Industry is a show on HBO and BBC depicting life in a British bank that appears to be a pastiche of J.P. Morgan (Pierpoint & Co. in lieu of John Pierpont Morgan) and Goldman Sachs (the opening scene looks like it’s set at the old Fleet Street office).
Given how many recipients of these letters are in financial services, I figured some in-depth commentary was in order. Partly a review of Industry, partly anthropological analysis, and partly reflections on banking culture.
It presumes you’ve seen the pilot—freely available on the HBO website in the U.S. and BBC’s iPlayer in the U.K.—so please watch it first before proceeding.
Unless you’re fine with being completely spoiled.
For mature audiences only
People are our capital
“People are our capital”. What does Pierpoint & Co. mean by this? Does it mean employees are treasured as much as the capital on the balance sheet? Or does it mean humans are but one resource to be used for maximizing executive compensation?
One heuristic for firm taxonomy is Missionary vs. Mercenary cultures. In Mercenary companies, the primary motivator is money, followed closely by ego. In Missionary companies, the primary motivator is nonmonetary. These firms believe their products or services are improving society. Ego might also be a motivator, but more along the lines of, as Steve Jobs put it, “making a dent in the universe”. They’re more likely to take a Rawlsian approach, balancing stakeholders rather than pursuing shareholder primacy.
In 2018 Dutch film Bankier van het Verzet (English: The Resistance Banker), the financiers who deploy their particular set of skills in order to support resistance fighters in World War II are completely driven by a moral mission. But such depictions onscreen are rare.
There’s AMC’s highly underrated tech drama Halt & Catch Fire, where Mutiny is set up by characters driven by a desire to create something more meaningful than the IBM PC clones they had been building at Cardiff Electric.
Generally speaking though, a show focused on, say, how much the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board really cares a lot about fiduciary duty is unlikely to have the dramatic tension required of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Wall Street dramas—e.g., Wall Street, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street, Showtime’s Black Monday—are therefore invariably moral stories meant to warn audiences about the dangers of avarice. Consequently, the firms depicted in these works are filled to the brim with widespread sociopathy. The apotheosis of this is American Psycho, a movie completely devoid of any investing or banking activities onscreen.
Even a comedic treatment like Trading Places hinges on insider trading, culminating in the ruin of two septuagenarian brothers, whom we later find homeless in Coming to America.
So when the Analysts are told, “Enrich your clients, enrich us, enrich yourselves”, we know it’s that last part which will be main motivator, or else there would be no reason for a show. The Analyst orientation scene ultimately sets the stage for the upcoming season with an overarching Sword of Damocles: in six months there with be a reduction in force.*
*It would be more accurate to portray this show with summer interns trying to get full-time offers. In reality, the Analysts are more likely to leave before their two years are up for a hedge fund or private equity opportunity at another firm. Recruiting keeps being preponed to the extent that there are jokes on FinMeme about toddler recruiting, but extensive discussion of this phenomenon would be too digressive for this review.
Sartorial analysis
In the first trading floor scene, a first year Analyst (“Robert”) is ridiculed for wearing a black suit from Ted Baker.* In addition with the character’s accent, it’s an economical way to convey class hierarchy as is the histrionic frocket scene in the washroom.
*Believe it or not, I have actually heard of a first year Analyst show up to an investment bank with a black suit…and only that black suit. Black suits are reserved for funerals. My recommendation for someone who doesn’t own a suit is to start with navy and gray suits and vary them enough so it doesn’t look like you’re wearing the same exact suit every day.
Traditionally, status has been more or less correlated with sartorial value. In The Big Short, Michael Lewis writes:
…the few guys who were actually important people wore three-thousand-dollar Italian suits. (One of the mysteries of the Wall Street male was that he was ignorant of the finer points of couture but could still tell in an instant how much another Wall Street male’s suit had cost.) The rating agencies guys wore blue suits from J.C. Penney, with ties that matched too well, and shirts that were starched just a bit too stiffly. They weren’t players and they didn’t know the people who were, either.
Industry essentially follows this traditional model. A quick visit to Ted Baker’s site reveals its origin as a Glaswegian shirtmaker. Quite far from Savile Row.
Interestingly, a broader casualization trend on Wall Street was happening even before we all started working from home. As tech companies have become far more dominant and banks face competitive pressure from Silicon Valley recruiting, firms have dialed down their dress codes. J.P. Morgan even had a pop-up Vineyard Vines shop at their headquarters several years ago.
The status symbol is no longer the bespoke suit but rather the vest, especially if it’s from an exclusive event such as the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference.
Countersignalling also plays a role in casualization. While bankers would traditionally buy a Rolex or Patek as a way to signal success, former Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman wear Swatches. Part of it is that wearing an Hublot is always a bad look; especially so in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
And as the CEO of a money center bank, you’re not just overseeing investment banking, but also parts of the firm whose activities are much closer to those of quasi-public institutions. It’s similar to how Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron stopped wearing Lagonda suits and French President Emmanuel Macron started wearing more affordable Jonas & Cie suits.
But mainly, when you’re the CEO, you have nothing left to prove.
What about those even higher in the Wall Street firmament than a bank CEO? Those with More Money Than God? If you’re Bobby Axelrod, you buy naming rights while wearing a Metallica t-shirt.
Food
Billions takes its food seriously. It is a culinary anthropologist’s dream show. Helen Rosner at The New Yorker even has a post-episode recap newsletter called OMG Did You See Billions?
The writers of Billions have a catalogue of restaurants and when they write a restaurant scene, they ask, “What restaurant would a character go to? How would they get a reservation? What table would they want?” You’re just seeing a slice of this work in the show. In another script, it might say “high end restaurant”, but in Billions scripts, they will specifically say Viand and the location scout will then just go to Viand and negotiate the filming rights.
Industry is not that type of show. There’s no reason a low level Analyst should be rubbing shoulders with Dave Chang or Daniel Bouloud anyway. All the low level bankers are eating at the desk, which is pretty accurate-to-life. Firms want to optimize employee time—I’ve been told that the old UBS floor in Stamford had its own Starbucks. So if you’re watching Industry expecting good food, I would prepare to be disappointed.
My one nitpick is the Analyst picking up the food orders for the team. This is unlikely to happen at a place like Pierpoint & Co. While it would happen at a smaller shop, at a large bank, there would be Admins to handle all the catering needs (my personal favorite in New York is Fresco by Scotto). Or there would be a company commissary. If there are orders, they would be placed on Seamless to decrease error rates. Or if you don’t need to be on the trading floor, you would grab something quick from outside to get some fresh air and would bring it back to eat at your desk.
Art
Art is inextricable from finance. The Four Seasons Restaurant, Wall Street’s canteen, had a Picasso tapestry. And it was hedge fund money that put artists like Damien Hirst on the map.
For large banks, we have to look to J.P. Morgan Chase, which has a collection—started in the Chase Manhattan Bank era—on the office walls which rotates periodically. So, yes, you can be an art major and end up on Wall Street.
I expect the collection in Industry to be less edgy than the collection in Billions since banks will take more of a portfolio approach as opposed to an auteur approach to curation. Art is fundamentally viewed as an asset class, not unlike when Bertram Cooper in Mad Men had a Rothko painting because he thought it was a good investment.
Basquiat became red hot in the ’10s and the office art in Industry reflects that. It remains to be seen who the hot artist of the ’20s will be.
Sex in Industry
Another first year Analyst is Harper, who pitches an option on 4% Treasuries to a client at dinner. The client then sexually harasses Harper after dinner. In a later scene, Harper is eventually gets the client to do a $500 million trade.
This shows the audience that Harper is willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. But Industry seems to depict sex as merely the cost of doing business. Maybe it addresses sexual harassment more substantively later in the season, but the pilot quickly moves on.
It seems like Industry uses sex mainly as a way to attract viewers.
In another scene, Robert, the working class first year Analyst wearing Ted Baker, speaks to a second year Analyst in his group, Theo. Robert intimates to Theo that he knows that Theo and Gus had a sexual history at Eton. The fact that Robert knows about this implies that the relationship between Robert and Gus is intimate as well, setting the audience up for some sort of inevitable love triangle.
Robert is then shown hooking up with an older woman in a nightclub bathroom later that night.
While it’s unfair to compare a pilot to a show five seasons long, Mad Men is an instructive case in how a show can handle sex well. While the characters were also extremely promiscuous at Sterling Cooper, what formed the core was the work relationships. This was most evident in “The Suitcase”, which was the Emmy submission for Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss. The core of their relationship came from the work: the Platonic bonds created when you spend countless hours with your coworker.
When sex does collide with work, it’s presented to raise moral questions. In “The Other Woman”, a certain relationship leads to the ad agency winning a certain account. The entire episode, up to the final pitch, and ultimately the aftermath—all of it—all of it is there to ultimately ask the question, “What price would we pay?”
We have to talk about Hari
Hari, the puffy vested State School graduate, is supposed to be the counterpoint to Gus, the Old Etonian Thatcherite. Whereas Gus exudes what Shamus Khan, author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, would describe as “ease of privilege”, Hari is brimming with insecurity.
In another TV show, they would develop the rivalry between Gus and Hari throughout the season. And then the coup de grace would be delivered somewhere in the back half of the season. If writers were daring, they would spend an entire episode dealing with the emotional aftermath of it all, with little forward plot. This is not that show.
“Don’t fucking fish. Stick to the formatting.”
—Concerned Associate
Hari works on Gus’s model because he says he wants to be a team player. But it’s apparent he really does it because he thinks performative masochism gets you a larger share of the bonus pool. The sleep deprivation eventually takes its toll (see Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep) and he ends up using Times New Roman 13 in lieu of Helvetica 12.* If he hadn’t been working on Gus’s model and was actually doing “the fucking pitchbook,” this likely would not have happened.
*If the template is properly set up, this shouldn’t happen. You should be choosing your fonts on the Slide Master.
Whereas excessive stimulants were the trigger in Dana Vachon’s Mergers & Acquisitions, in Industry, it’s typography. The karoshi depicted in these fictional works have a firm basis in reality. In the epilogue for Young Money, Kevin Roose writes about the 2013 death of a summer intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It was not the last.
In 2014, Fortune wrote, “Is there a suicide contagion on Wall Street?” In 2015, Billions co-creator/CNBC anchor/DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, “Reflections on Stress and Long Hours on Wall Street”.
Firms have instituted policies meant to ease the pressure, partly due to these deaths and partly due to competition from Silicon Valley. But while policies can help, ultimately, in the words of Peter Drucker, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
Culture, luckily, seems to have shifted for the better. In 2018, when David Solomon became CEO of Goldman Sachs, what was most notable was not his Excel acumen, but his side gig as D.J. D-Sol. It was a signal to The Street: you can have life outside work.