Auditioning for Wall Street

Yesterday, Wall Street on Parade reported on how the corrupt tentacles of Wall Street have engulfed the mindset of our newly minted law school graduates.
Getting one’s resume noticed from those of a stack of competitors previously meant using a good grade ivory linen stock instead of cheap white copy paper. Today, the word is apparently out that getting one’s resume noticed at a major Wall Street bank requires advertising one’s special knack, inside track, or secret sauce for ripping off society for the profit advantage of the big dogs on Wall Street.
On November 20, Senator Carl Levin and the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 396-page report and 8-inch stack of exhibits exposing more shocking Wall Street secrets that have been heretofore protected from daylight by timid or captured regulators. Among the exhibits was a resume submitted to JPMorgan Chase by a young, recent graduate of George Washington University Law School – a man that society might rightfully expect to conduct himself in an honorable and professional manner in the business world.
This young man, instead, attempted to set himself apart from the pack of recent law grads applying for jobs at JPMorgan by advertising at the very top of his resume that during his job in power procurement at Southern California Edison, he had ‘identified a flaw in the market mechanism Bid Cost Recovery that is causing the CAISO [the California grid operator] to misallocate millions of dollars.’ In case that was too subtle, the young job applicant went on to note that he had ‘showed how units in reliability areas can increase profits by 400%.’
There are a number of troubling assumptions this young man appears to be making: first, he appears to assume that no lawyer at JPMorgan will show this resume nor report the ‘flaw’ to a Federal regulator. He also appears to believe that his ability to exploit electricity markets in California will be quickly embraced by JPMorgan personnel and cue his resume to the front of the line. And, finally, he seems to intuitively perceive that this is how Wall Street operates in general.
Stunningly, the new law grad was right on every one of his assumptions. Part of the same exhibit 76 is a JPMorgan email from the person who would become this young man’s boss, Francis Dunleavy, advising: ‘Please get him in ASAP.’

This post was published at Wall Street On Parade By Pam Martens and Russ Marte.