THE FURTIVE FOLK OF GLOBAL FINANCE / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Last updated: March 13, 2014 2:37 pm

The furtive folk of global finance

By Gary Silverman in New York

We might at last see the faces of Wall Street’s hidden power players

It is one of the more remarkable developments in recent financial history. Power on Wall Street has passed into the hands of people who never show their faces in public but merely type away in obscurity.

These folks tweet. They text. They blog. They post. And they make trouble, spooking bank managements and spreading the word for causes such as the digital currency Bitcoin.

I would never have thought it possible when I began covering banking a couple of decades ago and followed only wheel-dealers of flesh and blood (with the former predominating on account of the trade’s predilection for porterhouse steak, fried potatoes and creamed spinach).

But these disembodied voices have grown so important that they are becoming the story themselves. The practitioners of the furtive style in finance are attracting attention – and that is starting to make their lives harder.

One of the first of the do-it-yourselfers to take a fall was the Goldman Sachs elevator man. Operating anonymously, he gained more than 100,000 followers on Twitter – and a book deal – by purporting to repeat politically incorrect morsels of chat emanating from the bowels of the bank.

As it turned out, the GSElevator tweets were probably not Goldman intelligence but a form of Goldman porn – fantasies about what all those horrible people at the bank (including, I assume, the one I’m having lunch with on Friday) might say.

The New York Times last month identified the mystery tweeter as John Lefevre, a 34-year-old living in Texas. He worked as bond salesman, but at Citigroup, which suggests that even if he had managed a trip in a Goldman elevator his fellow riders would have had to speak a little more slowly than usual for him to understand what they were saying (a joke, my Citi amigos!).

The impact this Twitter feed had at Goldman was evident after Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint backed out of its deal with Mr Lefevre for a book tentatively titled: Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking. Goldman responded in classic sore winner fashion, tweeting: “Guess elevators go up and down.”

But the revelations about Mr Lefevre’s mystery account can only be bad news for the genre. Who is going to believe tweets about the JPMorgan or Jefferies elevators now?

Another blow was dealt to this less corporeal contingent on Wall Street after Newsweek magazine tried to identify the “real” Satoshi Nakamoto, credited with creating the cryptographic currency Bitcoin.

If there were ever to be a poster boy for the new faceless financial world, it would be Mr Nakamoto, hitherto known only through his writings.

But Newsweek asserted that the Bitcoin founder is a Japanese-born sexagenarian named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, whom it found living in a Los Angeles suburb with his elderly mother and collection of toy trains.

He denied being the currency’s creator, and Bitcoin enthusiasts responded to the Newsweek report by going absolutely out of their minds with rage – which didn’t do any favours for the “real” Satoshi Nakamoto, wherever he is.

When the going gets tough in finance, easy and open communication becomes more important. By closing ranks so determinedly, the brotherhood of Bitcoin only added to the doubts about the currency, which have been stirred by the failure of a prominent Bitcoin exchange called Mt Gox and the arrest of a leading exponent on money-laundering charges.

The Wall Street establishment is clearly wary. Just consider the response given this week by James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, when he was asked about Bitcoin on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Business Network.

“I’m not sure I understand it,” Mr Gorman said. “I mean, it’s totally surreal. I mean, who’s the founder? Is it this guy in LA? What’s going on with Mt Gox? There are so many moving parts. Let’s just say I would think and hope that the regulators are paying a lot of attention.”

If I were a Bitcoiner, this kind of talk would make me nervous. When the chief executive of a big bank goes on a Murdoch television network to say he would like to see greater federal oversight of business, you are in trouble.

The furtive folks on Wall Street need to turn over a new leaf and make new friends. They need to get out more. They need to smile.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.