Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson - Home - Evening Standard
       

Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson

At first, I thought this memoir would just be a slick and ribald account of the rise and fall of a young stockbroker, complete with champagne, cocaine, Essex girls, and competitive traders who are also, at a deeper level, insecure and needy as well as greedy. Well, all this is there — the ups and downs, the nasty talk, the wonderful slang, the attractive and unattractive women, the legendary hangovers. On more than one occasion, our hero wakes up, like Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, thoroughly poisoned — and thoroughly keen to describe it. But this is a better book than I thought; the author knows how to explain markets and hedge funds.

"There may be trouble ahead," he says, and this must have been written a couple of years ago.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

'Who is Cityboy? He's every brash, suited, FT-carrying idiot who ever pushed past you on the tube. He's the egotistical buffoon who loudly brags about how much cash he's made on the market at otherwise pleasant dinner parties. He's the greedy, ruthless wanker whose actions are helping turn this world into the shit-hole it's rapidly becoming. For one period in my life, he was me.' In this no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of life in London's financial heartland, Cityboy breaks the Square Mile's code of silence in his own inimitable style, revealing explosive secrets, tricks of the trade and the corrupt, murky underbelly at the heart of life in the City. Drawing on his experience as a young analyst in a major investment bank, the six-figure bonuses, monstrous egos, and the everyday culture of verbal and substance abuse that fuels the world's money markets is brutally exposed as Cityboy describes his ascent up the hierarchy of this intensely competitive and morally dubious industry, and how it almost cost him his sanity.

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