

Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams - rjett
http://findthepulse.com/blog/2008/09/17/champagne-wishes-and-caviar-dreams/

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time_management
Joining investment banking in Sept. 2008 isn't buying low and selling high.
It's more like buying Nasdaq futures at 3500 in Oct. 2000.

The industry will always exist, but "investment banking" will lose its rather
singular cachet as finance becomes "just another industry", with a relatively
normal set of trade-offs and paying normal salaries. What we observed over the
past three decades was a bubble wherein financial professionals out-earned
their counterparts elsewhere by a factor of 3-10. That's on the way out;
finance is about to get much poorer, both in terms of the compensation it
offers and the talent it can draw. On the upside, other industries, including
technology, stand to get much richer.

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rjett
I would love to think you're correct and maybe you will be. I do think these
events will characterize a major milepost in our financial history.
Historically, Wall Street has trimmed the fat during bust cycles and then
hired fresh faces when things turn around only to have these new people make
the same old mistakes 5 or 10 years into their employment when the market goes
through a correction. If what we are seeing is such a cycle, and we are
nearing the bottom or the "trough" of this current cycle, then anybody getting
hired to start next summer will be getting into the industry at a good
time...that's where I got the buying low and selling high. Perhaps this series
of events will buck the trend though...you never know.

