Book Description
A Warner Business Book™, Author:John Rolfe and Peter Troob
" Many a starry-eyed megalomaniac has followed the siren song of Wall Street. Money, prestige, and power await them as they waltz off into the promised land...or so they think. They soon discover that the seductive sirens are actually a band of bowlegged sea hags. The promised land, it turns out, is always one more twenty-hour workday and another lap dance away. MONKEY BUSINESS is the hilarious confession of two young investment bankers, John Rolfe and Peter Troob, of what it's like at ground zero on The Street. Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. MONKEY BUSINESS pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the reader the inside skinny on what working at an investment bank is all about.
Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, the authors ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Once there, they discovered themselves foot soldiers in an investment banking army of overworked and frustrated lemmings furiously trying to spin straw into gold. Escaping with their sanity only partially intact, John and Peter have perfectly captured the chaotic essence of the Wall Street carnival and the outlandish personalities that make it all hum.
Uncensored, unsanitized, and uncut, MONKEY BUSINESS is as riotous as Animal House. It's more fun than a co-ed slumber party, and it's the smartest, most entertaining investment that you'll make this year."
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering. By the time Rolfe and Troob were able to discern the key fact that the "investment banking community has long been an oligopoly, with only a handful of real players with the size and scale to drive through the big deals," they were already grappling with the gritty reality of performing grunt labor in an environment ruled by despotic senior partners who called innumerable meetings to set unrealistic deadlines and make superhuman demands on anybody within screaming distance. The authors' resulting disappointment and disaffection leaps off every page. Unfortunately, they take out their frustrations with indiscriminate potshots at such easy targets as word processors ("Christopher Street fairies"), copy center personnel ("a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans" they offhandedly refer to as "militants") and female research analysts (whom they describe as "under-sexed, eager-to-please"). Long before the hapless authors have stooped to expressing their fury at the bank by such puerile antics as urinating into a beer bottle while seated at a banquet table at the Christmas party, readers will have had enough. (Apr.)
From The Industry Standard
The Net Economy is infatuated with boy wonders. Fawning magazine stories report the musings of obscure research analysts like PaineWebber's Walter Piecyk, 28, who managed to boost Qualcomm's market cap by $25 billion in one day last December. And Vanity Fair chronicles the harrowing road shows of baby-faced CEOs.
But there's a dark side to the story: the legions of hungry, young investment bankers who make it all happen behind the scenes. Wall Street's young turks attach themselves to anything... 
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