The fourth season of Industry has just wrapped, and with it another round of anxious, fluorescent-lit dealmaking and chemically enhanced risk-taking. The HBO drama has built its reputation on portraying young bankers as hyper-competitive, status-obsessed and permanently on edge.
It’s easy to dismiss the show as over-the-top (that’s why we watch, isn’t it?). But as one longtime Bay Street veteran we spoke to (who wishes to remain anonymous) says a lot of it isn’t too far off from what he saw back in the day.
“David,” as we’ll call him, has been on Bay Street since the mid-1980s — first as a securities and corporate lawyer, later as CEO of multiple Bay Street–based companies. When asked whether the excess on Industry feels recognizable, he doesn’t hesitate. “I’ve got tons of stories.”
One of them begins in the fall of 1997.
A company facing significant financial pressure decided to go public. The capital raise closed successfully, just before markets plunged during the Asian financial crisis. “There was a 32 percent decline in market value,” David recalls. “They closed the capital just before the stock market crash.”
The deal team went ahead with the usual celebration dinner. “Nobody seemed to care because they all got their money,” he says.
After dinner, the group moved the party to what he describes as “a sex club.” There was heavy drinking. Around 3 a.m., people began heading home. Only later did they realize three members of the group had been left behind, passed out in a dark room. “They ended up spending the night because they passed out. Nobody knew they were there.”
The market had collapsed. The fees had been secured. The celebration (and excess) proceeded anyway.
Industry often thrives on scenes of reward detached from consequence, and late-’90s Bay Street had its own version of that insulation, according to another story from David..
A few years later, at the height of the dot-com bubble, David watched another capital raise unfold. In early 2000, a hot e-commerce company closed a $150-million financing round after three lead investors competed for the top position. “They switched leads three times in the weekend before they closed,” he says.
A month later, the bubble burst.
“All the heroes of that thing,” he recalls, “were all hoping to get option upsides. And then the company got kind of rescued by another player in the marketplace and it’s now a massive, huge, successful company. But the guys who walked away from it lost everything.”
Boom and bust.
The culture, he suggests, rewarded aggression. “There were a bunch of emerging investment banks at the time,” he says. “It got pretty crazy.” The ethos, as he describes it: “Find a way to do it even if you shouldn’t.” One firm that came to symbolize that era was Yorkton Securities, which was later fined by regulators and sold in 2002. For David, it exemplified a period when boundaries were looser and oversight lighter.
“Back in the day, it was pretty much party time on Bay Street […] but the pressure, that part hasn’t changed.”“David”
The volatility wasn’t limited to nightlife. It could surface in more private ways.
“There was a guy who was a really senior investment banker on Bay Street,” David recalls carefully. “His life went into a bit of a… he had a lot of personal issues.” The banker, he says, began using drugs heavily without his colleagues realizing. One night, after drinking and taking drugs, he was found “walking naked down a very prominent street in Toronto.”
A colleague happened to drive past with his spouse and recognized him. “He had to rescue him and take him home,” David says. “It had nothing to do with the market,” he adds. “It just had to do with somebody whose personal stress got the better.”
Stress is a recurring theme on Industry and in David’s account of Bay Street. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he says, “It was such a disaster… all these superstars, young superstars were out of work on the streets, doing anything they could to make money. That was a really, really tough period.”
Law firms, accounting firms and banks were all affected. “That impacted law firms and impacted everything,” he says.
The mythology of high finance often leans on the late nights, the bravado, the excess. Toronto has long had its own cautionary lore, including the 1993 death of lawyer Garry Hoy, who fell from a Toronto-Dominion Centre window after demonstrating its strength during a firm tour. Hoy worked for a law firm housed in the financial district — not an investment bank — but the incident unfolded in the heart of Bay Street’s corporate core. The story remains a parable about confidence in structures one may think unbreakable.
David doesn’t romanticize the past. He just describes it as a different era, one where the guardrails were thinner and the swings more extreme. “Back in the day,” he says, referring to the pre-2008 years, “it was pretty much party time on Bay Street.”
Industry may turn up the volume for television, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere. The drugs, the ego, the risk-taking — those elements have existed in different forms on Bay Street, Wall Street, and The City for decades.
“It was a different time,” David says. “But the pressure… that part hasn’t changed.”
FEATURE IMAGE: STEPHEN CAMPBELL MORE. PHOTO BY SIMON RIDGWAY, COURTESY OF HBO.
