Like many in the fall of 2008, Amit Chatwani was done. Lehman Brothers had collapsed, the government had bailed out the American International Group, and the financial system was in chaos.
It was not the best time for Mr. Chatwani to continue writing his blog, Leveraged Sell-Out , a parody of the musings of young Wall Street bankers. And so, on Oct. 16, 2008, Leveraged Sell-Out went dark.
In his last post, “Remember the Titans,” Mr. Chatwani wrote, “Teach your children about the days when even uttering the name Morgan Stanley made college students faint. Read them the pre-2008 league tables, and make your sons and daughters memorize them alongside the ones for multiplication. Do whatever it takes to keep the legend of Wall Street as it was truly intended live on.”
Now, after more than five years, the blog is back.
The blog before the financial crisis was about many things — money, women, New York. But at it’s core, it was about a kind of self-aware elitism. By the fall of 2008, the blog was generating 225,000 unique page views a month, according to a New York Times article.
In its new form, the blog’s stories are set in Silicon Valley rather than on Wall Street, but characters still reflect that elitist “banker bro” attitude.
Mr. Chatwani confirmed on Thursday night that he was the author of the recent posts, the first of which appeared without fanfare on Jan. 9 of this year. He published a second piece a month later, on Feb. 11. “I was just inspired to do it again,” he said by phone from San Francisco, where he now lives.
From Mr. Chatwani’s perspective, the decision to stop writing in 2008 was not rooted in the financial system’s collapse; he says he was just ready to move on and try something else. He was intentionally vague about what he was doing in New York from 2008 until a year ago, when he moved to the West Coast (“I was writing this 800-word blog post, getting ready to post it,” he said, referring to the Jan. 9 story).
But in some ways, his last five years, and his blog, seem to follow the arc of his generation — finished with Wall Street, on to Silicon Valley. “The tech culture has just been inspiring in a way that it wasn’t before,” he said. “Seeing the movement of people out here and seeing the attitude that was brought to it,” he said, trailing off.
Mr. Chatwani started Leveraged Sell-Out in the fall of 2005 shortly after graduating from Princeton. He had gotten a job with the consulting division of a technology company and was was sharing an apartment in TriBeCa with four investment banker friends from college. More bankers lived in the apartment upstairs.
The blog evolved naturally from the short parodies he would write that were loosely based on his friends’ conversations, many of which centered on their bonuses. “Everybody kind of knows when they’re getting a bit carried away,” he said, “and it’s fun to point those things out.” By 2007, Bloomberg Businessweek was calling him, or at least the investment banker persona he had created, “The Borat of Wall Street.”.
One of Mr. Chatwani’s posts, “A Night in the Life,” was written in the form of a letter to Bloomberg Businessweek correcting a (real) article titled “Jammin’ Like Crazy at Goldman.” In no uncertain terms, “Logan,” the author of the letter, takes issue with the real article’s description of life as an investment banker.
“The young gunner you selected to write this article appears to have attended one ‘Indiana University.’ I’m not entirely certain where or what exactly this is, but I do know that it is most definitely not a member of the Ivy League,” he writes.
Mr. Chatwani leveraged his blogging success into a book deal. But the book, “Damn, It Feels Good to be a Banker And Other Baller Things You Only Get to Say If You Work on Wall Street,” published by Hyperion, had the unfortunate timing to come out in August 2008 (right before the depths of the financial crisis, when it did not feel so good to be a banker).
The book is a satirical how-to guide, whose back cover says its fictional author is a “24-year-old financier, groomed at Princeton University and a Bulge Bracket Bank, now pressing his advantage at the nation’s most prestigious private equity firm.”
Since 2008, the blog had not been taken down but there had been no posts, no books, no musings. The last time Mr. Chatwani published anything on the blog was before Barack Obama was elected president.
Then, on Jan. 9, Mr. Chatwani, who is now 31, quietly returned to Leveraged Sell-Out, posting a piece called “The Founder Hounder,” about a new kind of woman who aggressively pursues successful venture capitalists. On Feb. 11, he posted “The Book of Graham,” which again riffed on the technology start-up scene.
In a way, the selection, and the blog itself, connects the worlds before and after the financial crisis, with an appropriate gap that reflects those years of uncertainty.
As for what’s in store, Mr. Chatwani said he planned to post again in a couple weeks. He’ll continue posting until things erupt again. He says he’ll stick to stories about venture capitalism. He’s writing another book. He might write about Wall Street again, he said, but only to compare it to Silicon Valley.