Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Investment Banks Don’t Work for Free

Teen lovers

The way investment banking works is that you do a lot of free work for companies, meeting with them frequently to pitch ideas and give them advice and listen to their troubles and analyze their finances, in the hope that one day they will hire you to advise them on a merger or a bond deal and pay you a lot of money. Your fee for doing the merger is, generally, very generous, measured against the number of hours that you spend working on the merger. Measured against the number of hours that you spent pitching that company, ...