Raging Bulls

Around October, when the economy went into free fall, a bunch of out-of-work finance guys in their 20s descended on Buenos Aires, where you can have the penthouse, the steak dinners and the bottle service at ridiculous nightclubs and still save money renting out your apartment in New York or London.

Lifestyle arbitrage, baby! The word got out, and the party built on itself, making the fantasy it offered all the more intoxicating: Come spend a month—or four—in Buenos Aires, where you really are a master of the universe, where nights are sleepless and potential business deals are all scams and the clubs teem with unemployed expat bankers looking for their identities in piles of cocaine and the bloodshot eyes of hookers and thieves.

Jason got to the party four months early. That's not his real name. This is his story.

“ They all enjoyed a few snorts of coke, then had a threesome. ”

He remembers May 15, 2008 as the worst day of his life—up to that point, at least. That was the day he got laid off from his dream job. Jason was an investment banker in New York City. He remembers leaving the office building after he was let go, and it was as if everything was muffled. He couldn't really hear anything. He was walking along West 57th Street in Manhattan when he ran into a friend from college who was giddy about a hilarious new speed-dating service he had discovered.

"I just didn't hear anything that was coming out of his mouth," Jason recalls. "I was so shell-shocked."

Then he was on Fifth Avenue. He swears to God all the big buildings looked as if they were curving in above him. The trees formed a canopy, and their leaves seemed to be laughing at him. Fifth Avenue was the street he used to walk down each time he got to the next level. There had been many.

After graduating from a Big Ten state university in 2003, Jason told his college counselor he thought he might like ­finance because the entrepreneurial spirit and cutthroat competition of investing appealed to him—especially since he had been a star athlete and all. She suggested institutional sales. He started out at a public accounting firm, but he didn't want to be an accountant. He worked his way up, rising in the bullish years. Institutional sales, institutional sales, institutional sales, he would tell himself on the bad days. He worked in the back office at Lehman Brothers as an "ops monkey," doing the accounting work behind the trades being executed in the front office. He spent two years at Morgan Stanley, where he was technically in the front office but not really. A little less than a year ago a foreign bank that had recently entered the U.S. market gave him his own trading desk. He was on top of the world. He dressed the part. His first day at work he wore a gray Theory suit he had just bought for $950, a pair of Ferragamo loafers ($425) and a light blue BCBG button-down he'd had custom fitted.

This city can't fuck with me, Jason would say to himself. This city can't beat me. I'm a kid who went to a state school, with no cash in this world, and I'm fucking dealing. There were bottles and tables at Marquee and Tenjune with fellow banking friends. Jason likes to think he enjoyed the scene differently than the Ivy League kids who were handed their plum positions at investment banks, hedge funds and private equity funds. Jason's mother is a schoolteacher; his father works for the city of Syracuse. He delighted in acting the part and partying like his ­bonus could buy your ass.

On May 15 the city beat Jason. He was unemployed. He ducked into Bloomingdale's that day and bought three pairs of Ferragamos: one pair of casual white ones—he liked white Ferragamos—and two pairs of dressy work loafers. I'll wear these again one day, he told himself.

Illustration by Tomer Hanuka