Money Stuff
I know talking about Matt Levine’s newsletter is like talking about how much you love Tame Impala (did you know that he plays all his own instruments???), but dangit—Matt’s writing consistently great.
Investment banking is a business of building long-term relationships. Your job, as an investment banker, is to become close to the people who possess giant piles of money, in the hopes that one day they will do giant deals with their giant piles of money and give you some of it. If you are at the weekly meeting of an investment-banking group and everyone is going around the room talking about what they did last week, and someone says “I did a billion-dollar merger and earned an $8 million fee for the bank,” and you say “I played Settlers of Catan with Mark Zuckerberg,” you win, because the expected value of proximity to a giant pile of money is so much higher than the value of an actual fee from a normal-sized pile of money.