Investment Banker in 1519: Jakob Fugger buys an imperial election

The dealmaker who prices companies and moves capital — a trade running from Medici Florence to today's pitch decks, paid for trust when billions change hands. Investment banking is the trade of standing between capital and the people who need it: advising companies, governments and funds when they buy, sell, merge or raise money, and underwriting the stocks and bonds that pay for it. The job is older than its name — Renaissance Florence's merchant banks financed kings and popes through bills of exchange, and the Medici, Fugger and Rothschild houses ran recognizably modern versions of the business centuries before Wall Street existed.

The modern firm is a pyramid apprenticeship. Analysts fresh from university build the models and the hundred-page pitch books; associates and vice presidents run the deal process; managing directors win the clients and take the 2 a.m. phone call when a transaction wobbles. Pay is extreme at every level and so are the hours: a leaked 2021 survey of Goldman Sachs first-year analysts reported working weeks averaging around 95 hours.

This page follows the trade from the ruin of Florence's Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s through Jakob Fugger's purchased empire, J. P. Morgan's locked library, the invention of the Eurobond, London's Big Bang and the fall of Lehman Brothers. It covers how people actually get hired today, what the junior years demand, who reached the top of the profession — from Osaka to Lagos to Wall Street — and how much of the work AI can realistically absorb.