There is an air of exodus on Wall Street — and not just among those being fired. As Washington cracks down on compensation and tightens regulation of banks, a brain drain is occurring at some of the biggest ones. They are some of the same banks blamed for setting off the worst downturn since the Depression.
Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses.
That's the nasty news. Some opportunistic bankers just don't get the point. But others do.
This is certainly a concern for the banks losing top talent. But other
financial experts believe it is the beginning of a broader and
necessary reshaping of Wall Street, too long dominated by a handful of
major players that helped to fuel the financial crisis. The country may
be better off if the banking industry is less concentrated, they say.
Still, it tells us something about who we are as a culture.
Sensing a shifting tide, talented bankers who fear a dimmer future
at banks that have taken taxpayer money are migrating to brash boutique
firms like Aladdin, which are intent on proving their critics wrong by
chasing fast profits and growth in hopes of one day rising up as
challengers to the old guard.
The New York Times canvassed more
than a dozen new boutiques and found that several hundred bankers had
been snapped up since the summer of 2007 after layoffs or being lured
by smaller firms like Broadpoint, Pinetum Capital and BTIG — and
bringing their accounts, trading flow and profits with them.
So goes the nation. Adventurous? Innovative? Sure. Maybe.
But more like greedy. Even Howard Gardner, who tries to teach ethics, has his doubts, according to columnist Frank Rich.
... It’s hardly a given that the entrenched money culture has evaporated
along with the paper profits it generated. One skeptic is Howard
Gardner, the Harvard education professor who has created seminars at several elite colleges to counsel students in the notion of pursuing
meaningful, ethical and effective work — “Good Work,” as he has titled
it. He believes that many students may still be operating on the
assumption that the world of finance will just pick up where it left
off in a few years. “But we’re not going to be back there,” Gardner
told me last week, “and we shouldn’t be back there.” He notes that while the New Deal was built from ideas developed in the
Progressive Era and that the Reagan counterrevolution was the
culmination of the conservative movement of the 1950s and ’60s, there
is as yet “no counternarrative to replace ‘money is king.’ ” The
post-crash influx of graduates into Teach for America, while laudable,
may be transitory unless there’s the political vision and leadership to
make altruistic values stick after our crisis has passed. “It’s
completely up in the air what’s going to happen,” Gardner said.
We are right to be uncertain, even cynical, particularly at a time when serious doubts are growing about our new president's leadership, his bona fides, and his promises of transparency.
