On Eighties Wall Street: How Quaint

C sent me this article penned by Michael Lewis a.k.a Mr. Liar's Poker and, depending on your interests, Mr. Moneyball from Portfolio. There is a lot of nitty-gritty here about Wall Street's current Wicked Witch of the West-style meltdown, but I found these chunks about his perception of the high-rollin' eighties and Liar's Poker really fascinating:

"I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, "How quaint.'

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?"

It's way, way too early to see what is going to become of those kids from Ohio State who (claim to) just want to do the ol' finance thing for a few years, you know to save money for B-school or a startup. What do those 21-year-olds who thought they were shoe-ins for Morgan Stanley analyst gigs do now? What do those 25-year-olds who were slowly settling into i-banking as a career do? I know kids who got into entered the then-flush finance world because they truly love it, and I suspect they'll stick it out and just settle for less nights of bottle service and fewer weekends at the Hamptons summer share. But I also know kids who fell for the money—guys (mostly) who dream of leaving it all to open a bar in Key West. (Note: I realize this is douchey, but that's someone's real-life dream so shut it.) And while it's clearly a terribly shitty time for everyone (hi, I work at a magazine—not the most recession-friendly biz), I can't imagine stepping into an industry that's getting a Nip/Tuck-worthy facelift. Clearly, a lot of these people that took Liar's Poker as inspiration are going to shrink away from an industry that's more hard work and long hours than a huge paycheck, but where do they go?