The Christmas Bonus

Another old-news kind of story, but helpful nonetheless in sketching out just who the fuck these people are. “That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It’s Bonus Season on Wall Street”:

Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million.

The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker at Goldman Sachs in his late 30’s, had just received his year-end bonus.

“Normally this time of year is dead,” said Ms. Forbes, a vice president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage. But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients eager to see apartments.

Recipients of such year-end bonuses seem quick to downplay their significance, but who are they really kidding?

This year’s bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star bankers and traders in the heyday of the late 1990’s technology bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street’s elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.

One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon training at his house in upstate New York. It will include a swim-in-place lap pool, a climbing wall and a fitness center. Another bought an Aston Martin. For some, upgrading real estate is the first order of business.

But many Wall Street professionals are urging caution, given that the bonus typically constitutes the majority of their compensation. More than a dozen bankers, all of whom would talk about their spending only on the condition of anonymity, said they were all too aware that the good times could end as quickly as they did after 2000, when a $2.5 million income could turn to $800,000 overnight.

“Given the last two to three years when people figured out that this business is pretty volatile, they are going to try and bank a lot of their bonuses,” said one managing director at a firm where bonuses have been announced. “They’ve seen too many people laid off and they realize they can’t just spend all their money.”

It should be noted that this same banker just bought a $150,000 Aston Martin to park in his garage in Greenwich, Conn.

It’s not all about multi-million-dollar apartments and cars. There are boobies, too:

“Certainly the Wall Street crowd is very special to us,” said Lonnie Hanover, a representative for Scores, a high-end strip club in Manhattan. “December is an amazing month for our business, but it’s everything, it’s Christmas bonuses, Christmas spirit. They have their official parties and then the unofficial party here.”

Bonus Points: “Got Bonus Envy?” (New York Observer, December 25, 2000); “Wall Street’s Bonus Babies,” Jim Hightower (April 26, 2000); The Dils’ Trouser Press entry.