Boozing Bankers Bummed About Busted Summer

CNBC's John Carney must have an iron liver. How else could he elicit so many embarrassing comments from so many Wall Street types about their summers not spent relaxing in the Hamptons.

CNBC's John Carney must have an iron liver. How else could he elicit so many embarrassing comments from so many Wall Street types about their summers not spent relaxing in the Hamptons.

You don't get comments like this from sober bankers: "We really haven’t had one good summer since 2006. No one can relax on the beach—again!" And Carney readily acknowledges that "it was a three-martini complaint," given while waiting for a fourth at a "once-fashionable Midtown bar." Another complaint from a Goldman Sachs managing director, about the London Whale spooking everybody so much they couldn't even get away to their beach houses, came that same evening, "at a tavern along a cobble-stoned street in the financial district."

Carney also reported summer woes while at the whiskey bar Stone Rose, and the Irish pub Emmett O’Lunney’s. In fact, every single quote in Carney's piece came from a banker at a bar. (Hope he kept his receipts!) Carney's not the only one on the embarrassing bankers beat, of course. In February, Bloomberg's Max Abelson managed to get some amazing complaints about lower bonuses like this one: “I can’t imagine what I’m going to do... I’m crammed into 1,200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand.”

But the fact that Carney puts each of his subjects in the context of their favorite watering holes reveals just how hard stressed-out financial types hit the sauce, but how many bars the reporters covering them must also hit. It's exactly how we'd handle both of those jobs.