“I’d been mooed at, like a cow, when I left my desk to pump milk for my youngest child.”

The Goldman Years

In her memoir, a former Goldman Sachs financial analyst reckons with her two decades of short-selling stocks and enduring finance bros’ sexism

By Jamie Fiore Higgins

For years, banker boxes filled with diaries, at least one for each of my 18 years working on Wall Street, sat like ancient relics in my home office. Initially, after I left Goldman Sachs in 2016, I wouldn’t read them. My inquisitive seven-year-old twin daughters, however, had no qualms about digging through them. I hadn’t realized my journals could become a book until my daughter Beth noted, “Oh, they are like a story of when you worked at Goldman Sachs.”

The story began decades ago, when I was hired at age 21, right after graduating from Bryn Mawr College, as a financial analyst in a Goldman Sachs group called Global Securities Services. Part of my role was to help facilitate short selling with hedge funds and institutions. It’s a strategy in which investors sell stock or bonds, which they do not own but borrow, with the hope of buying it back later at a lower price. The fees for lending securities were not regulated. In many ways, I didn’t realize how that practice takes advantage of clients.