wicking Under Armour button-downs.

Chapter 5: Georgetown? I wouldn't let my maids' kids go there.

Schools
Schools and banking follow the same basic patterns as all things in nature. For example, look at the most discrete element of matter: the atom. In basic orbit, the electrons of an atom cannot jump from any given energy level to another; they are restricted to the orbitals in which they belong, their ground state.

Finance operates by these same rules. Kids from middle-tier schools stay at middle-tier Banks and top-tier kids stay in the top tier. Just like no electron can hop from e1 to e5, there's no Miami of Ohio student who miraculously ends up at a top private equity firm—that shit just doesn't happen. It would be chaos.

Top Tier
Princeton
School slogan: "Princeton—We Bringin' Banker Back"
In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald said of my alma mater, "I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic." He got two out of three—Princetonians aren't lazy. On the contrary, Tigers work furiously and diligently to ensure their top spots on Wall Street. I imagine F. Scott couldn't make it past first-round Banking interviews and, in his bitterness, made some blanket generalizations.

In my less biased opinion, I think of Princeton as being the consummate Banker school. Elitism, scholarship only for the sake of monetary gain, and a work-hard/ball-hard philosophy are the very bricks that bolster this institution. It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

Harvard
School slogan: "Harvard—With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"
Meeting someone from Harvard, they will undoubtedly display faux modesty and say something along the lines of, "Oh, I went to school in Boston." I imagine they want me to guess MIT, just so they can say "Harvard" proudly in response, but instead, I say something like, "Hmm. You really look like a Northeastern kind of guy. BU, maybe?" This puts them in their place, and they will scramble away, crying crimson tears all over the floor.

But, to their credit, Harvard's name universally carries the most prestige. That's why people "ooh" and "aah" even when someone's second cousin ends up at Harvard podiatry school, and that's why Banks like having Harvard kids on their desks.

Wharton
School slogan: "Wharton—University of Pennsylvania"
Based on their curriculum, I originally had Wharton slotted in the Vocational Banker Schools section below, but some stubborn fact-checker at my publisher made a huge fuss and cited various "facts" to prove that Wharton was indeed a Top-Tier Banker school. Not coincidentally, the fact-checker happened to be a Wharton alum. Figures.

I'll concede that a lot of prestigious Bankers do come from Wharton. But the fact that it is attached to the University of Pennsylvania is Wharton's biggest and most tragic downfall. In and of itself, Wharton is a fairly exclusive place, but the nature of its being lumped together with a big, ugly mass of mediocrity creates insecure, overcompensating alumni.

As a result, you will never hear a Wharton grad admit he went to UPenn. Even if he snuck in through the back door to Wharton after his second year, he will undeniably declare "Wharton" when he meets you, like a leper proudly extending his one good finger to shake. I see the rest of your disfigured hand, buddy, and it's revolting.

Third (Shit) Tier

Cornell
School slogan: "Cornell—Mediocrity Delivered"
Most people don't realize that three out of the seven of Cornell's undergraduate schools are publicly funded, but most people do realize that all seven are lucky to have been part of whatever blunder placed them in the Ivy League.

Cornell produces top "scholars" in two things: agriculture and hoteling; everyone else is stoked on whatever finance job or gorge they're lucky enough to land in.

Vocational Banker Schools
At least the students who study plumbing learn hard skills and gain connections to a union. All Vocational Banker School graduates have to show for their efforts is a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree, which no one has heard of or cares about at all.

New York University (Stern School of Business)
School slogan: "NYU—Bright Lights, No Future"
You'd think that being situated in New York City, the epicenter of finance, NYU would be a great Banker institution.

Proximity suggests that countless finance gods would claim NYU as their alma mater and that the school would easily feed its graduates into the top spots on Wall Street. That's just the kind of illogical thinking Stern relies on to stay afloat.

Sadly, the few NYU grads who do make it onto The Street deal with their school like a horrible one-night stand, wiping it from their memories. While recruiting, they will treat Stern candidates like illegitimate offspring, suddenly becoming awkward and saying, "It isn't mine."

Non-Banker Schools
Swarthmore / Oberlin / Haverford / Carleton
School slogan: ""
There are many schools across the country that are part of a network known as the "small liberal arts schools." I believe you end up at one of these places when you can't pass Calculus and vaguely understand but are still obsessed with Milan Kundera.

Know one thing though—when someone says to you, "I went to a small, liberal arts school," that means, "I make $40k a year, gross." Gross.