Report from the eye of the storm

On the subway a stranger in a suit knowingly eyed my Lehman Brothers ID badge in its Bear Stearns holster. With a look of detached curiosity, he expressed his condolences.

This is not the way I thought my Wall Street career would begin.

During college I was an intern at Bear Stearns. There I toiled at the lowest levels of Wall Street, fetching coffee, moving boxes and filing papers. In my final summer at Bear, I was promoted to intern in the marketing department of the asset-management division. There I worked on some hedge funds that invested in stuff called "mortgage-backed securities".