WHEN I was an investment banker, except with my last employer — Evercore — I always felt like an outsider who was there serendipitously. As a Filipino at the regional offices of global firms, I was actually aware of how the Philippines was often an afterthought, and the last big country in Asia to get to after you dealt with covering the others. Especially in the 1990s, when the global investment banks first followed the full-service commercial banks like Citi, Bank of America and JP Morgan into Asia, and were regionally staffing for the first time, I always felt the Filipinos were the last to be hired and potentially (and 1997 proved it to be largely true) among the first to be fired, all other things being equal. Unless you were exceptional, broader in responsibility beyond the Philippines, cheap or a junior with promise, or the firm took a longer view (which only a few did), you were at higher risk than others. They would usually shut down or drastically reduce operations and coverage related to the Philippines ahead of others at bad times.
I bring this up for two reasons — being only a few years in the workforce in 1983 (I was working while at law school where I graduated in 1984), I was acutely aware how ephemeral assumptions could be. I was very frugal being fearful my employment would not last, and two — which is the main point to this column — kept and made friends outside of the industry when I became an investment banker at global firms so I would not be limited to an investment banking bubble in my thinking.
Global investment banking and the culture and habits that envelop it is truly a bubble if you are in it. Pace of hiring, promotion and firing is compressed and much more intense, as is compensation and the accoutrements that accompany those successful in leading international firms. If that is both your work and social milieu, it can be very easy to be caught in that bubble. I remember my daughter recounting when she was older that in the 1990s when she had sleepovers with friends in Hong Kong, they could tell whose bag it was as their overnight bags were the corporate bags of their parents. They were those green duffel bags with the company name and logo on the blue handles. I remember even being somewhat slighted later by Macquarie’s bag not being in that style (Antipodean regional firm is what the snooty bulge [as in major US firms] would say) and used my Salomon Brothers bag. I was assuaged after joining Evercore by their blue bags with white handles which was similar in style and look. I can tell other obnoxious but amusing stories from then. Like in early 1994, right after I joined Salomon Brothers, some investment bankers (we were Hong Kong-based) were talking about how we would spend our bonuses, and among the group, everyone assumed I got the biggest one having just structured and led the award-winning Benpres Holdings’ IPO. One said he was buying an Audi, another said he was buying very expensive antique furniture, and they were apoplectic when I said that except for buying a rowing machine, I was going to save and invest everything. Bankers who were junior to me all wore or collected designer watches and asked why I wore a cheap Seiko. I said I liked that it had an alarm. That was just as cell phones were starting to be common and where the big innovation to come in a few years was to be able to send an SMS. Smartphones were a decade away. Also, pre-1997, so many junior brokers at minor international firms in Manila were literally burning their pay in smoke by having Cuban cigars and single malt scotches after work rather than saving and building a nest egg. After 1997, most were laid off and never returned. One retrained himself to become a nurse. Another became a sales agent for a delivery firm and was embarrassed when I recognized him when sending a package. There are worse examples from senior New York bankers but will leave it at this for now.
I bring up this bubble mentality as aberrant behavior is easy to regularize and even be the norm if that is all you are exposed to or deal with. Which brings me to the Senate and its recent and multiple brouhahas. It seems the chattering classes are even more upset than they were after the flood control scandals. Are they outraged by its seeming crassness or are moods and tempers further frayed with all the hardship and uncertainty unleashed by the Iran war, and fuel price increase and its spillover effects? Did the senators individually or collectively think a more blatant public display of what happens privately or at least to a lower degree, would just be taken as another example of the norm? Did they think it would not spark outrage as perhaps in their bubble it may be nothing out of the usual course of plotting and maneuvering? I am not a political insider and defer to those who are, but perhaps this is part of this behavior is what they are used to and to them what recently happened is an extension of acceptable boundaries?
I recall Gov. Mario Cuomo’s maxim — “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Well, it seems over here we campaign in sometimes low-quality drama, and at times govern in lurid and turgid melodrama. Clearly, many of us don’t think how the Senate is going is the preferred way. I was in NY when those gunshots were fired in the Senate. The two people I met who saw it on the news asked me if there was a coup under way. This is because that is what you expect when you see a video of shots fired in a legislature. Show other examples of gunshots in a legislature. It is usually a coup or assassination attempt. The latter if singular, the former if plural but not in our all-drama, little-substance culture. Add the chase of Sen. Ronald dela Rosa. I find it hard to fathom how a senior citizen of hefty build can outrun multiple law enforcement agents in prime physical shape through flights of stairs including a stumble. Then how a hardened politician can cry and be overwrought way after the event where nothing happened to any senator. Were these narratives tested outside their milieu or just examples of thinking in a bubble where behavior and what passes for norms are reinforced by the peer group and supported by yes men and women whose main purpose is to stay on the good side of their masters?
We need leadership, not drama and intramurals. Though I am not religious, here is apt advice from 1 Corinthians 13:11. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
The author is an independent director of the state-run Maharlika Investment Corp.
