I had dinner the other night with a friend of mine, a former investment banker and derivatives jock for the Toronto Dominion Bank. He grew sufficiently wealthy to retire years ago \u2014\u00a0while still in his thirties \u2014\u00a0and has since been managing hedge funds for widows and environmentalists to make up for his past life of crime.<\/p>\n
Actually, more of that is true than you might expect. I’ve only taken one or two liberties; for example, when I say “retired” I mean “forced out in a palace coup”, and when I say “sufficiently wealthy” I mean “had so much dirt on so many higher-ups that they gave him a shitload<\/em> of hush money on his way out the door.”<\/p>\n He had, you see, a low “Vulnerability Index”.<\/p>\n This is not just a piece of banker’s slang. This is an honest-to-god numerical index that TD calculates for every one of its employees; it is used to determine how egregiously they can afford to fuck their people over. There is a list, with a series of check boxes. If you have children, you get a check. If you have a mortgage, you get a check. (If you have a mortgage with the Toronto Dominion Bank, you get a whole lot<\/em> of checks.) The greater the number of check marks, the more tightly TD has you by the balls.<\/p>\n I am very much poorer than my retired friend, but I imagine I would have a similarly low VI. I am not in debt. I have no dependents (at least, none that any corporate types would think to consider). I can \u2014 I have<\/em>, on more than one occasion \u2014 given the finger to potentially lucrative (or at least stable) careers, walked away from jobs purely on principle. (The down side of this, of course, is that I don’t actually have<\/em> a career; at least I’ve had the freedom to make my own choices on the way.)<\/p>\n But what about the poor assholes with three kids, up to their eyeballs in debt, who’ve just watched their retirement saving evaporate because TD’s American buddies played fast and loose with the global game of AD&D we call “the economy”? What about those people who simply can’t afford<\/em> to walk away, no matter how badly they’re treated?<\/p>\n At the Toronto Dominion Bank, apparently, these are the people denied raises, regardless of the merit of their performance. These are the people expected to pick up the slack when the breeders go on mat leave, the folks expected to man the battlements during holidays because after all, it’s not as though you have family obligations to attend to<\/em>. These are the people the bank knows<\/em> it can shit all over, because they have a high Vulnerability Index.<\/p>\n No, I’m not that<\/em> na\u00efve. I’ve lost count of the similar tales I’ve heard from throughout the corporate ecosystem, so it doesn’t surprise me in the least that TD does this as well. What does blow me away, however, is the fact that they’ve so unabashedly quantified<\/em> their exploits; that they’ve turned backroom policy into explicit statistical technique; that they have derived an index of abuse with the same rigor and enthusiasm they use to calculate derivatives. They remind me of those concentration camp dooves back in World War Two1<\/sup>, so scrupulously documenting every atrocity without a moment’s thought that You know, if things go south some of this shit could be used as evidence…<\/em><\/p>\n And if TD is doing it, you can be damn sure every other bank in the country has got their own little formula feeding their own in-house databases. Makes me glad I keep my money with the small fry.<\/p>\n Apropos of nothing, really. I just thought some of you might like to know.<\/p>\n I had dinner the other night with a friend of mine, a former investment banker and derivatives jock for the Toronto Dominion Bank. He grew sufficiently wealthy to retire years ago \u2014\u00a0while still in his thirties \u2014\u00a0and has since been managing hedge funds for widows and environmentalists to make up for his past life of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
1<\/sup> Yeah, I know. Fuck Godwin’s Law. He can start his own blog if he doesn\u2019t like it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"