Salomon Brothers. The man sitting at the desk is John Gutfreund. The man standing is Michael Bloomberg. Gutfreund is covered in depth in the book “Liar’s Poker” by Michael Lewis. Bloomberg figured out how to deliver the details of various fixed income securities to the street through his proprietary terminals and became quite wealthy.
In 1983 I left my father’s firm and interviewed at a number of leading brokerage firms, Salomon Brothers among them. I got to go on their fixed income trading floor in New York. It is hard to describe how loud it was. This is the same floor Tom Wolfe sat on to do his research for the book “Bonfire of the Vanities”. I started interviewing with a guy who’s last named sounded like a baseball player, Klusinski or Kluzewski. Then they sent me out to meet the manager of their Dallas office, Jack somebody. In “Liar’s Poker”, Michael Lewis says that the worst form of banishment was to handle equities in Dallas. That was where I was headed.
I didn’t have an MBA. So I went to Rotan Mosle instead. By 1987 Salomon was exiting the municipal bond business entirely. I remember one of the last deals they bought, Texas GOs, single handedly. The deal got badly stuck, and the next thing you know they were out. They had been one of the most powerful firms in the municipal bond business for decades.
(Editor’s note. Notice the small screen with a keyboard sitting on the desk? That’s a Quotron. It would pull up one stock quotation at a time. It had a small amber screen. This picture was probably made in 1978 or 79 because Bloomberg was gone by 1980)