Tetsuya Ishikawa worked for six years as a credit banker at ABN AMRO, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Last year he was fired from MS, and a couple years prior to that, he was listed as one of the salesman investors should contact if they wanted to get a piece of ABACUS. And since getting canned, he's written a novel based on his "personal account of 21st-century banking excess," which was just published this week. How much of the story relayed by narrator Andrew Dover actually happened to 'Tets'? He'd put it at "close to 90 percent." (Dover was hired for his job with a $3 million guarantee, whereas in six years, Tets only took home a little "more than £1 million before taxes." Also, Andy does a lot of blow, where as the author says that "he was never a keen consumer of cocaine"). As for being a real page turner, according to reviewer Sathnam Sanghera, Ishikawa "makes structuring, syndicating and selling credit derivative, CDO and securitisation products as dull as it sounds," and does not name-check The Fabulous Fab, having not realized during the writing process that the SEC would be going after his former colleague the same week he made his authorial debut. And it's not clear how much light is shed on how exactly we got into this mess. Tets (via Dover) does however do a pretty good job of talking lap dances, strippers, and turning hoes into housewives, based on his experience in the field.
Surprisingly, however, the clichéd excesses of the narrator's personal life, which I expect to be fictionalised, turn out to be almost exactly alike. Ishikawa admits to having been a frequenter of Spearmint Rhino, as does his fictional alter ego (“If you're out on a Friday night and want to sit somewhere for a quiet drink, it's good”); visiting a German brothel (“I've been, but not with a client”); sleeping with escorts (“I did a lot of travel abroad and the first thing I asked on arriving was: ‘Where is the brothel?'”); having sex in the office ( “Uh, I have”) and dating a Brazilian lap dancer (“She became my first wife. My current wife is Korean and works in banking”).
Confessions Of The Man Who Caused The Credit Crunch [Times Online via BI]
Goldman's Banker Always Asked: 'Where's The Brothel?' [Daily Mail]
