Mind the Gap | Why bankers and cocaine are best of friends

“Cocaine. It’s a hell of a drug,” said Rick James. Cocaine and investment banking have been best friends since the 1980s when Wall Street’s rise in popular culture and London’s Big Bang created wealth and the envy of having/not having wealth.

The Hong Kong murder trial of Rurik Jutting, a former vice president of structured equity, finance and trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) revealed harrowing scenes that would have been taken straight out of the film American Psycho. The only scene Jutting hasn’t described from that movie is if he reviewed Genesis and Whitney Houston songs before he slaughtered his victims.

However, the violence was real and resulted in the tragic deaths of two women: Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 26. He is BAML’s second employee in Hong Kong accused of cocaine fuelled BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadomasochism), the first one being the late Robert Kissel, who met his end through a fatal beating by his wife.

The 2008 financial crisis only revealed a reality show culture of ceaseless greed that over the last 30 years has mercilessly glorified drug abuse and avarice. Cocaine is merely the party favourite.

In 1987s Wall Street, “greed is good”– morality was revealed to be as fungible as capital. In 2013, Wolf of Wall Street gleefully portrayed bankers as drug addled, sex crazed, man-boys hell bent on nihilism. Criminal behaviour was the only way to make money in finance: be first, be smarter or simply cheat.

And in 2015, The Big Short revealed American finance to essentially be a vast, racketeering influenced criminal enterprise that preys on the working poor.