Salomon Brothers

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Okay, so the Big Short is a much more realistic depiction of the financial industry, probably because it was written by Michael Lewis, who studied at the LSE and then worked as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in New York and London.

Solomon was one of the top five global investment banks at the time, and after a few mergers turned into the investment banking division of Citigroup.

Now, you always have to make things a bit more exciting for a film, but the big short didn't have to stretch too much as it was about the global financial crisis, which was a really crazy time to be working in the industry.

with that, there was a tremendous amount of investment that flowed in for their natural resources.

And one of the major physical commodity trading companies of its day, Fibro, the old Phillips brother, Commodity Trading House, which was then under the wing of, I think they were stolen by Salomon Brothers at that time, if you remember that name.

And they went in with a joint venture partner into Siberia.

And the theory sounded great that they were going to marry Western technology, Western capital with all this tremendous amount of oil sitting in the ground.

Clearly, at the time when I got involved in the derivatives markets in its earliest days, uh, the, uh, we were just trying to build businesses and, uh, we had a, we had a problem.

And the problem was, is that we could, uh, we being collectively Salomon Brothers, where I was working, as well as the, uh, half dozen or, uh, or so other dealers like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and, and, uh, Mor- JP Morgan, uh, we could transact, uh, much quicker than we could document the transactions.

Mm-hmm.

So we had these huge documentation backlogs, and it became clear to, uh- To us running those desks, uh, that we had a problem.

...

in turn, that kind of, uh, mentality, uh, that I developed early on when I got to Wall Street, I think really helped me throughout my career and my willingness to, uh, to take on, to take on risk.

Uh, another was, as I talk in the book, that, you know, I had no preconceived moti- n- you know, I, I moved from Bankers Trust Company to Salomon Brothers, and I have a whole chapter about how, uh, you know, there was risk, uh, going from a pretty comfortable job at a cushy bank to, you know, the dog-eat-dog environment of a Salomon Brothers.

And that's what it was known for, and of having very smart, very aggressive, uh, people that were, uh, highly successful at that firm.

So I had a real challenge of what am I going to do next? I ended up then spending the time in law school, spending time at the business school and pursuing education in finance.

And I was fortunate that my summer interns were at Wall Street, Salomon Brothers, learning about Wall Street and learning about trading and learning about finance.

And so I was fortunate that I was able to do that wall in law school.

And maybe a lot of those challenges where I learned what I didn't want to do.

And I spent many years as a securities analyst.

I was the head of the equities research department for Salomon Brothers in Bangkok in the mid 1990s.

And then I became an investment strategist and became the head of global investment strategy.

or ABN Amro Asset Management in London, looking at all asset classes globally.