A portrait of a slightly pathetic 29 year old banker

The New York Observer is running a sad indictment of what can happen to a, 'handsome young banker' with, 'olive skin and black hair, but slightly mean-looking eyes,' when his profession gets the better of him.

For anyone without time to read their entire 1,200 word portrait of the mysterious 29 year old, here's our slightly summarised version (with the best bits in bold). Does it resemble anyone you know?

'On a recent drizzly Sunday afternoon, a 29-year-old New York banker was sitting in a West Village cafe, eating biscotti with a mocha cappuccino and a glass of grapefruit juice. "I want to retire

early and maybe do something else," he sighed.

"My premium years were spent working very, very hard because of the crisis, and not getting paid for it," he said later. "I don't feel like I'm rich." To keep him from leaving last year, his bank said it would grant him a $650,000 bonus, though he was just told this month that whatever he gets will be given mostly as deferred stock that can't be sold for ages.

"I had these big dreams when I was a kid to help people. But it's much harder than one might think," the young man said. "You have to do your job. You're in the Army, and they send you to Vietnam. It's not a good war, but they tell you to shoot. You shoot. It's very complicated, but people don't see that. I have a job. I tried to do that the best I could."

He doesn't like working out, though he has shirtless photos of himself on Facebook. His girlfriend is three years younger. He likes The Economist and house music. He owns a few nice suits, which are Hugo Boss and were bought on sale: "I love," he said, "making good deals."

In the middle of the decade, he said, he got a master's degree in mathematics. It was Ivy League but easy. "Ph.D.'s are great, but everything before is just crap." Then he joined his bank to work with structured products-a young, lucrative and spectacularly murky corner of finance that pools together, slices up, repackages and makes bets on assets like mortgages or, in his case, corporate debt. "I have friends who are lawyers," he said. "Their starting salary was $200,000. My starting salary was $85,000. But I'm not a lawyer. And I don't want to be a lawyer. I'm good at math."

In early 2007, he was given a $275,000 bonus, mostly in cash. A year later, that number was $675,000, this time mostly in stock, although it was on top of a salary that had grown to six figures.

Early last year, after Wall Street had been brought to its knees, his bonus was only $45,000. "When you work really, really hard-my group was working from 7 to 9 every day, sometimes weekends-to be paid $150,000? I could have been making more." Friends left his bank. "At hedge funds, if you make money, you get paid."

But afterward his salary was raised to $200,000, and he was told about the $650,000 bonus he would get this year if he stayed. He did. Still, that sum didn't turn out to be what it seemed. "Every bonus I see as a jackpot. If I get it, great, if I don't ..." he said, trailing off. "I mean, you're very disappointed, yes. Imagine that happened to you."

Over another cappuccino, he talked about leaving to travel and start up cafes. His father is an engineer who eventually started a farm, restaurants and an oil company. "I said to myself a long time ago that the day I have enough money to work for myself, I'll stop working. I don't like working for other people."

Then he started thinking about Wall Street people who have to look at screens for 14 hours every day, and that got him wondering about people in general, especially mothers pushing each other on Black Friday to shop for Christmas presents. "It's like, really?" he said. "That's what mankind has created?"'