Patagonia is an outdoors brand founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard, an enthusiastic American rock climber with a lifelong dedication to environmental protection. The company was founded to provide good protection for sports enthusiasts in rough nature conditions. The price of Patagonia outwear can appear expensive but is thought to last a lifetime, in opposition to fast fashion retailers like H&M. In September Yvon Chouinard completed his life mission of protecting the environment by giving away his company to a trust focused on fighting climate change. Patagonia’s website now proudly states, “Earth is our only shareholder”. However, one of Patagonia’s most ardent customer segments is one that might not necessarily be in accordance with those values, finance bros!
Finance bros are a rare breed, only found inhabiting urban settings, unable to do anything manual besides lighting a cigarette, and usually on the verge of extinction in their mid-thirties. To truly understand this post-modern incarnation of homo economicus it is perhaps best to look at archetypes that describe best its current incarnation. To do so, let’s look at three of the greatest performances of American cinema; Michael Douglas in 1987’s Wall Street, Christian Bale in 2000’s American Psycho and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s character in Wall Street, is the sophisticated godfather of finance bros that they do not even know they have. Intelligent, ruthless, determined, and capable, Gekko is a powerful Wall Street trader who will get his hands dirty, recourse to insider trading, dissolve entire companies to gain from liquidations, and make a buck. He also coined the catchphrase “greed is good”. A sort of extremist interpretation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, where the only crime is to be caught. But Gekko is also highly self-aware “what I do: stock and real-estate speculation. It’s bullshit. […] I create nothing. I own. […] It’s the free market, and you’re part of it“. It is this differentiation that makes him unlikely to be known by the current generation. Gordon is not even an antihero he is the villain of the movie and ends up in jail for insider trading. Nonetheless, 40 years later, Michael Douglass continues to confess his astonishment in interviews that people still stop him in the streets of New York and cite him as the reason they went into finance.
Patrick Bateman, played by Christian Bale in American Psycho, extends the disregard of any sense of morality in the finance bro. Bateman is born in wealth and is as materialistic as one can be. He gets aroused by the typo on a business card, getting access to the best restaurants and nightclubs. He is an investment banker, or at least he likes to pretend so. It is implied that his position is linked to the fact that his father owns the company. Worthy of mentioning, Bateman’s idol is none other than Donald Trump, the perfect exemplification of success show-off. The character is also a sadistic serial killer at night, which makes the movie extremely entertaining but is of little value to the finance bro archetype. Rather it is the yuppie, corporate and consumerist that finance bro copied from Patrick Bateman.
The third and final character is without a doubt, the most impactful for young individuals still in business school. However, probably not for the right reasons. 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a finance epic universally recognised as a masterpiece. The three hours of its runtime chronicle in typical Martin Scorsese fashion, the stratospheric rise of a character, its unbridled ego, and the greater the pride, the greater the fall. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jordan Belfort, a young finance graduate in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, ready to hustle to make it on Wall Street. This eventually takes him to new heights. Like a young Rolling Stones on tour, his life is crippled by alcohol and drug addictions, parties in mansions, tropical vacations, full of short-lived relations and being chased by the authorities. However, the acid trip eventually wears out, and the house of cards collapses. Belfort and his associates are arrested by the FBI and sent to jail. This could be a cautionary tale on the long-term impact of living a private and professional life built on lies. It could also be more simply good entertainment, but not for the finance bro. The finance bro sees Jordan Belfort as the ultimate cool, a life of parties spent with friends to emulate. The fact that Jordan Belfort is a real person does not help. The real Belfort, now sixty years old, has continued to promote and cash on this image. You can now follow him on social media, listen to his podcast and even see him at conferences. The difference between the fiction of the movie and what really happened, as well as the thousands of victims defrauded, remains unknown to the finance bro who hangs the movie’s poster in his living room.
So here you have, as morally blind as Gordon Gekko, as obsessed with consumerist appearances as Patrick Bateman, and as ready to party as Jordan Belfort, this is the finance bro. However, like everywhere in no species is ever safe from the threat of new and evolved entrants. In the last couple of years, the rise of cryptocurrency has led to the inevitable rise of the crypto bro. If Gekko was using insider trading, he was at least investing in stocks of real companies, something tangible. The crypto bro believes that crypto is the future because “it exists” and justifies the valuation of crypto as “a new asset class”. All the concerns that cryptocurrencies consume 2% of the world’s electricity, directly fuelling climate change, that a limited number of coins, like Bitcoin, is bound to bring deflation and thus have no use in real life, that it is extremely volatile, or that the system has been deemed as a “greater fool theory” by Bill Gates & Warren Buffet, are all forgotten. Now the question is, will the supposed rise of the metaverse bring us an “NFT bro” that will supersede the crypto bro?