Investment Banker · 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.
Few professions have swung so violently between admiration and contempt. Medieval Christendom consigned moneylenders to Dante's seventh circle of Hell; three centuries later the Medici, grown from bankers into dukes, were commissioning the art of the Renaissance. The same whiplash repeats in every era since — savior in 1907, villain in 1933, "Master of the Universe" in 1987, and public enemy again by 2009.
The trade's internal culture is just as distinctive: an apprenticeship of brutal hours wrapped in rituals — the deal toy, the closing dinner, the bonus number delivered in a two-minute meeting — that convert exhaustion into belonging. Writers keep returning to it because the material is irresistible: enormous stakes, compressed time, and a hierarchy as legible as a royal court's.
How much status the profession carried in each era, on a 0–100 scale.
The Church's usury doctrine made lending at interest a sin; Dante placed usurers in the seventh circle of the Inferno, below murderers of the self. Moneylenders were tolerated as necessary, taxed as convenient, and periodically expelled — indispensable and despised at once.
The great houses converted finance into standing: the Medici produced two popes and married into royalty, and Jakob Fugger, banker to emperors, was plausibly the richest private citizen in European history. Status was real but conditional — a sovereign default or a monarch's displeasure could still destroy a house overnight.
J. Pierpont Morgan rescued the US financial system in 1907 as a private citizen, something no banker before or since has matched. The great houses sat at the peak of social and economic power — and under gathering suspicion, crystallized by the 1912 Pujo "money trust" hearings.
The crash and the Pecora hearings disgraced the profession; Glass–Steagall shrank it. Postwar investment bankers rebuilt a quieter standing — respectable, clubbable, well paid but not spectacularly so, closer to trusted family lawyers than to celebrities. Ambitious graduates of the era more often chose industry or government.
Deregulation and the 1980s takeover boom made bankers cultural icons of wealth — Tom Wolfe's "Masters of the Universe" — and banking the most sought-after graduate job in New York and London. The 2008 crisis converted glamour into public anger, yet application numbers never fell: envied, resented, and oversubscribed.
Matsys's Antwerp panel, now in the Louvre, shows a moneychanger weighing coins while his wife looks up from an illuminated prayer book — the era's whole ambivalence about finance in one image, painted just as Antwerp was becoming northern Europe's money center. It hung in Rubens's personal collection a century later.
Stone, a stockbroker's son, built Gordon Gekko partly from real 1980s raiders; the "greed is good" speech adapts a line Ivan Boesky delivered at Berkeley's business school in 1986, months before his insider-trading guilty plea. Intended as a cautionary tale, the film instead became a recruiting poster — bankers still quote Gekko admiringly.
Lewis's memoir of his years as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman fixed the image of the 1980s trading floor — the "Big Swinging Dick," the trainee blood sport — in the public mind. Lewis meant it as a warning against the industry; a generation of students famously read it as a how-to guide.
Japan's landmark finance drama follows a fund manager buying distressed companies in the post-bubble years, asking whether foreign-style dealmaking rescues or devours them. Its title — "vulture" — entered everyday Japanese vocabulary for buyout investors, and the series shaped how a generation of Japanese viewers understood M&A.
Set across 36 hours at a Lehman-like firm discovering its balance sheet is fatal, Chandor's debut — informed by his own father's decades at Merrill Lynch — is the rare finance film bankers themselves praise for accuracy: the risk meeting at 2 a.m., the seniority rituals, the decision to sell the toxic book before the market wakes up.
Written by two former junior bankers, Industry follows graduates competing for permanent desks at a fictional London bank, rendered with unusual fidelity — the Bloomberg jargon, the RIF day, the all-nighters. It became the definitive portrait of the modern junior experience, watched inside the industry as half drama, half documentary.
When a transaction closes, the working group receives a custom lucite block — the deal's name, size and logos entombed in acrylic. The objects descend from "tombstone" newspaper advertisements announcing completed offerings, and shelves of them function as a banker's visible career ledger. Junior bankers often design them; veterans measure a life's work in the row behind their desk.
On the morning a company goes public, its founders and the deal team stand on the exchange balcony to ring the opening bell — the NYSE has staged the ceremony daily since 1903 — while the bank's name sits on the prospectus below. For the client it marks a transformation; for the bankers it is the rare day the work is performed in public, confetti included.
Once a year, usually in January, each banker is called into a brief meeting and told a single number — the bonus, typically the majority of the year's pay. The figure encodes rank, standing and the year's deal flow at once, and the corridor conversation that follows ("were you happy?") is the industry's most honest performance review. Resignations cluster in the weeks immediately after.
The rituals all serve one purpose: binding people to a trade whose product is invisible. A surgeon can point to a patient and an architect to a building; a banker's monument is a lucite block and a name on a prospectus, which is exactly why the trade manufactures its own tokens of permanence.
And the culture's oldest tension — indispensable yet distrusted — has never resolved, from Dante's usurers to post-2008 protest placards. Every generation of storytellers rediscovers the same figure: the person at the table where enormous decisions are made, whose motives the audience is never quite sure of.
The person who starts the company — spotting the gap, bearing the risk and answering for payroll, from Assyrian caravan financiers to venture-backed founders.
AI-resistant 88 🧾The keeper of the books: heir to a craft so old it invented writing itself, now negotiating with the software built to automate it.
AI-resistant 35 📣The professional who creates demand — from Pompeii's painted walls and P&G's 1931 brand-man memo to the auction-driven feeds of the digital era.
AI-resistant 38 🗺️Decides what a company should build next, and why — turning customer needs, business goals and engineering limits into one shared plan nobody else fully owns.
AI-resistant 50 💱The scholar of scarcity — from Adam Smith's pin factory to the central-bank decision room, still asked to predict what no model fully captures.
AI-resistant 62