NYTimes - "Wall Street lives on"

Yup, kids a couple years out of college in PE or hedge funds make a quarter mil

How much had employment already fallen by last September? What kind of stat is that? Hiring of grads and post grads was down 70%. What a bunch of bullshit.

I didn't finish reading it, but I took a cautionary/alarmist tone from it, not a cheerful tone.

If you compare to a time after most of the cuts where made, what is the point. And per employee comp at Goldman is the same...nowhere else and not at hedge funds clearly (down last year and not even yet to their water mark this year).

"Nor are major pay cuts likely, according to a report last week from J.P. Morgan Securities"

There's a fair amount of new smaller firms springing up from the Ashes of Lehman, UBS & Bear, etc. Don't count NY out yet. And for those who saw Taleb's presentation the other day at the House session on VAR and why Wall Street blew up. He started every sentence touting a book or a study he wrote. Not a humble guy.

Wall street will be fine. However MBAs may not be paid like surgeons three year out of school any longer or at least as broadly. Hence fewer buyers of 1mm bachelor pads.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a7UTn7JFw1qk

Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”